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 [...]

For too many years, people working with data have used this trite – and truly inexact — definition of metadata: metadata is data about data. It’s short, it’s sweet and it sounds clever. But it doesn’t help anyone understand Metadata and what makes it distinct from the data itself. It’s quite likely that this inexactness [...]

In my last blog post I noted that time is an integral aspect of data. We made a distinction between data as entity, where the data pertains specifically to a thing; a person, a product, a company, etc., and data pertaining to an event; a sale, a delivery, a customer complaint, etc. In both cases [...]

The heart of an IOA is what we have chosen to call the middleware components. This set of software components connects the BI applications to the various BI data sources in a reliable way, delivering data to the applications in a timely manner. This is not a trivial task to achieve, requiring more than just [...]

When we speak of data, most of the time we’re talking about well-behaved and well defined data that is stored conveniently in databases. We refer to this proudly as “structured data,” and well we might because unstructured data is far less convenient. An often quoted statistic is that “only 20 percent of data is structured.” [...]