Why did I write this? I got challenged by Andy Warren

to write a bit about why I wrote something. I complained to him that he

has some "mechanical" posts on this blog that just mention he wrote

something with some questions, and don't really blog about why he wrote

something. He challenged me to write about why I wrote something, so

here I am.

I stumbled on the article in the editorial while loading stuff for Database Weekly a few weeks ago. Since it mentioned data, I knew it was relevant. Just seeing "data" in the title got me thinking.

Managing data is hard, and managing who gets to access data is even harder. I can't really imagine how you blanketly track who views or accesses what data or how you prevent things when Word, Excel, and more can cut and paste, directly access databases or cubes, and who knows what else is out there. The idea that someone's built technology to do this is amazing to me.

If it works. I'm skeptical, but I wanted to get some opinions from people out there. My guess is someone that reads my editorials has or plans to work with something like this and might provide some real world feedback.