Data Saturday Columbus is THIS WEEK!

For the third year in a row, I am off to Columbus OH to attend the wonderful Peter Shore and team’s Data Saturday #71 event at the beautiful Otterbein University in Westerville OH.

Repeat attendance, changed purpose

This year is a big change of pace for me, in that my goal there is to learn something new. In my new role, one of the big things I am supposed to do is to work on moving our on-prem data warehouse (that is over 15 years old at this point, and was created by a couple of data warehousing newbies… erm.. and I was one of those newbies.)

The whole process reminds me a lot of how in relational database design, a lot of our design choices were predicated on the lack of hardware resources to really implement a fully normalized system. Nowadays, we have plenty of power to make things happen (and oddly a lot of people have used that power to say “we don’t need to do design, power and space are cheap!)

In the same way, when we were first getting started, Kimball’s kitchen paradigm (and now the very similar medallion architecture) was something we wanted to do. Keep all the history to let you rebuild, have 3 layers, and integration space, etc. But we just didn’t have the hardware (or experience) so we built something that was pretty good, but in hindsight, was not nearly flexible enough for all the future demands as our reporting needs grew and grew (and we had people who could build those reports.

Learning to sew?

So I am going to spend all the sessions I can, learning the concepts of Fabric. I have done plenty of reading on the topic, and as I have noted before, one of my favorite ways to learn about a new topic is presentations. So off I go!

Scenic Route Plans

As far as my scenic route stop? Still haven’t decided. I promised myself that I would go to King’s Island this year, but with the job change, I don’t have the same amount of time to stop there this year either. I would say next year, but who am I kidding?

Whatever we end up doing will show up in next week’s roundup post!

See you there? If so, drop a comment or at least say “hi”!