Tag: 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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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 data science or warehousing context, which is often where quality problems surface. To quote William…
-
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…
-
Lynchburg SQL Server User’s Group 10/30
Yesterday 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