INSIGHTS

NVISIA presents at DAMA Chicago: Ensuring Your Data Lake Doesn’t Become a Data Swamp NVISIA's managing director Michael Vogt presented, Ensuring Your Data Lake Doesn’t Become a Data Swamp at today's DAMA Chicago meeting.

NVISIA is pleased to announce the launch of its data management practice. The new practice is being led by Michael Vogt, a Managing Director at NVISIA with 20 years of applied data and enterprise integration experience.

Introduction When it comes to writing software at an enterprise level, most established developers are familiar with a variety of different approaches to accessing data.  In the most common case, a database houses the data that needs to be accessed. Different techniques such as result sets and object-relational mappings have typically provided effective ways to approach data access.  With all of these different techniques, should a developers approach for exposing methods to access data change if the data source is not a database; such as a web service or a product API?  The answer is NO; it should not matter what type of data source is being accessed if the DAO pattern is being used properly.

 During a recent project, the requirements included data security and access by users in different regional locations. Most users were able to access the data using the BI tool (OBIEE) for financial reports.  Another user had access using SQL Developer and could view all of the data in the system.  The worst scenario of them all was a user accessing the data with a VB script in Excel. :-)

“A single fact can spoil a good argument.” – Anonymous One of the responsibilities of an enterprise data architect is to understand fact, or “truth”. There is a subtle difference between these two terms, at least when used here. There may be multiple facts that lead to something undisputed, but those facts, although true, are true within a specific context. Multiple facts about something may be referenced by a software application, but at an enterprise level when all software and business processes are taken into account, it is often the case that those facts provide a limited, or slightly different, perspective.