Tag Archives: Database Design

One More Species of Overloaded Data

A while back I wrote the post A Field Guide to Overloaded Data, which publicized the work of Duane Hufford, who examined different types of overloaded data during the 1990s. Over the years his classifications of overloaded data effectively categorized data anomalies I encountered in the wild.

That is until recently, when a colleague encountered an array of file names in a single SQL Server column. This instance didn’t fit into the three categories detailed in the earlier post, so I’m presenting it here. I’ve also added it to the the original post.

Bundling

Definition: Bundled data is a situation where a single column in a table contains an array of values. Continue reading

Data Architecture for Improved Dashboard Performance

Sometimes success seems like a data analytics team’s worst enemy. A few successful visualizations packaged up into a dashboard by a small skunkworks team can generate interest such that a year later the team has published scores of mission critical dashboards. As their use spreads throughout the organization, and as features expand to meet the needs of an expanding user base, the dashboards can slow down and data refreshes fail as they exceed database and  analytics tool time and resource limits.

There are steps teams can take to deal with such slowdowns. Analytics tool vendors typically offer efficiency guides, like this one, that help resolve dashboard response time issues. A frequent recommendation is for the dashboard to use summary tables rather than full detail, reducing the amount of data that the dashboard has to parse as the user waits for a viz to render.*

Summary tables also help resolve data refresh timeouts, but their long term success for the team depends on the foundation on which they are built and how they are organized. The most obvious approach is to build custom summaries serving each dashboard. While report-specific tables stand out as a quick win, analysis shows they are a suboptimal solution because they tend to (1) reduce ability to respond to requirements evolution, and (2) make metrics in different dashboards less consistent. Continue reading

Two Design Principles for Tableau Data Sources

It’s not unusual for talented teams of business analysts to find themselves maintaining significant inventories of Tableau dashboards. In addition to sound development practices, following two key principles in data source design help these teams spend less time in maintenance and focus more on building new visualizations: publishing Tableau data sources separately from workbooks and waiting until the last opportunity to join dimension and fact data.


Imagine a business team — let’s call it Marketing Analytics — with read-only access to a Hadoop store or an enterprise data warehouse. They gain approval for Tableau licenses and Tableau Server publication rights for five tech-savvy data analysts. After a few initial successes with some impactful visualizations, the team gathers steam. After a while the team finds itself supporting scores of published workbooks serving a few hundred managers and executives. In spite of generally sound practices, Marketing Analytics struggles to maintain consistency from one Tableau workbook to another.

Continue reading

Leadership Must Prioritize Data Quality

Data quality improvements follow specific, clear leadership from the top. Project leaders count data quality among project goals when senior management encourages them to do so with unequivocal incentives, a common business vocabulary, shared understanding of data quality principles, and general agreement on the objects of interest to the business and their key characteristics.

Poor data quality costs businesses about “$15 million per year in losses, according to Gartner.” As Tendü Yoğurtçu puts it, “artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms are only as effective as the data they use.” Data scientists understand the difficulties well, as they spend over 70% of their time in data prep.

Recent studies report that data entry typos are the largest source of poor data quality (here and here). My experience says otherwise. From what I’ve seen, operational data is generally good, and data errors only appear when data changes context. In this post I’ll detail why data quality is management’s responsibility, and why data quality will remain poor until leadership makes it a priority. Continue reading

Anonymize Data for Better Executive Analytics

Reading articles about data anonymization makes it clear that it is not an entirely effective security measure (here and here), but still part of a robust security capability, and required if your organization is affected by GDPR. (I use “anonymization” as a general term encompassing techniques that de-identify personal data within a given data set.)

But there’s a positive side of anonymized data that hasn’t received much press. Providing anonymous data to senior managers who don’t need access to personal data can encourage them to take a broader perspective, and thereby bring new energy to fact-based senior planning and analysis. Continue reading

Meaningful Requirements Start Successful Data Projects

To me, development projects fail or succeed in the first few weeks. Once a project starts off in the wrong direction, momentum and expectations tend to prevent a return to the proper path. With today’s wealth of database options each addressing exciting new possibilities, the right choice for the application’s data foundation plays a large part in steering a project to success.

At this year’s Enterprise Data World conference, William Brooks showed the relations among different data modeling approaches, in effect detailing how to derive nine different model types from a detailed conceptual entity relationship model. Mr Brooks’ presentation hinted at a way to correctly frame up your data direction early on in a project, setting the stage for success.

According to his presentation, called “Symmetry in Modeling Approaches“, the different model types — relational, graph, dimensional, JSON, XML, and so on — all represent different perspectives on the same data relationships. Each suits a different application, like dimensional for reporting applications, data vault for data warehouses, graph databases for multi-layered search, and so on. However, if properly constructed they all map back in predictable and specific ways to a normalized entity-relationship model.

I and others write that ER modeling should be integral to requirements definition, but Mr. Brooks’ presentation implies that ER modeling can also serve as the basis for application architecture as well. Continue reading

Reporting Database Design Guidelines: Dimensional Values and Strategies

I recently found myself in a series of conversations in which I needed to make a case for dimensional data modeling. The discussions involved a group of highly skilled data architects who were surely familiar with dimensional techniques but didn’t see them as the best solution in the case at hand.

I thought it would be easy to find a quick, jargon free summary of best reporting database design principles aimed at a technical audience. There were a number of good summaries (cited at the end of this post), but none pitched just right for this highly-technical-but-outside-the-data-warehouse-world crowd.

I wanted to raise the dimensional model because, for most business reporting scenarios, it not only delivers on reporting needs, but also helps report developers handle changes to those needs as a side effect of the design.

So these are the notes I prepared for the conversation. They helped us all get on the same page, hopefully they will be useful to others: Continue reading

GIGO: Data Quality Guidelines for Application Development

There’s consensus among data quality experts that, generally speaking data quality is pretty much bad (here, here, and here). Data quality approaches generally focus on profiling, managing, and correcting data after it is already in the system. This makes sense in a daGIGOta science or warehousing context, which is often where quality problems surface. To quote William McKnight at the first of those sources:

“Data quality is no longer the domain of just the data warehouse. It is accepted as an enterprise responsibility. If we have the tools, experiences, and best practices, why, then, do we continue to struggle with the problem of data quality?”

So if the data quality problem is Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO), then I would think that it would be easy to find data quality guidelines for app dev, and that those guidelines would be lightweight and helpful to those projects. Based on my research there are few to none such sources (please add them to the comments if you find otherwise).

So, all that said here’s my cut at app dev data quality guidelines by project activity: Continue reading

A Short List of Accessible Big Data Training Options

As you’ve read on this site and many others, the database world is well into a transition from a relational focus to a focus on non-relational tools. While the relational approach underpins most organizations’ data management cycles, I’d venture to say that all have a big chunk of big data, NoSQL, unstructured data, and more in their five-year plans, and that chunk is what’s getting most of the executive “mind share”, to use the vernacular.

Some are well along the way in their big data learning adventure, but others haven’t started yet. One thing about this IT revolution is that there’s no shortage of highly accessible training options. But several people have complained to me about the sheer quantity of options, not to mention the sheer number of new words the novice needs to learn in order to figure out what the heck big data is.

So here’s a very short list of training options accessible to the IT professional who is a rank big data beginner, starting with a very brief classification of the tools that I hope provides a some context. Continue reading

Lynchburg SQL Server User’s Group 10/30

Liberty-UniversityYesterday I had the pleasure of presenting “The Business End of Data Modeling” for the Lynchburg SQL Server User’s Group. It was a great time, thanks for having me out!

I’ve linked the presentation below, please comment here or shoot me an email if you have comments or questions.

BusinessEndOfDataModeling20141030