Data Modeling is Dead? Join Us 24 Jan 2PM EST to Discuss

During this month’s Big Challenges in Data Modeling we’ll be talking about the state of data modeling. 

Last month Tom LaRock (@sqlrockstar | blog) wrote a post Data Modeling is Dead, Long Live Data Modeling. 

Data modeling is dead. It is a product of an era that has passed; that of corporate silos that created their own versions of software to suit their own needs.

That is no longer the world in which we live. That era was one that had high costs associated with building and maintaining a database of customers.

Today’s era is one where you can subscribe to Salesforce.com for just a few dollars a day. You can decide for yourself to run a new report. How much did that same report cost in the old era? How long would it take for IT to deliver that report? That’s why businesses today are using such services, because it reduces time and costs.

You need to read the whole post to get his position, but I find that his take on the state of data modeling is common in the IT world.  I posted a link to his blog post to a LinkedIn group and there was an extensive discussion.

I’ve invited Tom to join a real-world data architect and me to talk the current state of data modeling and what the future holds for data architects. 

This Month’s Panelists

Thomas LaRock

• Thomas LaRock is a seasoned IT professional with over a decade of technical and management experience. Currently serving as a Technical Evangelist for Confio Software, Thomas has progressed through several roles in his career including programmer, analyst, and DBA. Thomas holds a MS degree in Mathematics from Washington State University and is a member of the Usability Professional’s Association. Thomas currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) and is a SQL Server MCM as well as MVP. Thomas can also be found blogging at http://thomaslarock.com and is the author of DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA (http://dbasurvivor.com).

Gabriel Tanase

• Gabriel Tanase is a Data Architect currently with a mid-size business consulting organization. He has accumulated some tough years of ordinary real-life data modeling experience and the not-unheard-of distinction of having taught it academically before really practicing. He is currently specializing in keeping everybody else in the project happy while quietly enforcing information meaning and integrity.

This webinar is free to attend, but you must register.  It officially starts at 2PM EST, but you can join us at 1:45 when we start our prep. We’ll be taking questions via the Q&A and we offer a real time chat so that you can be part of the conversation, too. 

The Job of the Future

I agree with this:

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.

-Robert Reich

Do you think this we are educating our future generations for this sort of job of the future?  Are we creating the type of learning and living environments that encourage our kids to tackle these kinds of tasks?