Seven Steps to Effective Data Governance

The concept and discipline of data governance has grown in importance as organizations are forced to comply with regulations, cut costs, integrate among different COTS (Commercial-off-the-shelf) systems, provide data interoperability through internal and external APIs.

One of my retail clients has large daily transaction data flow among retail, wholesale inventory, financial, auditing and warehouse departments, etc. It has separate COTS systems such as JDA ESO, eCommerce Shopify and Tecsys SCM, etc. It also has in-house store master, product master data, etc. In some system, SKU is defined as 6-digits number; in another, it’s defined as varchar. In such a complex environment, data management turns to be an outstanding issue.

In order to improve customer experience, increase efficien...

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Building Performance Monitoring Layers for SQL Server Farm

One of my banking clients has a large SQL Server farm which hosts support data. Another client uses SharePoint as ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system which relies on underneath SQL Server farm. Both are dependent on the infrastructure operating 24*7*365, both have strong needs to monitor the performance of SQL Server farm.

Let’s see how to build performance monitoring layers for a SQL Server farm. Though this might not be the best approach, it can be a great reference based on technical implementation feasibility under existing IT environment.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Let’s assume that we utilize NetApp as storage, VMware ESXi (vs. Hyper-V) as bare-metal OS. The guest OS is Windows Servers on which SQL Server instances run. As illustrated, scale-out (vs...

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Enterprise Integration: API Management Vendors Landscape

In enterprise integration area, there are more and more REST APIs than ever. API management turns to be very important for every organization.

I collected the logos of some main API management vendors, along with the logos of those vendors who offer tools that have dependencies with API management, such as data modeling tool, service registry, identity management and application infrastructure, put them together with vendors’ logos who offer monitoring, DevOps and logging services. So we understand the technology stack of API management.

API Management Vendors’ Landscape

In API management box, I put vendors logos according to Gartner Magic Quadrant for API management...

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