Half-Day Tutorials

Monday Morning Tutorials

Tutorial 1A
Data Modeling Basics: Everything you need to know to get started

Marcie Barkin Goodwin
President & CEO
Axis Software Designs, Inc.

Are you new to Data Modeling?
Would you like to review the basics?
Then this is the tutorial for you!

‘Data Modeling Basics’ combines lecture, illustration and interactive discussion to provide the novice (or rusty beginner) with all the details necessary to understand the elements of a data model. In addition, the model’s accompanying documentation will be discussed, as well as ‘Best Practices’ for building, reviewing and delivering the logical data model ‘package’ to management and/or the physical team.

Participants will gain an understanding of the models and the modeling process, allowing them to participate with confidence. This tutorial is intended for all beginning modelers, or anyone interested in seeing what data modeling is all about, including business users, analysts and managers who need to understand data models. Presented by Marcie Barkin Goodwin (a former Hollywood actress and comedienne), this tutorial will cover the basics of data modeling, and is sure to entertain as well!

Tutorial Outline

• Let’s Communicate!
• A few words about gathering knowledge – Interviews and group facilitated sessions
• The heart of the matter
• An Introduction to the IDEF & IE methods
• The Model Objects – Entities, Attributes & Relationships
• And Their Friends…
  - Keys – Who am I?
  - Cardinality – The (sometimes challenging) parent/child relationship
  - Recursion & Generalization Hierarchies (Big words for simple concepts)
• Normalization – It’s just good housekeeping!
• Nurturing & handing-off the model
• Subject areas & esthetics
• Documentation
• And let’s not forget standards & procedures!

Tutorial 1B
Implementing Universal Data Models to Integrate Data

Len Silverston
President
Universal Data Models, LLC

How have other organizations been able to integrate data from disparate “silo” data sources? This tutorial will share practical models and approaches that have helped many organizations move towards more integrated data. Len Silverston, best selling author of “The Data Model Resource Book, Volumes 1 and 2” will share models to integrate critical data such as customer and product information that may be maintained redundantly in various packaged applications such as Oracle Financials, Siebel, SAP, or custom applications and will share methods showing how to bring this data into a common, integrated data structure.

This tutorial is for experienced data management practitioners. You will need to have some experience in data modeling.

Specifically, this tutorial will address:

• 4 best-practice data architectures/approaches for integrating data with pros and cons for each
• A Universal Data Model for integrating customer, contact, partner, employee and any other roles played by people and organizations
• A Universal Data Model for integrating products, goods, and services data
• A Universal Data Model integrating contract and order data
• A Universal Data Model for integrating web visit and hit data
• Physical implementation approaches for matching, synchronizing, and integrating data from various sources into a common, integrated data store or data warehouse
• Lessons learned from organizations who have succeeded in integrating data versus those organizations that haven’t succeeded

Tutorial 1C
XML Schemas for the Data Architect

James Bean
President and CEO
Global Web Architecture Group

W3C XML Schemas provide a robust method for describing the content of an XML document. XML schemas are in fact a well-defined metadata language. In many cases there are similarities to the metadata (e.g. system catalog and schema level information) of a relational database. The opportunities afforded by XML and synergies with the role of the data architect are becoming obvious to IT and business leadership. This tutorial session is intended to provide instruction in the syntax and capabilities of XML schemas with a data architecture focus. It will walk through the W3C XML Schemas syntax and focus on the areas of greatest value to, and synergy with, the DA role. Of significance in this respect are:

• Container types (element, attribute)
• Structures (complexTypes, groups)
• Data types (base, derived, custom - there are many, many data types)
• Facets (again many, e.g. length, min length, max length, total digits, fractional digits, min inclusive, max inclusive, patterns, whitespace, enumeration, etc....)
• Annotations (appinfo, description).

Tutorial 1D
Establishing and Running an Effective Data Stewardship and Information Quality Improvement Program

Kurt Allebach
Executive Consultant/Principle
Caladesi Professional Services

Companies around the world are beginning to see the data in their business systems as a strategic asset. Unfortunately, the quality of a lot of this data greatly reduces its strategic usefulness. Additionally, poor quality data has a tactical impact on organizational performance causing process failures and low customer satisfaction. Many companies are implementing programs to improve the quality of their data. This session will examine all aspects of establishing a Data Stewardship Program with a focus on “Continuous Quality Improvement”. Topics will include defining the various organizational roles, processes, and methodologies. Attendees of this tutorial will learn:

1. An understanding of the various data stewardship roles within an organization and the critical relationships between them.
2. How to develop an Enterprise Information Framework and how it interacts with the Enterprise Process Model.
3. How to develop the Domain Information Standards that will serve as benchmarks for the data quality analysis process.
4. An understanding of the various infrastructure elements, such as metadata repositories and analysis tools, within a Data Stewardship program and the function they play.

Attendees will leave with a full data stewardship process model detailing all governance, analysis, and remediation sub-processes that they can use within their own organizations to start improving data quality and saving money.

Tutorial 1E
Mastering Reference Data

Malcolm Chisholm
Senior Consultant
Askget.com Inc

Reference data performs several important functions for the enterprise. These include relating an enterprise's data to the external world, driving business rules, and providing categories for the reporting of data. Like metadata, it makes other data understandable and usable, and like metadata it requires special management. Yet few enterprises devote much attention to this need resulting in widespread data quality problems, and that failure to unlock the true potential from the enterprise's information resource.

This topic is important because reference data is used so widely within enterprises and affects so many databases. Yet it is notoriously difficult to standardize across an organization, and there is little consensus on how to manage it. Having well managed reference data helps an organization to share data, and in particular to implement data warehouses successfully. It also necessary for the successful implementation of a business rules strategy. This tutorial provides a roadmap for how to successfully manage corporate reference data, including:

• A description of what reference data is, and the various categories that comprise it
• The management techniques that are applicable to the various categories of reference data. This will include a facilitated exercise for the audience to categorize reference data categories in a data model.
• The resources needed, and techniques available, to manage reference data centrally within an enterprise
• Options for distributing reference data within an organization, and also how to implement a central reference data server environment
• The special metadata that is associated with reference data and how to manage it
• The management of the full reference data life cycle.

Additional learning benefits for attendees will include:

• How to recognize the different categories of reference data and apply specific management techniques to each class
• How to organize the data administration function to manage reference data.
• How to build and implement systems to publish reference data across the enterprise
• How to distribute reference data within an organization
• How to provide a central reference data server to the organization.

Tutorial 1F
A Fundamental Framework for Evaluating Data Management Technology

Fabian Pascal
Technology Analyst, Editor and Publisher
Database Debunkings

Even a cursory inspection of data management practice reveals that the majority of practitioners - be they novices, or experienced - operate in “cookbook”, product-specific mode, without really knowing and understanding the fundamental concepts and methods underlying their practice. For example: what data means, what is a data model, data independence, etc. This is not entirely their fault: the industry neither provides, nor requires an education in data fundamentals, which are ignored, distorted, or incorrectly dismissed in daily practice as “just theory” and, therefore, without practical value. The consequences are very costly: the IT industry operates like the fashion industry, because practitioners are unable to see through the “paradigms”, models, technologies and products (read: fads) proliferated by marketeers, “experts” and the trade press. The problem is so acute that not only is technology not progressing, but also it actually going backwards!

The purpose of this seminar is to provide a fundamentally correct way to evaluate data management technologies, products and practices. It will help practitioners understand data fundamentals that are either ignored or distorted in the industry. It will show how to apply these fundamentals in your daily practice, and how to use them in the evaluation of the technologies being promoted. This will be a general, rigorous and above all, meaningful framework for the evaluation of data management technologies and practices, based on data fundamentals.

Objectives include:

• Provide a general framework for evaluating technologies, products and practices rigorously and systematically for functionality, soundness and ease of use;
• Inculcate knowledge and correct understanding, appreciation and use of critical data fundamentals in daily practice;
• Instill ability to overcome, work around, and minimize negative consequences of the industry’s mode of operation, and see through fallacies and misconceptions prevalent in the industry

Tutorial Outline:

• What meaning means
• Propositions and predicates
• Conceptual models, Logical models and Data model
• Business rules and integrity constraints
• What databases and DBMSs really are
• Evaluation framework

Monday Afternoon Tutorials

Marcie Barkin Goodwin
President & CEO
Axis Software Designs, Inc.

Communication is Everything…

Process Modelers have a good idea of what it takes to create a process model – but they don’t (or shouldn’t) work in a vacuum. Business users and managers play a critical role in contributing to and evaluating process models, and it’s important that they understand what a process model is communicating.

This presentation is focused on empowering both new modelers and the non-modelers on the team - giving them a better understanding of the modeling process and the meaning of model components, allowing them to participate with confidence.

Tutorial Outline

• The World of Process Modeling
  - What is Process Modeling and why do it anyway?
  - The critical role of the business expert
• The Heart of the Matter
  - An introduction to the IDEF method
  - Diagram context and decomposition – ‘Divide & Conquer’
  - Gathering Knowledge – Interviews and group facilitated sessions
  - Data in a process model – It takes 2 to Tango!
  - Best Practices – Have you thought about these lately?
  - Process modeling standards and procedures

Tutorial 2B
Converting a Logical Data Model to a Physical Database

Thomas Haughey
President
InfoModel, Inc.

Performing the conversion of a Logical Data Model to a Physical Database is a process that has often troubled the data modeler and mystified the DBA. However, with the use of a few simple principles and several clearly defined stages, this conversion can be made manageable and understandable.

The first step is the definition of key empirical data. Four major factors need to be considered:

• Amount of data
• Complexity of data
• Complexity of queries
• Load factor.

One also has to understand the capabilities of the technology in use. Guided by these factors, the designer can then make reasonable trade-offs to the data. A trade-off is a compromise that emphasizes one aspect, which becomes an advantage, and which may de-emphasize another aspect, which may become a disadvantage. The key is to balance these trade-offs.

Trade-offs can be divided into several classes, namely, technology, safe and aggressive trade-offs. Technology trade-offs, such as adding indices, do not modify the data structure but can help optimize the system. Safe trade-offs make compromises without jeopardizing integrity. For example, splitting a large table into several non-redundant tables, or collapsing trivial code tables. Aggressive trade-offs do compromise integrity but can provide big performance gains. The key is to control them. Examples of these are adding redundancy and storing derived data.

An important message is that "there is not such thing as a free lunch". Trade-offs are just that. They come with a cost. The key is to understand their cost and the impact. This tutorial will use several practical examples to demonstrate a systematic and sensible way to achieve this.

Tutorial 2C
XML Prototyping - Models and Structures

James Bean
President and CEO
Global Web Architecture Group

Prototyping of XML documents (as documents, transactions and messages) is roughly analogous to data modeling for data that is intended to be persisted. The greatest difference is that most XML documents are first "consumed" and then optionally (although frequently) persisted in some form. The process of XML Schema design and engineering often lacks a model from which to generate the initial syntax. XML prototyping provides that model as well as a method of alignment with traditional data models.

This tutorial will focus on:

• Prototyping of XML documents as a form of modeling (alignment with traditional data models)
• XML structure models
  - vertical
  - horizontal
  - component
  - hybrid
• Advantages and disadvantages of these models for describing and constraining the content of an XML transaction
• XML Architectural forms (i.e. reusable "patterns" that can be applied to advantage with a structure model)
  - rigid
  - abstract
  - hybrid
• Impact and value of XML prototyping to XML Schema development

Tutorial 2D
Enterprise Metadata Implementation — Learning from “Best Practices”

R. Todd Stephens
Director of the Metadata Services Group
BellSouth

This tutorial focuses on the formulation and implementation of an enterprise metadata organization. Participants will learn techniques to understand the role of metadata in the development of Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI). The Metadata Services Group within BellSouth has spent the last 4 years developing an enterprise metadata solution based on a solid product line and a customer service focus. This tutorial will develop the attendees understanding of how to develop a successful enterprise metadata implementation. The presenter will be taking four years of metadata experience and condensing that knowledge into this three-hour session. We will examine the principles of marketing, selling strategies, service offerings, architecture, team construction and overall strategy of delivery for an enterprise metadata solution in both the structured and un-structured world.

Come see why BellSouth, won the Outstanding Enterprise Meta Data Implementation in this year's Wilshire Award for Metadata Best Practices. Hear why past tutorial participants are making comments like:

• “After seeing the Enterprise Repository presentation, I can say that
  BellSouth has the best collection of repositories I have ever seen.”
• “Phenomenal, simply phenomenal”
• “Amazing and inspiring”
• “I have never seen anyone do so much with metadata”
• “This is the best metadata presentation I have ever seen”

Tutorial topics include:

• The enterprise environment revealed
• Applying the principles of architecture to metadata
• The major components of a metadata project
• Branding, selling and marketing metadata
• Metadata success = A service oriented organization

Attendees will learn the following:

• Increase your understanding of which strategy options make the most sense and which do not
• Identify and compare your organization's metadata strategy with ours
• Develop metadata solutions and blueprints for a service transformation
• Recognize which architectures and services can create a competitive advantage
• Discover why enterprise metadata is different than data warehouse metadata
• Apply our lessons learned to your organizations situation
• Better anticipate and prepare for your customers’ changing needs
• Discover what skills you need within the metadata team
• Enhance your ability to market and sell enterprise metadata
• Understand why data architecture can enable the implementation of metadata

Tutorial 2E
Implementing a Message-Based Data Integration Strategy

Dave McComb
President
Semantic Arts

Messaging and service oriented architectures offer huge potential improvements for enterprises, but in order to reap those benefits, companies need to have an organized approach to their adoption, configuration and use. This tutorial starts at the enterprise level and deals with the difficult tradeoffs between applications development and application integration economics.

We take a fresh look at application partitioning, and decoupling as strategies for improving the adaptability of applications, and how XML message based architectures and web services can be used to implement these concepts. This presentation will cover specific strategies for reducing application to application and application to technology dependencies, concluding with specific strategies for migrating an enterprise off its existing legacy applications to a more flexible and responsive architecture.

Throughout the tutorial we will draw on case studies from the service and manufacturing industries to highlight alternate approaches and potential pitfalls. Participants will come away with an understanding of how message based, service oriented approaches can be applied at the enterprise level. They will have a methodology and guidelines to implement an enterprise message model and they will be given guidance on how to introduce this to their organization.

Integration vs. Decoupling – The Critical Balance

• Five ways to integrate your systems, and when to use each
• Decoupling as the often cited but rarely achieved, means to gracefully upgrade your systems

Message-Based, Service Oriented Architectures

• Partitioning, strategies for cutting your applications down to size
• How to extract sharable services from your current applications
• How a message based architecture makes sharing services feasible
• Extending the life of legacy systems through application adaptors

Application Decoupling and Message Based Architectures

• Getting to the root causes of application dependency
• Why solving one or two of your decoupling issues isn’t enough
• Axes of decoupling – the six dimensions of separation: technical, destination, syntactic, semantic, identity and domain.

Developing An Enterprise Message Model

• A step by step approach to building an enterprise message model, as the key to rationalizing message traffic for your enterprise.
• The data groups role in the new world of message based integration.

Methodologies and Getting Started

• An overall approach to assessing your current situation, planning a more modern architecture and planning a route to get there.
• Practical insights to help make this happen in your organization.

Tutorial 2F
End to End Security for SQL Server 2000 Data

Morris Lewis
President
Holistech, incorporated

Because of new government regulations concerning terrorism, hacking, and privacy, SQL Server database administrators are responsible for ensuring the safety and confidentiality of their data no matter where it is used. Common business practices relating to authenticating users’ identities and authorizing access to data are no longer sufficient to meet government requirements for protecting data, nor are they able to withstand even the simplest hacking tools available to attackers. New environments like Microsoft’s .NET Framework do offer new ways to protect data, but they also add new complexity to the production environment as a whole. Finally, application design is moving away from creating monolithic programs that implement all services users will need to a breaking apart of services and functionality into individual components that will often reside on multiple different computers, thus creating an environment in which data may pass through several transformations as it flows between the client and SQL Server. This half day session covers the following techniques for building more secure environments for your data.

• Designing Strong Authentication
  -·Windows Authenticated logins vs SQL Server Authenticated logins
  -·ASP.NET authentication options
  -·Application authentication options
  
• Securing Data on the network
  -·Secure Sockets Layer encryption
  - Using third party digital certificates
  - Using Windows 2000 Certificate Services
  -·IPSec
  -·Kerberos
  - Using Kerberos to specify authorized servers
  - Controlling access on a per-user, per-server basis
  
• Hiding Data in SQL Server
  -·Hashing vs. Encryption
  -·Data verification techniques
  -·Data encryption techniques
  - Encrypting data in the .NET Framework
  - Encrypting data in SQL Server
  
• Making SQL Server More Secure
  -·Limiting Administrator Access
  -·Removing Permissions From Objects in the Master Database
  -·Designing a Framework of Roles and Windows Groups
  -·Building Barriers to Data with Views, Stored Procedures, User Defined Functions, and Calculated Columns
  

Tuesday Morning Tutorials

Tutorial 3A
Information Modeling in a Changing Environment

Graham Witt
Senior Consultant
Consulting Insights

Change is an unavoidable feature of every system acquisition project, with requirements not only being refined during the course of the project but frequently evolving into something quite different. Agile methods have evolved in response to this situation but, since the tools and techniques generally available to information modelers do not provide much in the way of support for rapid change, it is tempting to dispense with information modeling as if it were an unnecessary and time-wasting distraction.

This presentation describes a variety of techniques that enable an information modeler to respond to a changing environment and add value to an agile or conventional project in such an environment. Topics include:

• Reasons for change
• Managing model changes
• Global changes
• Model reconfiguration
• Consequential changes
• Documenting model changes for reviewers
• Incorporating changing models in documentation.

Tutorial 3B
Building a Business Case for Enterprise Metadata

R. Todd Stephens
Director of the Metadata Services Group
BellSouth

The ability to successfully initiate a project often relies on the development of a compelling business case. For many organizations, business cases are essential tools for strategic analysis and decision making, and for tangibly defining the expected costs and returns associated with a metadata project. This tutorial focuses on the formulation and development of a business case for enterprise metadata. The purpose is to establish a framework for building a business case for the development of a metadata management program. Participants will be better able to communicate the benefits of metadata as well as focus on the business value for having a metadata management program operational. This course will provide a basic roadmap for developing the business case with a few “best practices” added in for flavoring.

Attendees will learn the following

• How Metadata plays into the enterprise
• What is a business case and which type is best suited for metadata
• How the current organizational and architecture environment impact the case
• How to define the ROI within a metadata business case
• What are some of the critical success factors to be aware of?
• The different approaches to doing enterprise metadata

Tutorial Outline

• Introduction to enterprise metadata and business case development
• Elements of the metadata business case
  - Strategic
  - Economic
  - Financial
  - Project management
• Annual report requirements
• Reasons metadata business cases fail

Tutorial 3C
Objective Data Quality Assessment

David Loshin
President
Knowledge Integrity Incorporated

Because data quality issues are relevant only within the business context in which inspected data is used, data quality levels can only be measured with respect to business data consumer expectations. Relying on subjective measurements determined by software vendors only provides a subjective
assessment from the point of view of an external party with little stake in the ultimate project success.

Objective data quality measurement relies on metrics relating directly to how information is being used and how missed expectations impact the business. Once expectations are isolated and understood, we can define assertions that capture those expectations that are used for measuring how information complies with those data quality rules. These rules, which seed our objective data quality metrics, are knowledge-based metadata related to the data sets, suitable for incorporation into the metadata repository. This tutorial discusses the process of exploring information, identifying data quality rules, and isolating noncompliance as a sequence of stages:

• Data Set Selection
• Data Profiling
• Profile Review
• Rule Definition
• Rule Review and Refinement
• Objective Measurements
• Characterize Value Proposition.

The result of the process yields information that can be used to justify an ongoing data quality program.

Tutorial 3D
Implementing Service-Oriented Architectures for Business Agility

Ron Schmelzer
Founder and Senior Analyst
ZapThink, LLC

Companies today are struggling with the best way to implement IT infrastructures that enable business agility. Service-oriented architectures based on Web services provide cost-effective approaches to achieving companies’ agility goals. This course provides companies of all sizes and industries an approach to implementing Service-oriented architectures in a way that provides return-on-investment (ROI) at each step along the path toward agile IT infrastructures. We will discuss the steps and phases by which companies can move from today's brittle infrastructures to loosely-coupled, coarse-grained, asynchronous SOAs.

The course covers concepts in point-to-point Web services implementations for integration, securing, managing, and adding process layers to these services, implementing registries and management for loose coupling, moving to asynchronous invocations for greater reliability, and concepts in virtualization, grid computing, and more. We’ll provide the big picture for SOA adoption as well as the details on how to actually go about implementing SOAs in a logical progression of steps, each resulting in significant ROI. This tutorial is intended for project planners, architects, and business decision makers for technical implementation, and developers interested in the big picture of implementation. A basic understanding of Web services is strongly recommended prerequisite knowledge.

What You will Learn:

• The different value propositions for SOAs, and how to communicate them within an organization
• When a simple Web services project is sufficient, and when it’s not
• How to phase an SOA project so that each phase has a positive ROI
• How to identify problems that are appropriate for Service-oriented solutions
• What aspects of an SOA should be implemented first, and which aspects can wait until later

Tutorial 3E
Marrying SQL, XML, Web Services and Grid Services

Ken North
Consultant, Author and Speaker

The race is on to offer the best database technology for XML applications, web services, and grid computing. SQL vendors offer database extensions to support XML document processing and messaging. They also support web services and grid services development. This session will explore what IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle offer for XML, web services and grid services developers. The instructor will discuss SQL extensions, XML APIs, XML custom types, XML DB, transformations, SOAP, WSDL, XML messaging and queues, and techniques for storing, indexing, and retrieving XML content.

Ken North is a consultant, industry analyst, author, speaker, software developer and company founder. He teches Expert Series seminars and his classes have been recommended by Microsoft and Sun. He is the author of Database Magic with Ken North (Prentice Hall) and Windows Multi-DBMS Programming (John Wiley & Sons) and he's contributed to other books. Ken has been a contributing editor for several publications and is currently XML and Web Services editor for Dr. Dobb's. His articles and columns have appeared in Intelligent Enterprise, Dr. Dobb's Journal, DB2, SQL Server, XML, XML-Journal, Byte, Java Pro, Web Techniques, PC Week, Internet Computing, Network Computing, DBMS, Software Development, SearchDatabase, The Data Administration Newsletter, Windows NT, Windows Tech Journal, Windows NT Systems, Smart Access, and other publications.

Tutorial 3F
Valuing Information and Knowledge — Developing metrics to demonstrate the financial value of information assets and develop business cases

John Ladley
President
KI Solutions

An organization’s information portfolio contains great potential value. Many information management departments want to demonstrate this potential value of information and knowledge to upper management. There are multiple reasons for this:

• Proactive justification for enterprise information management (i.e. their own jobs)
• Reactive risk management to reduce corporate exposure to information related risk

However, intrinsic value, or potential value, has no meaning to beleaguered CEOs. Fortunately for the information or knowledge manager, there is some work being done on valuing information and knowledge, and developing metrics to demonstrate and assess the value of information assets, i.e. hard financial measurement.

This workshop will review the reasoning, means, and techniques for assessing the information assets of a company or organization. Rather than present specific (and often proprietary) measurement techniques, this session will recommend how shops can develop their own metrics that fit their own situations. Specific topics will be:

• Evaluate what the value of information really is
• Definition of the components of a business case
• Definition of Information Valuation
• Techniques to incorporate business objectives into Information Valuation
• Techniques to identify the value of information portfolios

This session is for financial and information managers, CIO’s and data administration management. It would be useful to be familiar with financial concepts such as present value. Anyone who has a data warehouse of information administration department struggling to justify growth or existence will also benefit.

Online registration 

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