The Data Warrior

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Archive for the tag “@dlinstedt”

10 Apr 2017

Data Vault Training – Europe & US

Lots of training classes on Data Vault 2.0 are on the horizon around the world thanks to a new venture that Dan Linstedt and Michael Olschimke have formed called ScaleFree. In addition to world class consulting, they are offering dozens of Data Vault 2.0 related classes, including Bootcamps, Certification, and Introduction to Data Vault Modeling.

Here are the of the upcoming classes for 2017:

So no excuses in 2017 – there are all these classes plus whatever other classes Dan manages to fit into his schedule.

Go learn Data Vault 2.0 and improve your data warehouse success rate!

Cheers,

Kent

The Data Warrior

P.S. Don’t forget to join use at the 4th Annual WWDVC in beautiful Stowe, Vermont!

wwdvc2017

Posted in Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, Training and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
19 Mar 2017

Data Vault 2.0 Online Training – Early Adopter

Finally! People have been asking for this literally for years – to be able to get authentic Data Vault 2.0 (CDVP2) training in an online format.

Please remember there are no refunds and to get the best deal on the Early Adopter offer ($300 off), you must purchase by Friday March 24th, 2017. After that, the price goes up to $997.

So if you have been waiting to get Data Vault 2.o training straight from the inventor, Dan “Data Vault” Linstedt – this is your chance! Get it here.

Happy Vaulting!

Kent

The Data Warrior

NB: I have seen the videos and can say the content is the quality and caliber I expect from Dan and Sanjay, but you should also know that by buying via the links in this post, I will get a cut. Thank you.

P.S. Don’t forget about the upcoming World Wide Data Vault Consortium in Stowe this May. Sign up here.

 wwdvc2017
Posted in Data Vault and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
03 Jun 2016

It WAS the #Best #DataVault Event Ever!

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a few days in lovely Stowe, Vermont at the Stoweflake Mountain Resort and Spa attending the 3rd Annual World Wide Data Vault Consortium (#WWDVC). Not only was the location picturesque, the weather was near perfect, the beer was tasty, and the learning and networking were outstanding.

We had 75 attendees coming from all over the world – Germany, Switzerland, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, USA, Finland, and India. Quite a turnout!

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Day 1- Data Vault Brainstorming

This year I arrived early enough to participate in what is arguably the best part of the event – a full day, open forum discussion with certified Data Vault modelers and practitioners, lead by the inventor of Data Vault, Dan Linstedt.

The brain power in the room was stunning. There were about 30 people in all and we all got to introduce ourselves and talk a bit about what we had been doing with Data Vault. It was great to hear the many and varied ways in which Data Vault is being used across multiple industries (including a US intelligence agency – but that is a secret). Everything from traditional data warehousing and BI, to realtime streaming IoT data, to virtual Data Vaults and virtualized information marts, to using Data Vault to help with Master Data Management (MDM). It was eye opening and exciting to hear all these applications and opportunities.

If you are not yet certified, get certified! Then you can attend this session at WWDVC 2017 (spoiler – at Stoweflake again!). And you are in luck as Dan just announced three classes later this year in St Albans, Vermont. Plus there are multiple classes coming up in Europe as well.

Day 2- Hands on Workshops

Another unprecedented day at WWDVC.  The three platinum sponsors, AnalytixDS, Talend, and Varigence, all ran 3-hour hands on workshops. These were a fantastic opportunity to see how these vendors have really stepped up to the plate to support quickly building Data Vault solutions with their tools.

These were great sessions, led but highly qualified folks. They showcased some great solutions and answered a lot of questions.

All three sessions were standing room only – with over 35 attendees. (We had to drag in chairs from other rooms!)

Be sure to make time to attend these next year as I am sure they will be on the agenda again.

Day 3 – The Main Event Begins

Yes, all the way to Day 3 before the official kickoff with keynote and speakers.

Dan of course got us started with welcome, thanks to all the sponsors, and housekeeping. Nicely this event only has one room and one track so no one has to pick between sessions!

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Keynote

The keynote this year was Swimming in the Data Lake by none other than the Father of Data Warehousing, Bill Inmon. I greatly enjoyed his somewhat irreverent look at our industry and his discussion on Big Data and the Data Lake concepts. It was quite a humorous talk (“I don’t mean to offend anybody, but….”). I would say it is one of the best talks I have ever heard Bill give over my 20+ years of knowing him (so I have heard a few).

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And being a prolific author, Bill of course has a new book out on Data Lakes (available now on Amazon here).

WWDVC_BillInmon_DataLakeBook

Being good geeks, several of us did manage to get our picture taken with Mr. Inmon as “social evidence” that we know him (well, I actually did co-author a book with him back in the day).

Kent with Bill 2016

Lots of Talks

Yes it was a full day with tons of stuff to fill our heads with ideas: new, useful and occasionally controversial. (stay tuned for videos on all these!)

Dan’s business partner, Sanjay Pande, came all the way from India to talk about Data Vault 2.0 on Hadoop. Roelant Vos came again from Australia to give us a business based view of a data vault project at his company (Allianz) about Customer Centric Analytics. Mary Mink and Sam Bendayan of Ultimate Software came for the 2nd year to talk about how their SaaS company is using Data Vault to provide customer value. This time they talked about their efforts to move to virtual information marts (very cool).

I did my presentation on Building a Virtualized ODS. This was a real life example from my consulting last year on doing an agile data warehouse project based on Data Vault architectural principles. It was a fun talk with lots of interaction. I love challenging the norm, then proving it works!

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Of course I did have to do a little intro promo about my employer, Snowflake Computing. I am happy to say there was quite a bit of interest in our cloud-native, elastic data warehouse offering.

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After my talk I did a drawing for a GoPro camera (courtesy of Snowflake). I am happy to say it went Russell Searle from Australia! This man loves Data Vault so much he has paid his own way to Vermont twice now to attend WWDVC. Now that is dedication!

KentWWDVC16_GoPro

Days 4 & 5

Sadly I had other commitments back in Texas and could not stay for these days (but did follow along a bit on twitter). If you want to see everything that happened, search Twitter for #WWDVC.

One fun thing on Day 4 was a few people got to go up in a tethered hot air balloon. Hopefully I can try that next year.

WWDVC_StoweflakeBalloon

Other Fun Stuff

Of course not everything happens in the sessions. Lots of good networking and information exchange happens informally at these events. I did several impromptu demonstrations of Snowflake. The German and Australian contingents were quite interested and can’t wait until Snowflake is available in their regions.

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Thanks to my friends Paul and Raphael at WhereScape for loaning me their big monitor!

I introduced a very international crowd to the best northern-style, southern BBQ at the Sunset Grille. We had good Data Vault, and non-DV, conversations along with finger licking ribs, brisket, and pulled pork (and beer of course).

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Take Aways

Every year, as he closes out the event, Dan tries to summarize key learnings for everyone to take home. Here they are for WWDVC 2016:

WWDVC_conclusions

Well that is it for this time around. With such a great event it is impossible to adequately cover everything but I hope this is enough to get you to put WWDVC 2017 on your event calendar. Ask for the time off now!

Safe travels to all the attendees. See you again soon.

Kent

The Data Warrior

Posted in Big Data, Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, SnowflakeDB and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
30 Apr 2016

Best #DataVault Event Ever!

Hard to believe it is less than 25 days to WWDVC 20016. I’m going. Are you?

If not, why not?

The 3rd Annual World Wide Data Vault Consortium is going to be epic!

What is the WWDVC?

It’s the only conference that focuses on everything happening in the Data Vault world, and this time, the keynote speaker is the father of Data Warehousing himself Bill Inmon. He created the industry in which we earn our daily bread.

The sessions start prior to the conference with a closed room meeting of Data Vault certified brainstorming. I will be there for sure to talk about Data Vault in the Cloud and of course experiences in virtualizing layers of the data vault architecture. I can hardly wait to discuss what I have learned this year with the other data vault brainiacs.

This is followed by a day of hands on workshops:

  • How to build a DV, a Data Mart, and End User Analytics from Scratch in 3 hours

  • Extend the power of the Data Vault to a real-time use case using a Spark based Lambda architecture

  • Generate code using the award winning Mapping Manager tool

And, these are all before the conference even starts.

There’s a lot more during the conference including the famous networking sessions which this event is known for. If you’ve already booked your seat, see you there. If not, what are you waiting for?

For something so valuable, you would expect a hefty price tag like the vendors do it.

Nope, it’s dirt cheap.

Check it out for yourself here:

WWDVC Registration

It’s a conference for Data Warehouse people with a Data Vault focus. Folks like you. It does have many things for the business person as well such as selling the Data Vault concept to the business owner (Peter Aiken), case studies including implementation of an Near Real Time DV 2.0 in the cloud, and a customer centric analytics case study, and more.

Give Your Brain a Treat

Some of the smartest people in Data Warehousing I know, have been in attendance in the past. This is a once a year chance to meet them in person, increase your network, and have a great time

This time it appears to have been kicked up a notch with the likes of John Giles (Universal Data Vault), Peter Aiken (In one instance their DV 2.0 helped save a client a whopping $25M/year), Bill Inmon (The father of the DW), Dale Anderson (Used the DV to build one of the world’s first DaaS).

There are also the repeat attendees like Mary Mink and Sam Bendayan (Used DV 2.0 to implement an NRT DW sourced from a NoSQL platform serving 3000+ customers), Michael Olschimke (Co-author of the new DV 2.0 book), Roelant Vos (Not only did he build his own automation, he likes to experiment … with architecture).

And … vendors of automation tools. Several of the world’s leading Data Warehouse Automation tools will not only be there, they are sponsoring (and buying dinner and drinks!).

And as if that is not enough, you will get to rub elbows with Dan Linstedt, the inventor of Data Vault, Sanjay (co-founder of LearnDataVault.com), and of course me, Kent, The Data Warrior.

So what are you waiting for? Go buy your ticket to the conference, book your room, and figure out how you will get there (hitch hike if you have to).

See you in Vermont!

Kent

The Data Warrior

P.S. Don’t forget Saturday at WWDVC is crazy shirt day.

P.P.S. The company I work for, Snowflake Computing, is a sponsor and is giving me a GoPro! to raffle off, so, don’t miss my talk on Thursday if you want in on the raffle.

 

 

Posted in Big Data, Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, SnowflakeDB and tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
23 Mar 2016

4 Keys to Succeeding with Agile Data Warehousing in 2016

I have been out giving talks again on using agile methods for data warehouse and business intelligence projects, so I thought it was time for me to share my thoughts about the 4 key elements you need to be successful with an Agile DW project in 2016.

Adopt an Agile Methodology

By this I am talking about SCRUM, Kanban, ScrumBan, or DAD (Disciplined Agile Development), among others.

Go read the blogs, read the books, study these methods. Attend a conference (like Agile Tech in April). Figure out what will work for your organization’s culture and leverage the skills of your staff. One size does not fit all.

In past engagements I have used approaches primarily based on SCRUM and Kanban. Both have been very effective once we got our processes down.

If you need/want help, find a good agile coach.

Use an Agile Data Engineering Approach

If you want to develop your data warehouse in an agile, iterative manner, then you need a way to design your EDW repository that lends itself to this approach without causing huge re-engineering pains (known as refactoring) in future iterations.

The best way I have found is using the Data Vault modeling approach. It was designed specifically for building data warehouses in this manner. I have written much about this approach and give many talks showing examples of successful agile projects using Data Vault. And there is plenty of material available to help you learn how to do it (see the books on the sidebar of this blog).

Also keep an eye on Dan Linstedt’s twitter feed and blog for his training classes.

Use Data Warehouse Automation Software

No better way to get agile and deliver results fast, than to automate as much of your development work as possible. If you use repeatable patterns (like Data Vault) in your design methodology, then it is even easier to automate and greatly reduce your time to market.

There are two vendors in the market that I like a lot and have had some experience with. They are WhereScape and AnalytixDS. And both support not only “traditional” approaches to data warehousing (like automating the ETL for a Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension) but they both also support Data Vault (and both will be at WWDVC 2016).

Which of these tools you might use depends on your approach, your current tools, and your skills.

If you are coming from a more traditional DW paradigm and use ETL tools like Informatica, Talend, or DataStage, then I would recommend you look at AnalytixDS Mapping Manager which allows you to generate your ETL code from source to target mappings.

If you are just getting started or are committed to more of a database-centric approach and want your ETL or ELT code to run in the database, then look at WhereScape’s products.

Both are great companies with knowledgable people and happy customers.

Your third option is to write your own automation routines. There are many shops doing that as well. Just be sure you have the appropriate skills in house and can allocate the upfront time to get going (a month or so at least).

Deploy on an Agile Data Warehouse Platform

So now that I have learned about Elastic Data Warehousing in the cloud, I can’t imagine trying to do an agile DW project any other way.

Of course I am referring to Snowflake Computing’s DWaaS (data warehouse as a service) offering. Yes, I might be a bit biased since I do work for them now, but…this tech is really good!

From a features perspective, what I am talking about is having a high powered, easily scalable database that supports BI and analytic workloads and does not require a ton of time to configure and tweak.

Why do I think that is a success criteria? Because I have spent way too many months on way too many “agile” projects waiting to get access to the hardware! Or I get access and we either run out of space (e.g., “we had no idea you need THAT much storage”) or we can’t properly test production level loads and queries because the development box does not have enough horsepower.

Taking advantage of the elasticity of the cloud solves both of these problems and the folks at Snowflake have successfully built an RDBMS in the cloud that specifically harnesses these features and leverages them for data warehouse and analytic workloads by providing the ability to scale up and scale down both storage and compute resources on demand.

That and its many other features, give me the infrastructure I need to get an agile data warehouse project off the ground almost instantly. And I can do a Data Vault on Snowflake too.

Very cool.

So what do you think? Are you ready to accelerate your team’s performance and adopt an agile approach to data warehousing?

I hope this post gives you a few ideas on how to make that happen.

Model on!

Kent

The Data Warrior

 

Posted in Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, SnowflakeDB and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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