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You're spot on. I can tell you work in Enterprise as well and I feel your pain brother/sister. 1. Everyone is willing to sell you something that is going to ma
by sqldba 10y ago
You're spot on. I can tell you work in Enterprise as well and I feel your pain brother/sister.
1. Everyone is willing to sell you something that is going to manage all of your disparate legacy data, except that somehow nothing ever seems to die in the Enterprise and instead you end up with users of the unmaintainable legacy system AND a second system on top (and third, and fourth) that now also all need to be maintained.
> Analysis and reporting are the easy part.
I don't agree on this point. They're just as hard as ever. Of course you have Excel, Reporting Services, and Power BI. But everyone wants you to formulate the QUESTIONS as well as the ANSWERS. As soon as they discover all of the issues you've found, now it's bury-your-head-in-the-sand-time, because they just want to whittle it down to that top 1% of 1% of problems so that their stats look good; whack it into a daily email, which goes onto a daily KPI sheet, and the underlying issues they originally wanted to know about of course never (or rarely) get fixed. Progress!
2. Let me tell you about Big Data! It's a codeword for:
* We know you've never archived or thrown anything away before, that you have data coming out of your ass.
* We also know you'll never use it. You don't have the funds, inclination, or staff to use it. But one day we're going to build something that will magically do it all for you. So you better keep holding onto it.
* Oh yeah and we have something to sell you to help you keep holding onto it all until that magical day arrives! Please send us a purchase order. Thanks.
I love data. I am sure that some companies like energy companies and telecoms do actually have to deal with massive amounts of data. But Big Data has become a management buzzword that doesn't mean much except retaining everything and spending money.
If you retain everything you never have to make a decision about what to destroy. Management loathe having to make a decision to destroy anything that they might be held liable for, but also love spending money on something that they can use to justify that they're solving a problem.
Thus the success of Big Data.
3. Predictive. I can't comment. Everyone talks about it but I don't see the solutions in the real world. Most of us are stuck in Excel / SQL and just starting to dip our toes into R. When everything else in life is hard, predictive becomes just another harder thing to avoid.
> There is some light at the end of the tunnel.
What you're talking about is Master Data. Of course the well for this has already been poisoned long ago and woe to all who sip from it.
Everyone loves starting an MD project that siphons data in. But the second people have to manage the data inside and start cleansing it and making decisions - it falls in a heap. It rarely gets to the stage where data is then written back to source systems it's game over (LOLOLOL many a vendor I have left in the dust just asking them about this - "That's phase 2" they say - and they've never had any single customer reach it).
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Back on point about the article though, it looks like an interesting way to structure data and it could probably do as an Excel add-on of some kind. I expected something that would create a database but unless there's more than the video this is just writing queries?
This is all well and fine, I guess, if it adds usability. But nobody's jobs are going anywhere. The article says this tool can create anything SQL-92 can. Good luck... I deal with shit daily that you couldn't even begin to imagine.
- kfk 10y agoEvery time somebody mentions "Excel" and "add-on" in the same phrase I then have trouble sleeping at night. I have never seen a working add-on in Excel, it's all crap, nasty too. Also, the complexity is not in the creation of the database, but in the syncing and control of all the changes people do to that data. In programmers terms, think if everybody would download the source code, do changes, but never upload those changes to a master, but then fighting each other on who has the right "code". We need a git hub of data, but for people that don't even understand what data really is.
- di4na 10y agoYup completely agree. I was hired to do that. Dive in their data, old and new, in my current company. I got insight. I got valuable answers. And when i brought them up they said "uh yeah but we can't change it. It is a political decision. You don't have some QuickWin to show that you are useful ?" I found things to do... but it is not the core of the problem. I am lucky my boss is quite high on the hierarchy and may be convinced to attack that core problem. But it will take a looooong time.
- kfk 10y agoCore problems take months or years, depending on who gets involved. But low hanging fruits are everywhere and you should exploit them to gain credit and credibility. Just don't implement solutions that fix a small issue but then introduce even more technical debt (i.e.: coding a custom access database for non technical users).
- di4na 10y agothing is, most of the time low hanging fruits are the only thing they solved during the past 10 years. They are now stucked with core problems. And no, most of them would not take long time. They just need a political decision, but could be solved in a couple days.