From the Editor

 

Welcome to the latest issue of The Data Profiler.  First, I’d like to apologize for the lateness of the issue.  Though I’m grateful for a full work schedule, it has minimized my time devoted to the newsletter.  Rest assured, the upcoming issues will be timely and relevant to your projects and efforts.

 

This quarter has seen some very interesting developments in the ETL market, an area of interest since half of our data profiling efforts are devoted to such projects (the other half being data quality assessments).  With its acquisition of Mercator, Ascential Software has successfully broadened their data integration platform to even larger migration efforts.  Informatica hasn’t stayed quiet with its acquisition of Striva.  The mainframe capabilities of Striva’s products are a welcome complement to Informatica’s Power Center.  Also of interest is the strategic alliance between Informatica and First Logic.  Hopefully, some integrated capabilities will result, giving Ascential some competition in the end-to-end data integration space.

 

This quarter’s issue only contains one article focusing on standardizing code sets for a logical domain.  We investigate some techniques and considerations for deciding which code set best satisfies the business needs and best describes the underlying domain.  Combining traditional business requirements with data profiling techniques provides a more objective way of selecting a code set.

 

As a final note, I invite all of you to attend the 2003 Enterprise Data Forum (EDF) in Cherry Hill, NJ, November 3-6, as well as my session, “The Structural Integrity of Source Data” on Wednesday, Nov 5^th at 1:45PM.  This is a good conference to learn of the many new directions in data and metadata management.  The Data Profiler will also publish a special issue in late November devoted to the conference.  I hope to see you there.

 

Joseph Novella,

Editor