WhereScape RED Builds data warehouses, fast.

Last week I got a phone call from the Australian chapter of TDWI & I was asked if I would like to have dinner with Bill Inmon. It took me 4 hours get flights books, grab my passport and a suit & of course, get permission from the Secretary of the Home Office. Bill Inmon was the keynote speaker for TDWI Sydney, where he launched DW 2.0 - Architecture for the Next Generation of Data Warehousing.

Bill and the folks @ CIF introduced the next data revolution: unstructured data management. Bill covered all you need to know to make unstructured data work for your organization. How to bring textural information into your existing DW, leverage existing front end visualisation toolsets, and implement textual analytic processing technologies. Inmon talks about the place for textual integration & how to integrate it into the DW, and new techniques for reading and analyzing textural data. For more information - http://www.inmoncif.com/home/

The feedback from the attendees re his content was superb – but I also think they were excited to have met ‘the man’ & see him in action. Below is a photo of (from left to right) Steve Hitchman - Master Distributor of WhereScape RED in Australia, William H. Inmon & me.

Perry, Steve and Bill Inmon

That night we had a fantastic meal with Bill & his lovely wife Lynn at Glass in the Hilton Hotel, which would have to be one of the best restaurants in Sydney & they really turned it on. Bill & Lynn live in Colorado in a small town where Lynn is very involved in the business as one of the founders of Inmon Data Systems (among other things).

Thanks TDWI & of course Bill & Lynn Inmon … it was a real pleasure … cheers Perry

 Perry Sansom, VP Asia Pacific, www.wherescape.com

One of our fine UK partners, Business and Decision, sold WhereScape RED to Cancer Research UK last year (thanks Julian).  I don’t think there are many people who have not been impacted by Cancer, and at WhereScape we have had more than our fair share of knocks.  For us it wasn’t necessary to make a decision - we donated the money back to them.  In the mail this morning I got a letter of appreciation and certificate from CRUK which we will proudly hang in our office.

We are pleased to announce that WhereScape will be exhibiting at IBM’s Information on Demand conference at the Mandelay Bay, Las Vegas from October 26-30th.  Our thanks to IBM for their support and if you are passing through the conference hall, please stop by and ask about our 24 hour challenge.

I read today that Gartner has updated their ten most important technologies for 2009, and new to the list is BI.  Obviously this comes as no surprise to us, we have always had a view that business intelligence is strategic.  It was still good to see it recognized that In these times of economic doom and gloom helping business leaders to “make faster, better and more-informed decisions” is critical.

In our own experience we are certainly still seeing companies investing in BI systems.  September was the last month of our quarter, and was a record September, a record month and a record quarter for us.  Some great companies have signed up with us and we look forward to working with them to help rapidly build superb data warehouses to assist them through these times of global turmoil.

Data warehouses can be complex, and sometimes it is necessary to check whether a load table is actually used in one of the end star schemas.

We can use the track forward diagram, but this won’t pick up if a column has been mapped manually in a transform.
To catch this, do a search from Tools -> Search for string

It’s coming up to Marathon season again.  On 2nd November New York, the world’s largest marathon, takes place as well as the somewhat smaller Auckland Marathon.  After having run in the 18 mile tune up event in Central Park last weekend I am looking forward (if that is possible) to the lesser humidity of the Auckland Marathon. 

We have a limited number of red (of course) adidas adistar short sleeve t shirts available for Marathon running WhereScape customers.  If you would like one let your sales person or reseller know and if there are any left we will ship you one.