Shane writes an AgileBI series called “3 AgileBI Things” published on LinkedIn Pulse. This article below is a copy of “AgileBI Things – 2017-03-12“. Shane also writes on AgileBI concepts at AgileBI Guru. Image source: Pixabay
1. SQL Server Temporal tables, automating changes over time
As I have mentioned many times before, one the goals you need to strive for in an AgileBI approach is to remove manual tasks and automate as much as possible. Only by doing this can you reduce the cycle times for delivering value to your customers as well as reducing risk.
Often different technology options can help you in this task, technologies like Attunity Replicate which automates the creation of the Persistent Staging Layer (PSL) with minimal human effort.
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 has a feature called temporal tables that look like they could help with automating point in time reporting on data.
Hans Michiels has written a great article on them and how they could be used in a data warehouse environment.
Temporal Table applications in SQL Data Warehouse environments
2. Changing Data
Continuing with the data theme this week, I often get into discussions on change data capture (CDC), deltas, SCD2s etc.
Again as I have said many times before we use Data Vault as our modelling method for our structured central data repositories, and DV takes care of a lot of the management of these changes automatically.
Roelant Vos has written a good paper on this subject.
3. ODE – Open Source Data Vault Automation Engine
We have delivered a few Data Vault projects in New Zealand now, and when we started our data vault journey a few years ago we looked around for a data automation tool to use and found the offerings lacking.
So we did what all good Kiwis do, and started writing our own. After a few projects, the code got some serious legs so we decided to open source it and Optimal Data Engine, ODE for short was born.
The team have just released ODE v4 which has the largest list of new features we have released for a while.
Kate has blogged about the new features here:
And you can, of course, download it for free and get doco from the http://ode.ninja site.
About Shane
When the team have time I am nagging them to add new cool features to ODE, our open source data vault automation engine at ode.ninja.
Most of my time is actually spent teaching and coaching customers how to deliver using AgileBI as part of the Optimal Orange team.
We run regular Agile courses with a business intelligence slant in both Wellington and Auckland, you can learn more about these here.
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