This Design Tip reflects on the remarkable durability of the basic Extract-Transform-Load paradigm, while at the same time recognizing some profound changes that must be addressed. These changes are due to new data demands, new classes of users, and new technology opportunities.

via Design Tip #169 New Directions for ETL | Kimball Group.

You are bad at giving technical interviews. Yes, you. You’re looking for the wrong skills, hiring the wrong people, and actively screwing yourself and your company.

via This is why you never end up hiring good developers – Quartz.

This doesn’t just apply to developers, it should apply to anyone working in a “must know how to think and ask questions” position.

via Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful.

I do so dislike placeholder as label. Begone!

To help users quickly find what they need, anchor text should stand out from the body content and accurately describe the page that it refers to.

via Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword.

One of the most effective tools for managing data quality and data governance, as well as giving business users confidence in the data warehouse results, is the audit dimension. We often attach an audit dimension to every fact table so that business users can choose to illuminate the provenance and confidence in their queries and reports. Simply put, the audit dimension elevates metadata to the status of ordinary data and makes this metadata available at the top level of any BI tool user interface.

via Design Tip #164 Have You Built Your Audit Dimension Yet? – Kimball Group.

We’re at an in­flec­tion point in the prac­tice of con­struct­ing soft­ware. Our tools are good, our server de­vel­op­ers are happy, but when it comes to build­ing client-side soft­ware, we re­ally don’t know where we’re going or how to get there.

via ongoing by Tim Bray · Software in 2014.

Fill in missing data with the INFER command. Unlike a traditional regression model, where you need to separately train a supervised model for each column you’re interested in predicting, INFER statements are flexible and work with any set of columns to predict.

via BayesDB.

DATAVIVA, A PROJECT DEVELOPED IN PART BY MEDIA LAB PROFESSOR CÉSAR HIDALGO, AIMS TO MAKE A WIDE SWATH OF GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC DATA USABLE WITH A SERIES OF VISUALIZATION APPS.

via New MIT Media Lab Tool Lets Anyone Visualize Unwieldy Government Data | Co.Design | business + design.

Ralph Kimball introduced the data warehouse/business intelligence industry to dimensional modeling in 1996 with his seminal book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit.  Since then, the Kimball Group has extended the portfolio of best practices.Drawn from The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Third Edition, the “official” Kimball dimensional modeling techniques are described on the following links and attached .pdf:

via Dimensional Modeling Techniques – Kimball Group.

Marketing guru Seth Godin once said, “Don’t find customers for your products; find products for your customers.”

Employers need to adopt a similar mindset: Don’t find people for your jobs; create jobs for talented people.

via Ask The Headhunter: Why America’s Employment System Is so Broken | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS.

Thanks for passing this along Ernie. Jobs, hmmm.