Since Their Wings Have Got Rusted.

At Enzee Universe this week in Boston, Netezza’s user conference. My first one, of course, so a great opportunity to learn directly from the customers what they are doing and what they want. And i have a challenging role to play. I get to be a flip holder, one of a small group of Netezza staffers who will be wandering the conference with flip video cameras in hand. I’ll be shooting clips from presentations, and any attendees who will talk to me. We’re going to put the clips up on the conference website (attendees only access). And i’ll be in the partner pavilion looking to shoot the slickest, most diverting elevator pitches to upload.

And since i have a very long history of data modelling i’m going to keep an eye open for any presentations on the topic. In Netezza we’re pretty agnostic about logical data modelling; we only get concerned about the physical database design, but i have heard stories about physical warehouse designs that have been optimized for their original target database and continued to evolve over the lifetime of the implementation, By the time we see them they are a long way from the original TNF model. I wrote a little while ago about this and why it’s no barrier to a successful Netezza implementation, but what i haven’t tracked down yet is the best practise for building a Netezza warehouse from scratch. Any pointers/resources/suggestions?

I’m going to try to post every day from the conference, so i hope that flip will help me gather material. If you want to help out with your own Netezza anecdote, i’ll be the slap-head Brit in the red shoes. And a glass of champagne to the first person who correctly tells me who made my shoes. And another for who tells me why the title.