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Words of wisdom

Taking a holistic view of your enterprise architecture from design to operation is the route to success.

by Rob Armstrong

"Quite smart, plays well with others" —From a child's report card

If you are a parent, you can probably relate to the above quote. We all want to hear that our children are doing well, but more importantly, we want to know that they are able to interact and behave in society. If you are an IT professional you should also be able to relate, as we want all of the various components in our architecture to be not only “best of breed” but also “plug and play.” We all understand that being capable is not enough; you also need to be a good team player.

That is the crux of Teradata’s Real-Time Enterprise Reference Architecture. Purposely designed to segregate the data, communication and presentation layers, the tools and platforms are only required to do what they are intended to do. Transformation tools are not being asked to also perform the data movement. Front-end tools are not being asked to also undertake the arduous data manipulation tasks, and data movement protocols are not being required to perform complex and intensive joins.

Of course, to have the total environment work in concert, the various “players” have to come to a tacit agreement on the protocols by which to pass data and processes between layers. This brings us to our next quote…

"I like using standards, I can pick whichever one fits my need best." —Anonymous

I heard this quote early in my career and it keeps coming up from time to time. This mindset turns plug-and-play into plug-and-pray. Too often I hear that this or that “does not meet my standards,” yet those standards were set without enterprise data warehousing (EDW) in mind. At one account, I was told that Teradata was not on the standards list. When I inquired as to which was the database standard, I got the names of five other databases.

So much for standards. The key takeaway point here is that while it is good to have standards, some flexibility is needed within the selection process.

The underlying requirement that permits coexistence within the enterprise architecture is an adherence to standards, whichever one you may pick. Many vendors are finding standards compliance to be an ongoing issue. In order to appeal to a large number of companies, our products must communicate and interact with an ever-widening circle of interfaces and protocols. With the introduction and adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise application integration (EAI), these compatibility issues are growing.

Again, by abstracting the various processing layers, we can facilitate this capability. Rather than picking a few standards and adhering to them, Teradata has designed an active data warehouse environment to work with application programming interfaces ( APIs) and interfaces among those standards. Because they use the lower-level communication layers and allow open access via the API linkage, Teradata products can be easily integrated into a wide variety of enterprise standards. As we add new capabilities, we will incorporate the most common and well-accepted standards into the product.

For the other, more boutique, protocols, we have a very thin communication layer that allows one protocol to be translated through our API. Consider, for example, the single sign-on and enterprise security arena. Rather than adhering to just Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or other security protocols, Teradata has created a security API layer so we can quickly translate our security and logon checking with any protocol. In the initial offering, we have already created the linkage for the most popular protocols; it is now a simple matter for us to provide a linkage to more boutique offerings.

Another example is our recently announced Teradata Parallel Transporter API for data movement and loading. This API will allow tool vendors to quickly get the best performance by linking into our load utilities and allow those utilities to expose all of the monitoring metrics back to the tool so there is a complete, and consistent, view of the processes.

All of these capabilities need to function cohesively in order to be efficient for the business. In other words…

"United we stand, divided we fall." —Aesop's Fables

I have to admit that I am somewhat hesitant to use the term active data warehouse because it implies that it is the data warehouse that creates the “active” portion of the environment. (Of course, I also don’t like the term data warehouse, but that is a topic for another day.) The real message behind the active data warehouse story is that the solution can be as active as required. If you need to have data available in minutes for cross-functional business analytics, then your data warehouse has to allow real-time analytics. The data warehouse must be an active and contributing member of the total picture.

That is where the above quote comes into play. Too often, I hear that the requirements for one aspect of the total environment hold it to a higher standard than other pieces of the architecture. This is most noticeable in the disaster-recovery arena. Questions focus on the recovery speed of the data warehouse, but then we discover the application servers have no backup or disaster plans in place. It is critical that the data warehouse and associated servers be understood and managed as an integrated system, as opposed to a series of individual platforms.

If you are like me, the source of this quote came as a bit of a surprise. Everyone I asked thought this was from a revolutionary-era patriot, not some ancient Greek fable writer. Nonetheless, the sentiment is still very appropriate for the data warehousing arena. The success, or failure, of any one tool set depends on the success, or failure, of them all. This is good, as it puts all interested parties into a “win-win-win” mindset, with the ultimate winners being the corporate enterprise and end customers.

The bottom line is that it is important to have a complete, integrated enterprise-wide architecture. It is equally important to remember that none of that is any good if you are not constantly driving the environment to the fulfillment of even greater business goals.

All this leads to next issue’s topic on governance. In a bow to the next installment, which will be all entertainment-related quotes, I leave you with the immortal words of Yoda: “There is do, or there is do not. There is no try.” T

Rob Armstrong is a director with Teradata. Since 1987, Rob has consulted with or led teams to deliver some of the most successful data warehouse systems in existence.

© Teradata Magazine-June 2006

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