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The Presenters:

Karen López is a principal consultant at InfoAdvisors, Inc., a Toronto-based consulting firm. Karen has spoken at several DAMA conferences and DAMA Chapters.  She has 20 years of experience in project and data management on large, multi-project programs.  Karen specializes in the practical application of data management principles.

Karen is also the ListMistress and moderator of the InfoAdvisors Discussion Groups (including ERWin) at www.infoadvisors.com.

Data Modeling Contentious Issues

A highly interactive and popular session where attendees evaluate the options and best practices of common and advanced data modeling issues, such as:

        * Party/party role
        * Natural vs. surrogate keys
        * Class Models vs. Data Models
        * SOAs, Ontologies, ESBs, New TLAs and Shoe Strings
        * What is Logical? What is Physical? Why Do We Care?
        * Politics vs. Customer Satisfaction

...and others. Participants in this session will be presenting with an issue along with a range of responses or possible solutions. Participants will vote on their preferred response, then the group as a whole will discuss the results, along with the merits of each possible response. If the specific issue has been discussed in other presentations, a summary of the responses of the other groups will be presented. The goal of this workshop is to help practitioners identify potential points of conflict in data modeling, as well as alternative approaches to resolving the issues. This presentation is targeted at experienced data modelers and assumes extensive data modeling skills.
 

Steve Knutson has over 27 years of experience developing complex, multi-terabyte business intelligence and data warehousing solutions.  He has also served as an instructor, coauthoring and delivering a 5 day Data Warehousing Analysis and Design course, as well as delivering two and three day classes in data modeling and advanced SQL query techniques, and mentoring 2-week Object Oriented analysis, design and implementation workshops.  Steve is currently the Solutions Architect for a $50 million Care Coordination Technical Initiative within the health insurance industry.  Steve resides with his wife and two daughters in the Philadelphia area.

Defining Data Handling Rules

What do you do when no business rule exists?  In a Business Intelligence Environment, business and data analysts work with business users to define the business rules that convert data from source to the various target data stores.  However, business users will not define all data scenarios, usually because they have no known business driver upon which to base a specific business rule.  Therefore, the data architect must define a set of default data handling rules to cover logic detail where no business rule exists.  This presentation will define the concept of Data Handling Rules and their role in a BI/DW environment, walk through some Data Handling Rules examples, and discuss how data handling rules affect Business/Data Analysis and ETL activities.

SCHEDULE: 

8:30 - 9:00      Registration

9:00 - 9:30      DAMA/PEMUG News

9:30 - 12:00    Karen López - Data Modeling Contentious Issues

12:00 - 1:30   Lunch - Pizza Provided!

1:30 - 3:00      Steve Knutson - Defining Data Handling Rules

3:15 - 3:30      PEMUG/DAMA Board - Wrap up and Highlights of the next Meeting