By Karen Lopez on Thursday, July 24, 2008 2:03 PM

The ERSIG organizers are pleased to announce the next ERSIG online meeting! Please join us on Wednesday, July 30, at 7PM UTC /6PM BST /1PM EDT /12PM CDT /11AM MDT /10AM PDT for...

"Going Beyond Database Modeling: LDMs for X-Solution Design and Integration," by Mehmet Orun from Genentech.

There will be a Q&A session following the presentation.

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Wednesday, July 30 at 7PM UTC /6PM BST /1PM EDT /12PM CDT /11AM MDT /10AM PDT

Meeting URL:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/embarcadero/join?id=ERSIGJuly&role=attend

&pw=ERSIG

Alternate URL:https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/embarcadero/join

Meeting ID: ERSIGJuly

Entry Code: ERSIG

Audio Conferencing (Toll): +1 (702) 902-0735

Audio Conferencing (Toll-free): +1 (866) 533-0065

Participant Code: ERSIG

FIRST-TIME USERS

To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=90703

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ERSIG meets online for an hour every other month. Users from the ER/Studio community will present on a variety of topics and we will have a Q&A session following the presentations. Please visit http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/usergroups.html for all the latest ERSIG information.

We hope to see you online.

Best regards,

Your ERSIG Leadership Team

Bruce Baum, Chris Bradley, Mehmet Orun, and Kevin Phelps

By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 1:01 PM

Just a reminder that the Call for Presentations is open for the 2009 DAMA Symposium and Wilshire Meta Data Conference.  In addition to having the benefit of being located in Tampa, FL, the DAMA Conference is the best managed, most informative gathering of data and information management professionals anywhere on the planet.

The most common complaint I hear about is that it is too hard to pick one session to attend in any one hour.  Rob and I blogged about last year's conference (available via our home page at www.infoadvisors.com) so you can get a feel for the depth and breadth of topics being covered.

I'm guessing that some of you are thinking "there's no way my boss will send me this year" due to reduced travel policies.  Well, one way to overcome that objection is for you to submit a presentation abstract that is chosen for the program. Speakers have their registration fees waived, making it easier for you to justify this expense.  And if your presentation is chosen as a half-day or full-day topic, you can get your travel expenses covered as well.   So you can get yourself to the conference.  In fact, that's how I've done it for 10 years or so.

I'll be posting again soon with some tips on how to increase your chances of having your proposal accepted as well as some tips to overcome that one last thing holding you back: "but I'll have to SPEAK!"

Start thinking now about a topic and watch for the follow up posts.

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 2:40 PM

 

CA ERwin Data Modeler Garners Reader’s Choice Award from Visual Studio Magazine

Cited for Excellence among Software Design, Frameworks and Modeling Tools by Microsoft Developer Community

ISLANDIA, N.Y., July 7, 2008 – CA (NASDAQ: CA) today announced that CA ERwin Data Modeler received a "Reader's Choice" award from Visual Studio Magazine. Readers chose CA ERwin Data Modeler for excellence in the software design, frameworks and modeling category based on its proven ability to add value, efficiency and performance to customers worldwide.

This year's annual Reader's Choice award is based on Visual Studio-related products receiving the most votes from a survey sent to over 23,000 Visual Studio Magazine subscribers. The ballot included over 400 products across 22 categories.

CA ERwin Data Modeler Garners Reader’s Choice Award from Visual Studio Magazine - CA

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 2:37 PM

CA is offering discounted training on ERwin R7 Complete Compare via webinar to PLC Modeling members.  So you have another reason to join the ERwin PLC.  Use the link below to join the PLC and to find out about special benefits offered to PLC Members.

PLC Modeling UserGroupHome

By Karen Lopez on Monday, July 21, 2008 4:38 PM

Greg Keller, Chief Evangelist for Embarcadero, talks to Jason Tiret and Josh Howard about the the directions for ER/Studio and ER/Studio Enterprise Portal. 

One of the nifty things mentioned is that anyone who participates in the Beta program for ER/Studio Enterprise Portal is eligible for a 20% discount on that product when it is releases.  What makes participating in this beta much easier than most is that you can beta test it on their serve, which means no installing, no licensing, no getting the operations folks involved.  Just sign up, get your welcome message, give it a drive and boom, a 20% savings on license fees.

JOSH: The Enterprise Portal was basically designed to help Data Architects share and communicate the metadata stored in the ER/Studio repository, and make it available as a self-service reporting tool to the organization. And since the Portal is accessed through a browser, the Data Architect and their modeling teams can literally share all this rich metadata to hundreds of different users throughout the enterprise, whether they are business analysts, database designers, or application developers. Over the years, we witnessed so many of our ER/Studio customers, large and small, develop these hand rolled solutions to distribute metadata. Some very sophisticated...like what we are productizinig, and others mainly automated macros to pump out information from ER/Studio which was becoming known as this 'hub' of information at these customer sites. So, we made teh choice to productize this need and sell it to our customers in a manner that enables them to distrubute quickly and broadly in a way everyone gets: e.g. using a web browser.

GREGK: Indeed. I spent many hundreds of hourse working on this very problem with customers. So, when does Portal ship?

JOSH: While this product won’t be made available to the public until late August, interested parties can certainly test-drive the Portal by sending an email to betas@embarcadero.com or by visiting the beta center. We’re also throwing in a 20% discount to help incentivize those early adopters into trying the tool during the beta release.

 

:....:Meta Frequency:....:: A Q & A with the ER/Studio product management team

By Karen Lopez on Friday, July 18, 2008 2:50 PM

Search Data Management has a crash course in BI Basics on their website and it looks like it could be a great resource for both new and experienced data management professionals.

Business intelligence basics

04 Jun 2008 | Kathryn Marquis, Assistant Editor

Business intelligence (BI) is about more than just technology. Experts say BI also requires a strategy for organizing people and processes -- as well as a clear vision of organizational goals, performance requirements, key performance indicators (KPIs) and more.

This business intelligence basics guide is a resource for professionals involved in all aspects of BI -- from building a business case to writing a request for proposal (RFP) for BI technology to designing executive dashboards. This guide covers BI basics and can be useful in many ways, including getting a quick overview of the discipline and training new employees.

It even addresses the Kimball versus Inmon debates.  Check it out.

Business intelligence basics

By Karen Lopez on Friday, July 18, 2008 1:53 PM

If you use air travel greater than zero times a year (meaning at all), you know that sometimes the waits at security check points can be agonizingly long. A service called CLEAR allows you to bypass most of the security line and get though in just a few minutes.

I was in Orlando earlier in the year and the line ups for security had hundreds of people in them.  Most were infrequent travelers which meant that it took them longer to get through security.  Most were also upset that they were probably going to miss their flights because they hadn't anticipated the long waits to get through ticketing, then the longer waits to clear security.  Kids were crying, parents were cursing (or was it the other way around?) and no one was having a pleasant experience....except for those of us bypassing it all by using a kiosk and heading right to a dedicated screening line where we got through it all in just a few minutes.

Traveling via air these days is a real nightmare and you can have sweeter dreams if you get yourself a CLEAR card.  It costs about $130 a year.  If you quote my referral code (which I can send you if you contact me at website@infoadvisors.com )
at registration, you'll get 13 months for the price of 12...and I get an extra month added to my account, too.  It's a win-win situation.

Right now CLEAR operates at about 20 major airports, with more being added frequently.  You do need to be a US Citizen or US Permanent resident to enroll today, but I think that will expand to Canada sometime soon.

Wouldn't you rather be sitting in the lounge, having a cold one than standing in line waiting for the guy in front of you to figure out how to take off his belt and shoes at the same time without dropping his drawers in front of everyone?

You'll want this card, even if you only make a few trips a year.

By Karen Lopez on Friday, July 18, 2008 12:46 PM

I have a contract opportunity for an Enterprise Integration Business Analyst in the Toronto area (no travel expenses available). If you are a contractor and interested, please contact me at website @ infoadvisors.com .

By Karen Lopez on Thursday, July 17, 2008 2:19 PM

Greg IP has authored an article in the Wall Street Journal about the declining value of college degrees in the U.S.  His case study is Bea Dewing, a Data Modeler who has worked at Sprint and Wal-Mart.  The focus of his story is the fact that Ms. Dewing has a much lower salary at Wal-Mart than she did at Sprint.

There may be some more information that was left out of this article, but I'm having a tough time comparing salaries of data architects at a telecommunications company and a retailer, even if that retailer is the world's largest.  I'm also wondering what the cost of living differences are between Kansas City and Bentonville, AR.

The Declining Value
Of Your College Degree

By GREG IP

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.

Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor's degree -- her second -- in computer science from Maryland's Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.

"I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most," says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet café that didn't succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121623686919059307-TeZnDXqiG9UB2fwzkNBfnucSMaA_20080816.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

BTW, the article mentions that Ms. Dewing was also instrumental in re-launching what appears to be the Kansas City DAMA chapter.  The other interesting point made in the articles is about the fact that most schools don't even address data modeling in their curricula, something I've been talking about for the last two decades.

By Karen Lopez on Thursday, July 17, 2008 2:10 PM

Is Oracle Designer going to rise from the ashes?  Recently Oracle issued a statement of direction for their SQL Developer toolset that includes support for logical and physical data modeling via an add-on product.  There is no information about pricing for this add-on.

 

Oracle SQL Developer Statement of Direction

Updated June 2008

Oracle SQL Developer

Oracle SQL Developer enhances productivity and simplifies database development tasks by providing a graphical interface for browsing database objects, creating and updating objects and running SQL statements and scripts. Using SQL Developer you can create, edit and debug PL/SQL statements, and create and run reports. SQL Developer supports connections to and migrations from third-party databases; MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access and Sybase Adaptive Server, and users can work with files using the integrated Subversion and CVS version control support. SQL Developer connects to any Oracle Database version 9.2.0.1 and later and supports a variety of platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

SQL Developer was initially released as an early adopter on the 28th of December 2005. Since initial production in March 2006, SQL Developer has maintained a position of the second most downloaded product on OTN after the database, and by May 2008 had passed 1 million downloads, with over 1.2 million users. Oracle SQL Developer ships Oracle Database 11gR1 and is included in the Oracle JDeveloper 11g (Beta).

Future Releases

The next release of Oracle SQL Developer focuses on providing complete graphical logical and physical data modeling functionality delivered as an optional extension to SQL Developer. Customers who do not select the data modeling option will be able to continue to use the base SQL Developer product. The base product will continue to benefit from further updates, with new features added gathered from the user community requirements.

Plans for the next release of Oracle SQL Developer and beyond include the following:

• Database Data Modeling to support:
  • Designing logical Entity Relation Diagrams
  • Building physical schema designs
  • Generating and executing DDL scripts
  • Reverse and forward engineering of existing relational data structures
  • Data domain administration
  • Naming standardization
  • Model formatting (font, colors)
  • Importing data models from CA Erwin and Oracle Designer
  • Compare and merge facilities
  • Multiple database support
    • Oracle Database
    • DB2 (Mainframe & UDB)
    • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Logical and physical multi-dimensional modeling
  • Object relational Data Types
  • Spatial Modeling
  • Multi-level logical and physical design environments
  • Model validation rules
  • Offline (file based) and Repository based modeling

SQL Developer Statement of Direction