This question goes right to the heart of many of the problems that we experience in building business systems. We can think of there being two distinct positions in this. One is the object oriented (OO) approach to data, the other is the relational approach. The OO Approach: From the OO perspective, an object consists [...]

Long before metadata became a problem, it was a blessing. Prior to the invention and proliferation of databases, the contents of any given file were defined only within the programs that used them. Files never declared anything about the data they contained in any standard way. This meant that you had to depend upon a [...]

I first read about “the democratization of data” a few years ago in a Google blog by Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist. The use of the word “democratization” is a little misleading, here. It’s not about data getting to cast votes and elect representatives. It’s about the consumer being able to consume data in a [...]

A while ago I dipped into the idea that “Data doesn’t know what it is.” This is pointing out the obvious, in a way. A collection of data, whether it is a record in a file, or a whole file or even a whole database, carries no information that allows you – or more to [...]

You may have noticed the words “Data Governance” cropping up every now and then in articles about BI, and particularly articles about MDM. But what is it? And Who cares? We have gone through decade after decade of IT without anyone entertaining the notion that data should be governed in some way, never mind what [...]