It was a little bit quite here in the last few weeks, which does not mean that there is nothing more to write about. I decided to take a little break during the summertime and get some fresh ideas. Before start talking about some new stuff, I first need to finish some open topics:

• SSIS Design for Performance & Scale: A follow up on the parallelism strategies will be published very soon.
• Parallel Data Warehouse – POC lessons learned: The 3rd part of this series is still missing, but I promise to deliver very soon.

What’s next? I’m currently do some testing and investigation in new technology trends like Big Data and Windows Azure.

It think there is a lot of confusion around Big Data out there. This is now a hype topic like SOA has been. But my hope is, and I’m convinced, that it will have a happy end. If you tell people right now you are a Big Data architect they will probably say “Cool”. But don’t mention you are a SOA guy, I guess they will start laughing “poor boy”.

The point with Big Data is, that everybody talks about, but I don’t see any projects around Big Data technologies like Hadoop, Hive, Pig, etc. Currently Big Data is often used as synonym of handling large amount of data. But it’s much more then a data size topic. So I will take up this trend and give some insights how it could fit to classical data warehouse architectures. I think it’s time that these technologies get closer together.