Main | July 2006 »
June 26, 2006
Too strange ...
I think I am pretty much inured to the strangeness of the internet. But every now and then you come across something so peculiar that it defies accurate description ... or at least accurate description that anyone would believe.
This is quite suitable for the fainthearted, so do not worry on that account. But after this, neither exercise videos or language lessons will be the same again ...
Share:
Posted by Donald Farmer at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2006
Entities for Developers. (Whither the future of MDM?)
At TechEd2006 in Boston last week, the Microsoft ADO.Net and Visual Studio teams were generating excitement around Entities and LINQ.
I can do no better than to quote from Soma (the VP of Visual Studio) in his blog.
Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is a breakthrough technology that eliminates the impedance mismatch among different data domains. With LINQ, developers do not need to learn separate query syntaxes when querying over diverse data domains such as XML, Relational and Objects.
At the same time, our ADO team has been building a new data mapping substrate called ADO.NET Entities. Entities move the data model up from the physical structure of relational tables to a data model that more accurately represents business entities such as “Customer” or “Order” that could map to multiple relational tables and views. You can think about entities as a declarative way to specify the structure of a business object which you can then add business logic to and, through the power of LINQ, be able to query over them as well.
What does this mean for MDM? Well, I honestly can't say yet - that is in the cooking pot and the devil is in the detail. Nevertheless, we talk a lot about MDM on the B-EYE network, so let's throw this into the mix.
ADO.Net is arguably the leading data access layer for all developers. (Arguably, simply becuase I don't exactly how it stacks up against JDBC in the market. It's certainly hugely significant.) Visual Studio tools are by a long way the leading development environment.
Together they will include a data model for representing entities, and a syntax for querying and manipulating them in all the most popular programming languages.
Now, there's a lot more to MDM than that, of course. But I am excited that MDM, CDI and other entity management solutions are going to be much easier to deliver, and much more productive and interoperable for administrators and end users.
Any thoughts?
Share:
Posted by Donald Farmer at 11:00 AM | Comments (1)
June 17, 2006
Tales of Two Bills
This week I was in Boston at the Microsoft TechEd conference - our premier education event. Normally, that alone would provide material for a dozen posts: I could (and do) talk for hours about partners and customers, casual conversations, presentations given and questions encountered. However, this week, what I personally got up to is hardly the most interesting topic, even for me.
For one thing, Bill Baker's team announced Microsoft Performance Point Server. As readers of B-EYE Network know, this has caused a splash in the BI market. Then, to top it all, I returned from Boston on the Thursday, and after a quick lunch at home, headed to the office, only to hear that BillG announce his transition out of his role at Microsoft.
Well, other folks have given their views MS Performance Point Server, so I will not say too much here. Only that I am energized to see us take on Business Intelligence for the Information Worker with so much vigour and passion. Bill Baker - now guiding that stratagem - was previously General Manager of BI in SQL Server. There, he delivered a foundation for a BI platform: a platform that has proved so undeniably successful that even Microstrategy and Hyperion have, in their ways, embraced it as a mutual advantage. Bill Baker's passion for serving the benefits of BI to the greatest number is sometimes misunderstood, but it should not be underestimated. The masses are going to have their BI. Their capacity to make fully-informed decisions in their work will be transformed by that. I do not doubt that they will have this capability in great part through the initiatives currently fizzing in Building 31 at Redmond.
Nevertheless, exciting though Performance Point is, even on B-EYE network another Bill at Redmond has made the big headlines this week. I have been fortunate at times to see the "two Bills" in action, and it was always quite an experience. Product or strategy reviews, even with a room full of smart and confident vice-presidents, frequently became a 1:1 conversation between them.
You'll have read plenty this week about BillG's technical depth or about his ability to remain focussed on detail for hours and hours at a time. These characteristics are certainly what make us nervous when preparing for reviews and meetings with him, but I think what is most significant about BillG is that these traits are not abstract, but are rooted in something deeper that really does make him exceptional. There is, so far as I could tell, less of the geek or nerd about him than is commonly claimed.
What BillG seems to have, more than anyone else, is a truly comprehensive vision of information technologies and the roles they should play. When he pounces on a technical detail it is generally not the case that he has grokked the technology so thoroughly that he can find a technical flaw in the smallest detail. Rather, it is as if something has jarred or perturbed a more unified conception of what the technology is for. Bill often appears to grasp that picture both broadly and more holistically than others.
Another characteristic of BillG that I have admired in contrast to other things you have read about him, is that he has his own manner of modesty. I don't mean that he can't be arrogant, or brusque, or ill-tempered with those around him. But I do think he has a sense of his place in something bigger than him - that his causes, whether Microsoft, or the wider fields of technology, or his charities, are causes to which he contributes, not causes delineated only by his interest in them. I don’t keep emails, but I remember one, directed to Bill Baker as it happens, where we were struggling to clearly define a particular strategy. BillG wrote, as accurately as I can remember, that "I need us to have an answer to this soon. Steve is repeatedly pressuring me for this and the business review is approaching." You can't imagine Larry Ellison writing that mail with that tone.
So, a big week at Microsoft. There has been plenty of other things to blog about too and I hope I get round to them … My presentation on metadata at TechEd, where over 90 people turned up at 5.30 (dedicated souls) and where I probably learned more than they did! Sybase buying Solonde (yet another database has ETL as standard.) And more thoughts on the distinctions that designers need to make between users and customers. Watch this space ...
Posted by Donald Farmer at 6:30 PM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2006
Customers and users
One aim of this blog will be to discuss choices facing designers of data integration software. It's easy to talk about "knowing the customer" when developing a product, and naturally every designer works hard to do this. Nevertheless, now and then I find myself refocusing on an aspect of our market position that is easy to overlook - the distinction between users and customers. This week, prompted by various happenstances, I have been doing just that.
The distinction can be summarized simply enough. Customers are those who make purchasing decisions about which software their enterprise will use: users work with the software to implement solutions. In many cases these may be the same people, acting in different roles from day to day. In other circumstances - in many, I would hope - users have huge influence in purchasing decisions. Nevertheless, there are numerous enterprises where decisions are made top-down and users just have to get on with it: and, of course, outsourcing is an increasing trend where the user may well have little or no say in the choice of toolset.
As product designers we therefore face two issues: we must appeal to customers in order to be selected as the tool or platform of choice, and we must meet the needs of users to make that choice work. Let's start with users, and in another post I'll cover how we address our customers.
Here at Microsoft, the development teams are encouraged to engage very directly with our community of users, partly through online forums where the public can post any issue for us to help out with. I was applying some business intelligence to the forum usage statistics, in particular to analyze activity on our Integration Services forum. That was quite an eye-opener. We had almost 1000 active members in the last financial quarter, and almost 10000 posts. At around 100 posts a day, that places us among the most active forums at Microsoft, coming in just after programming languages such as C#. That's pretty remarkable for a data integration application and it tells me two things, at least.
First of all, and simply, we clearly have a lot of users out there, actively exercising the product and asking questions. Scaling design issues to cover such large numbers is a unique, and stimulating, aspect of designing products at MS. It is also difficult, because it requires great depth of focus - on the needs, and feedback, of individual users, while also addressing the general case of thousands of slightly differing scenarios.
For example, we released a little shared-source metadata toolkit to the web. Within a week it had around 1000 downloads. The program manager was delighted to see 10x more instances of his work in the wild in one week than he had seen at his previous company in years. But our unit manager put it in context. Her background was working on the WebData data access stack for Microsoft, where she saw 1000 downloads per day for new releases. Working at that scale - well, it's a different world.
Secondofly (love that word!), we should consider who these thousands of users are. That's not too difficult to work out - they are by and large developers, active in the same fields as the C# or VisualBasic developers whose forums we most resemble. The market segment we see reflected in our online community is a demand for data integration as a general developer activity. Not data integration for Business Intelligence specifically (although we are being successful there too) but data integration as something that everyone who works with data has to do. This makes a lot of sense - we all have a ton of data, but it is rarely in the format, or of the quality, or as integrated with other relevant data, as we would like. We talk often of BI for the masses. Well, this is data integration for the masses, and it is clear that the masses need it.
In fact, Colin White's detailed report on data integration for TDWI showed that custom coding is still a most significant solution to data integration problems. Living as we do, at the confluence of hand-coded development and code-free applications, this is fertile ground for us.
In another post, I'll write about customers and the demands they make of us - and how we strive to resolve those with the demands of users. Meanwhile, I would be delighted to red any comments you may have on the distinction I have been making here - in my experience, It's a somewhat neglected area.
Share:
Posted by Donald Farmer at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2006
Introductions - or, who is this guy and why is he blogging?
I'm terrible at introductions.
In formal business, Donald Farmer, Group Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services says all that needs to be said for many people. I am just what my name card says, and there's no need to know any more. I can rarely be so reserved. Customers and partners soon learn more than they need to know about my travels, my garden, my trips to the supermarket for shampoo, and so on.
Thankfully, blogs, even when about business, are relaxed. B-EYE blogs in particular are more like an evening event at TDWI, albeit without the drinks and nibbles - though you could supply your own whilst reading. There are good friends here, and colleagues, and other vendors, and - although we're mostly talking shop about business intelligence - we can also catch up on recent events, or share some stories and smiles. In that setting, I'm not just a program manager at Microsoft. I'm husband of a gifted artist, and proud father of my son. My childhood in the Scottish highlands and islands is as likely to sidetrack the discussion as my practices in data warehousing. My passions for food, wine, enlightenment philosophy, medieval history, modern art or wildflowers are side-by-side with a restless curiosity about information quality, performance tuning, data modeling, or unstructured data.
So, here in my B-EYE blog, don't expect formality. Chances are, I'll be writing this with a glass of wine to hand. Often I'll be writing at the end of a long day of difficult design decisions or working through customer issues. On other days, I'll just have put down a new book of poetry, or have come in from the garden, and those will be bubbling in my mind.
Nevertheless, I will be writing mostly about business intelligence: more particularly about data integration and the daily work involved in delivering a data integration platform to market. I trust I will give some insight to the decisions we have to make as platform designers and developers: how we make those choices, how we prioritize and resolve and explain and rethink: how we look at the market: how we emerge into the daylight when a product has shipped to find real people using it to solve real problems, often in ways we never intended.
I am anxious that it should be interesting - but I know I'm among friends, and I should just relax and get blogging.
Share:
Posted by Donald Farmer at 2:45 PM | Comments (1)
