Project X Discussions

CoffeeCAST #52 - Consultant in the Middle

Welcome to the 52nd CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.

Happy New Year and we are back on the air as it were.  I have asked Graham to join me while we talk a little about:

1. Consultant in the Middle / Readiness

1. Master Data Management (MDM - IBM, Oracle and Teradata)
2. Moving data around costs money
3. Business Intelligence Trends in 2008

Download 52_coffeecast_52_consultant_in_the_middle.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #49 - Teradata Partners 2007 - Wednesday Closing General Session

Welcome to the 49th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd. Live from Las Vegas.

Hello again from Vegas - baby.  We are coming close to covering the end of a great week at the Teradata 2007 Partners event.  The closing session was great, Graham and I continue with some discussion on the closing session.

This was an inspiring session which had the theme of innovation.  So before we go on to our last CoffeeCAST in regards to this event, here is the discussion that Graham and I had after the session by Dean Kamen (most notably known for the invention of the Segway, but the least of his advances)

1. Innovation versus Invention
2. Innovation is more about surprises (negative) what he refers to as rude realities of issues which are unforeseen
3. Seven Rude Realities
4. Three Suggestions
5. Introduction to Deka Research and Development Corporation
6. A very fast overview of FIRST - For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology a great and fast growing movement to bring the 'bling' into Science and Technology

Download 49_coffeecast_49_teradata_partners_2007_wednesday_part_1.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #48 - Teradata Partners 2007 - Tuesday Sessions

Welcome to the 48th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd. Live from Las Vegas.

Hello again from Vegas - baby.  It was the end of a great week at the Teradata 2007 Partners event and Graham and I continue on to discuss more of our thoughts on the conference.

Tuesday was a jam packed with some great stuff.  So we summarize at a high level by talking about today's sessions that I attended:

1. Future Trends in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence - Gartner Presentation by Donald Feinberg
2. What's Your Strategy for Master Data Management - A discussion on systems convergence
3. Gaining CxO's Support for your EDW and Business Intelligence - Ron Swift - Teradata
4. Teradata Active System Management (TASM)
5. A New Era of Data Integration with ELT approach - CTO one-on-one with Stephen Brobst of Teradata
6. Active Ingest to Support Active Enterprise Intelligence
7. Back Up And Recovery - early morning session
8. What's New with Stored Procedures
9. The New Query Rewrite Subsystem in V2R12.0
10. Table Functions: A Tutorial

So as you can see a lot of covered ground, so we only go into it in a couple of areas.

Download 48_coffeecast_48_teradata_partners_2007_tuesday.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #47 - Teradata Partners 2007 - Monday Sessions Part 2

Welcome to the 47th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd. Live from Las Vegas.

Hello from Vegas - baby.  It was the end of a great week at the Teradata 2007 Partners event and Graham and I decided to take some time away from the wine and tables to discuss our thoughts on the conference.

Monday was a busy day with some great stuff.  So we continue by talking about today's sessions that I attended:

1. Performance Management
   • Top 7 Best Practices
   • The Cause of Poor Performance
   • Strategies and Approaches
     • Data Collection
     • Performance Management
     • Planning
     • Workload Management
   • Tools

Download 47_coffeecast_47_teradata_partners_2007_monday_part_2.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #46 - Teradata Partners 2007 - Monday Sessions Part 1

Welcome to the 46th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd. Live from Las Vegas.

Hello from Vegas - baby.  It is the end of a great week at the Teradata 2007 Partners event and Graham and I have decided to take some time away from the wine and tables to discuss our thoughts on the conference.

Monday was a busy day with some great stuff.  So we start by talking about today's sessions that Graham attended:

1. Teradata Query Optimization
   
   • Statistics
   • Evenly Distribution across nodes
   • Indexes
   • A Little discussion on Nodes and Amps
2. 20 Tb/hour Backup
   • Backup and Recovery
   • Netvault from Bakbone Software
   • The story from eBay
     • Custom built
     • Sun hardware
   • Leveraging Archmain
   • After Image Journaling

Download 46_coffeecast_46_teradata_partners_2007_monday_part_1.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #44 - Floor Sweep Mentality and Details

Welcome to the 44th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  Well it is Wednesday night before Graham goes off to sail and I grabbed him to chat about what is on his mind and have a quick CoffeeCAST.

Todays conversation was funnily I think more about the mind and attitudes or approaches to common issues in Information Technology.  Today though we only focused on the following:

1. Technology upgrades - The floor sweep mentality
2. Attention Detail
3. The life of Production Support

Download 44_coffeecast_44_floor_sweep_mentality_and_details.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #43 - Collaboration in the Enterprise

Welcome to the 43r CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  I finally had a chance to catch up with Rex Lee who I have known for a while and have been bugging to come onto the CoffeeCAST and he finally submitted on behalf of the kids ;)

We took the time to talk about something which is top of mind to many corporations - collaboration in the enterprise.  Rex sets some framework on focusing on the client and then breaks it down into four components or success criteria:

1. innovation
2. speed / agility
3. holistic - end to end approach
4. employee engagement

In our discussion Rex mentions a couple of outside reference points:

1. McMaster World Conference on Innovation
2. IBM World Jam
3. Andrew McAfee

Download 43_coffeecast_43_collaboration_in_the_enterprise.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #42 - Teradata User Group and Other Musings

Welcome to the 42nd CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  I took a few minutes of space at a Starbucks along with Graham Boundy to chat about last weeks Teradata User Group meeting and a few other musings along the way.

This was an impromptu meeting without any agenda, but we talked about a couple of technologies that were talked about along with some general thoughts.  i won't give anything away in the show notes right now, but will update with the products tomorrow.

Download 42_coffeecast_42_teradata_user_group_and_other_musings.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST #41 - Capacity Planning with MIP

Welcome to the 41st CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  I have been talking with Michael Ianni-Palarchio (MIP) about some capacity planning excercises and MIP has been sharing his experiences with me so we sat down over a java at Starbucks and pulled away from a Florence event and talked about Capacity Planning.  We talked about our thoughts on:

• Who uses capacity plan
• Where it sits in Strategy
• The idea of shared services or cost recovery
• Like an old fashioned ASP (Application Service Provider model)

Download 41_coffeecast_41_capacity_planning_with_mip.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The audiocast is available on iTunes (as a Podcast) or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

CoffeeCAST - not today - Teamwork

Surprise, no CoffeeCAST today as I am off on holidays.  So I thought I would cobble something different together.

I have had the great fortune to be working with some great guys on a bunch of projects over the last 9 months.  Somewhere along the line in a late night session I played an audio clip about teamwork.  Here it is.

Download TEAMWORK.WAV

The applicable part of this is that everything we do ultimately boils down to people and often working together aligned to a common (sometimes) goal.  In a lessons learned session I ran yesterday I talked about the balancing act that we had of challenge and glory in working with the team and holding our alignment to the objectives set.