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In March of this year I published a blog entry called “MDM -> Entity Framework -> ADO.Net Data Services. Better together?” where I theorised about implementing ADO.Net Data Services (aka Astoria) as a means for exposing entities out of Microsoft’s forthcoming Master Data Management (MDM) product that is slated for release with Office 14. As ...

Well, it was comedy all the way at the start of day two.  I arrived in the main hall for the keynote speeches to be greeted by a 12 foot image of our glorious MD and serial blogger, Dorf and his glamorous assistant David Portas in a video presentation of the work Conchango has done with McLaren F1 using the filestream ...

It was nice to start the day drinking Starbucks in Seattle.  It has that feeling of authenticity about it like drinking Boddingtons in Manchester or getting head-butted in Glasgow.  Except of course, that Boddingtons is no longer brewed in Manchester since the Belgian owners moved production from Strangeways, where it had been for 200 ...

    I'm back! It’s been a while since my last blog post but reader-pressure has forced me to come out of retirement. Firstly I received an email from Tammy Freeman asking me the following: “One of my tasks at work is to come up with documentation on cost-efficient training plans for … data architecture.  We are ...

If you've been reading my blog over the past year or so you'll have noticed that two things I've started to become really interested in are Master Data Management (MDM) and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). The interest in SSDS, a cloud-based service in which an organisation can host their data, is a natural progression from my day job of the last ...

News just in… Microsoft have purchased Zoomix, a data quality software vendor. From the press release: Zoomix will contribute a critical layer of data improvement to Microsoft's SQL Server Data Platform Interesting stuff. One would think this will sit fairly and squarely within SSIS given that SSIS will be shipping Data Profiling ...

I have blogged a little bit about ADO.Net Data Services (aka Astoria) and Microsoft MDM of late and once briefly mentioned the two in the same breath. As I have gotten to know a bit more about these two technologies I have been thinking more about how they might one day work together and I'm going to outline those thoughts in this blog. Before I ...

No doubt you've heard today's news about Microsoft's attempted takeover of Yahoo. Being a data integration guy as I am my interest isn't sparked by talk of share dealings, boardroom swaggering or financial terms; I want to know how Microsoft plan to integrate the two companies' customer lists and employee org charts. This will be no mean feat. I ...

As I get more and more embroiled in the Master Data Management (MDM) discipline I'm forming nascent opinions on what constitutes MDM, and how best to implement an MDM strategy. A common question raised about this discipline is whether your MDM system should be for supporting operational systems (e.g. running your customer-facing applications) or ...

Its a while since I spoke about Analysis Services on here but today I was getting back into the SSAS groove in a couple of ways.   Firstly, I received an email from Microsoft Connect in reply to one of my old suggestions which I opened back in June 2006. The submission went something like this: It would be nice to have ''dynamic'' ...