Welcome to EMC Consulting Blogs

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 ...

    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 ...

The NFL came to the UK the other week, when the New York Dreadnoughts took on the Miami Flange Brackets at the “Wembley Bowl” in London (England).  Apparently one million people applied for tickets to see 120 fat men rolling around in the mud, a claim not quite backed up by the 9000 empty seats in the stadium.  Still, it was ...

Just lately I've been doing a bit of searching around to see what data-centric offerings, other than the ones I normally deal with, Microsoft are pulling together. The one that has most caught my eye has been Astoria. I can't remember where exactly I first heard about it but it was this blog entry by Alex Barnett that really ...

It has been a while since my last post.  There are a number of reasons for this - lack of time, the fact that blogging comes quite low on my list of fun things to do and mainly because the blog posts I had lined up on my laptop were dealt a severe blow following a United Airlines flight from LAX to Oakland (where my ...

In my last post I explained a little about the Master Data Management (MDM) problem that we have faced on my current project. At its very core building an MDM system is a data modelling exercise and in this post I'm going to talk about the data model iterations that we have gone through in an attempt to solve the problem. In order to talk ...

So far in this series I have introduced you (somewhat) to SoBI and now I'd like to introduce you to one of the enabling initiatives that we have undertaken. First, a bit of history. In the summer of 2005 the purveyors of SoBI realised that in order for the architecture to work it was necassary to have some agreement on what identified each ...

My last post provided a concise overview of what I think SoBI is. It talked about service facades, BI caches and data consumers, and it placed an emphasis on data quality in the Systems Of Record (SoRs). In that post I talked about how data that is required for BI purposes is cached above the service facades and I now want to talk a little about ...

When I joined my current project in 2005 I didn't know much about Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). I knew it was something to do with transferring information via standard protocols and making it available to consumers but that was about it. My background is Business Intelligence (BI) which is all about it collecting data ...