Tom Haughey is the president of InfoModel LLC, a training and consulting company specializing in data warehousing and data management. He has worked on dozens of database and data warehouse projects for more than two decades. Haughey was former CTO for Pepsi Bottling Group and director of enterprise data warehousing for PepsiCo. He may be reached at (201) 337-9094 or via e-mail at tom.haughey@InfoModelUSA.com.

Bridging: Solving Many-to-Many Relationships in the Dimensional Model
September 10, 2008 This article will take a closer look at the M:M in a dimensional model.

Are there best practices or tools for creating a data dictionary?
November 28, 2007 Take a look at "Business Metadata," by William Inmon, Bonnie O’Neil and Lowell Fryman. Also look at Dave Marco’s...

Where is the best place for a BI application to reside?
November 28, 2007 There are different kinds of BI applications. Some BI applications are data marts. A data mart is defined as an environment...

Are you aware of off-the-shelf operational data store solutions?
November 28, 2007 The only packaged ODSs I know of are part of major ERP products like SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, etc.

What are your views on the advantages and/or disadvantages ETL tools and data modeling versus code?
November 28, 2007 Data modeling tools are inexpensive and writing code to provide the same function is pointless. You have too much work to do...

Should the metadata layer that sits between the data marts and the query/reporting tools be owned by the business or IT?
November 28, 2007 It depends on what is meant by “owned.” IT should provide the metadata repository along with the rules about who can...

Is there a good book for BI project management that you would recommend?
November 28, 2007 Very soon there will be a very good book for Agile BI PM. I am hoping to publish it in the fall of 2008.

Could you please supply a definition for "exploration data mart?"
March 1, 2007

Ask the Experts
July 28, 2006 How can we meet all end-user requests for the enterprise data warehouse?

In a data warehousing project, which way is the best to store data in database?
July 10, 2006