ETL: Facing The Future
International Expert Joe Caserta Returns To S.a. To Share Ground Breaking Knowledge
Joe Caserta, recognised around the globe for his foresight, experience and vast knowledge of the ETL industry will be hosted by Data Warehouse specialists, Alicornio Africa in November. His return for a second consecutive year, is sure to see ETL practitioners of all levels fervently gathering to glean as much of Caserta’s latest, international information on this highly competitive and complex business intelligence module.
In this column, excerpted from The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (Wiley, 2004), Joe Caserta discusses the changing requirements of the data warehouse and their implications.
“IT really has only two complimentary missions: Get data in, and get data out. Getting data in, of course, is transaction processing. Over the last 30 years, organizations have spent more than a trillion dollars building progressively more powerful transaction processing systems whose job is to capture data for operational purposes. But data cannot be a one-way flow: At some point, we must consume data and derive value from it. There is a profound cultural assumption in the business world that if only we could see all of our data, we could manage our business more effectively. This cultural assumption is so deeply rooted that we take it for granted. Yet this is the mission of the data warehouse, and this is why the data warehouse is a permanent entity in all of our organizations, even as it morphs and changes its shape. Viewed in this way, it seems reasonable that in the long run, the overall investment in getting data out will rival that of getting data in.
In our view, the most important data warehouse reality is the stunning complexity of developing and running an ETL system. This is an overstrained problem. As the sheer size of data and the number of software and hardware processes mushrooms, it will become less and less feasible for you to roll your own system. The future will belong to systems that allow you to assemble high level building blocks of logic.
The gold coin for the data warehouse is being able to respond to the true business needs of the organization. In final analysis, the most important characteristics of ETL system designers are business-oriented, higher level system skills to keep the data warehouse aimed in the right direction and succeed most effectively in delivering the data warehouse mission: getting the data out.”
To attend Joe Caserta’s workshops being held at the Unisys Auditorium, Sunninghill Johannesburg between the 16th and 18th November, contact Fiona King at Alicornio Africa on (011) 258 8739 or email fionak@alicornio.co.za
About Joe Caserta
Joe Caserta is the co-author with Ralph Kimball of the first in-depth book on data warehouse ETL design and development, The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit. He is an influential data warehousing veteran whose expertise is shaped by years of industry experience. In the ETL workshop Joe shares his extensive knowledge and enthusiasm for designing, deploying, and managing the data warehouse ETL process.
About Alicornio Africa
For the past six years, Alicornio Africa has serviced an impressive array of blue chip and other companies. In addition, they have continuously added to the knowledge pool of their industry by hosting leading international experts in the field in training and discussion forums. They have established themselves as leaders in the education of the expert and layman alike in the intricacies of the highly complex arena of business intelligence, information integration management, data warehousing, architecture, design and implementation. Alicornio Africa’s consulting services are both product and non-product specific. The company distributes and implements DOC1 for Customer Communication Management, and they are distributors and implementation specialists of the Sagent Solution for Information Integration.