Those who recast their careers in the data integration space typically get there by accident.  They get tasked to create a data integration strategy within their organization, or they are tossed some data integration technology.  Once they run with it, another data integration subject matter expert is born. The path to develop your “mad data [...]

It began with Google and Yahoo!, both of whom has lots of data, partly because they were offering search services, and the web even in its early days, was big data by any reasonable metric. And when I write “reasonable metric” I have to pause for a while because when you think of it there [...]

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 [...]

There is suddenly a keen interest in NoSQL databases, many of which are wholly new products. What is a NoSQL database, you may be asking. So here’s an answer but it is not a simple one because, there is no official agreement on what NoSQL means. Some commentators insist that the No in NoSQL stands [...]