Inside the Data Reading Room: Late Summer 2013 Edition

Hello data readerand welcome to the latest edition of Inside the Data Reading Room. Regular readers of this blog know that Inside the Data Reading Room is a semi-regular feature of this blog with the goal of introducing and reviewing new and classic books on data technology and database systems.



With that in mind, let's start with a classic.. that is also new! A new edition of an essential book for technologists, (Addison-Wesley; ISBN: 978-0-321-93411-6) by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is now available in a new, 3rd edition. This book concentrates on the human aspect of project management and teams. If you believe that success is driven by technology more so than people, this book will change your misconceptions. This book originally was written in the late 1980s but not only has it been updated, much of the original content and intent is still pertinent to today's software development projects.




DeMarco is the author of several other revolutionary texts such as(Yourdon Press; ISBN: 0138543801). This book almost single-handedly introduced the concept of structured design into the computer programming lexicon. Today, structured analysis and design is almost completely taken for granted as the best way to approach the development of application programs.



At any rate, the Peopleware is an essential text for understanding the human resource element of IT project teams. And, as such, it is an important book because many of the biggest impediment to successful software development are not technological, but human.



Next up on the bookshelf is (Morgan Kaufmann; ISBN 978-0-12-405891-0) by Krish Krishnan. Many times people confuse Big Data as a replacement for the data warehouse, but that is not trueand this book will help you and your organization understand how the two can co-exist.



The book is broken up into three sections. In the first section, we learn about Big Data as the author describes what it is, how it can benefit your organization, and offers up some examples. The second section focuses on the data warehouse and some of the newer challenges being faced (such as workload management, cloud computing and in-memory technologies).Additionally, it is in this section where integration techniques for Big Data and the data warehouse are discussed. The third section deals with issues such as data governance, data visualization, information life-cycle management, data scientists, and implementing a Big Data-ready data warehouse.



If your organization has established data warehouses and is looking to embrace Big Data, look no further than for advice on how to succeed in those efforts.



And the final book on the shelf in our Data Reading Room is by Anthony Giordano (IBM Press; ISBN 978-0-13-708493-7). This book offers a consistent methodology and practices for integrating data across multiple sources and locations. With today's business focus on gleaning information via analytics on big data sets, it becomes increasingly necessary to focus on data integration techniques. And Giordano's book provides a wealth of knowledge on the subject.



The book is divided into three sections. The first section delivers an overview of data integration including a discussion of the types of data integration (EAI, SOA, ETL, etc.) and outlines a reference architecture for data integration. The second section of the book covers the data integration systems development lifecycle in detail. Each component of the lifecycle is defined and described and a case study using the lifecycle is presented. Finally, in the third section, Giordano discusses data integration in the context of other information management disciplines, including data governance, metadata, and data quality.



If your organization is tackling data integration issues you can learn a lot about getting them under control by reading Anthony Giordano's .



And that concludes our late Summer edition of Inside the Data Reading Room. Be sure to keep tuning in to for more coverage of the latest data- and database-related books.
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