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October 24, 2005
EII Crash Course - A Syllabus
So you're new to EII, you say? Don't want to be out-talked at the water cooler? Fear not. Here's a crash course to get you all learned up.
First, sticking close to home, a few blog entries you should read from Dan Linstedt (and this one, too) and Colin White.
The you might want to venture out to a few of the usual trade pubs. Here are some good articles I've found. Neil Raden surveyed the integration landscape in the December 2004 Intelligent Enterprise. Greg Mancuso and Al Moreno from Sinecon wrote an excellent overview of available integration strategies in this April's DM Review. Curt Hall from the Cutter Consortium wrote an excellent piece on the fit between EII and Data Warehousing in May.
Then a few pieces we've put together at Ipedo: "The Guide to Enteprise Information Integration" and "Determining Financial Returns on Enterprise Information Integration." There's a lot more stuff in the EII Zone.
If you feel good about all that and are ready to wade into the technical stuff, check out Srinivas Pandrangi's blog The EII Files.
If you can groc all that, then you are among the EII literate and ready to move on to some more detailed stuff. We'll save that for another entry.
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Posted by Tim Matthews at 11:45 AM | TrackBack
October 17, 2005
EII and McDonalds?
As I sit down to write this first entry, I am reminded of the speaker who tears up his prepared remarks in favor of off-the-cuff comments. How does that expression go, 'Even the best of intentions...'
EII is quite a hot topic these days, especially in the areas of business intelligence and reporting. To understand it, we must take a step back, look at the technology, and compare it to technologies perhaps more familiar in the BI world - like ETL.
Which was where I had intended to begin with EII Talk. But then something came along that just could not be ignored. A posting from of my colleagues that was fresh as the smell of bacon in the morning.
So we'll begin in the middle, using his analogy to understand how EII platforms deal with performance and scalability, two common questions/objections that always come up in an EII sale. Here's how it begins:
The other day, over lunch, I was trying to explain to a technology executive in another industry some of Ipedo’s advantages in EII. Inspired by our fast food surroundings, I came up with several analogies that might help explain (1) cost-based query optimization vs. rule-based optimization, (2) policy-based caching and automatic cache invalidation, and (3) concurrency. These are three key areas that affect EII performance, and ones in which Ipedo excels among EII vendors.
Read on about 'McEII - Cost-based Optimization, Caching, Concurrency, and the Big Mac.'
