CT at the Show
Data is Focus at TDWI Series
BI Roadmap
Attendees from the corporate world and higher education alike
got their data-warehousing and decision-making bearings this
past May during an intensive week of seminars in San Francisco
designed to arm them with both theory and practical experience
in data warehousing and business intelligence. A co-author of
Data Strategy (Addison-Wesley, 2005), seminar leader Larissa
Moss talked to Campus Technology about TDWI’s unique, high-touch
approach to seminar content development. “The Data Warehousing
Institute not only researches the topics,” she said, “they
also have practitioners who are working with clients [to test
theories and turn them into best practices]— the same practitioners
who teach the
seminars at TDWI.”
Practice makes a modeler
Small groups tackled case studies in the Data Modeling
in Practice sessions, working together to build all the
data modeling deliverables—a practical approach to
learning under real-life-like constraints of limited time and
resources. This group of students built a fact-qualifier matrix
under the guidance of instructor Steve Hoberman, author of
Data Modeler’s Workbench (John Wiley & Sons, 2001).
Walking thru life (cycles)
Instructor Paul Kautza walked students through the basics of
dimensional modeling, and introduced all the components and the
life cycle of the data warehouse—the entire process of building
and
implementing a successful data warehouse architecture.