Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Comparitive EDW Architecture Seminar by Bill Inmon

I attended a "Comparitive EDW Architecture" seminar put on by Bill Inmon in Golden, CO, on 4/4/2012 to 4/6/2012.  The purpose of the seminar was to explain the different DW philosophies of Inmon and Kimabll and how they can not only be used together, but complement each other.

Sadly, no one from the "official" Kimball organization accepted Bill's invite to present at the conference.  Scott Hirst, Ultra Solutions, Inc., did attend and presented the Kimball DW architecture philosophy very well.  Thanks, Scott.

The seminar presented Inmon's latest DW 2.0 architecture philosophy and Kimball's latest Dimensional architecture.  Also discussed was how the two of them can complement each other.

The DW 2.0 architecture was compared to a city's architecture and Kimball's Dimensional model was compared to a house's architecture.  The DW 2.0 architecture (in at least 3NF normal form) provided the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) foundation upon which the Dimensional  architecture is used to build the data marts needed for OLAP and reporting.

Of course, the best part of any seminar like this is the chance to network with others and learn from shared experiences.


Power Designer 16: Multi-line text in Description and Annotation columns not always displayed

 Product: PowerDesigner Enterprise Architect Version 16.0.0.3576 EBF5
OS: Windows 7 Professional

In PDM, select Model => Tables
Show Name, Comment, Description, Annotation columns
Sort by Description
Click ... for any apparently blank column that appears between rows with displayed text in column.
Text for column will appear.
Close editing window.
Text will appear in column displayed in grid.

Bug report made: Case 11732189