Design and Theory

Technical Article

ENTERPRISE METADATA FRAMEWORK

  • Article

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss enterprise metadata to a wide variety of audiences and much of this conversation is captured in this “Best Practices” implementation framework. The model has evolved over the past few years as our program continues to do the same. Of course, this summary can only be a few pages long so the depth of the content here will be a tad shallow but you should be able to get the basics from the diagram and the description that follows. Figure 1 provides the new framework and the content follows to describe each section.

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2005-05-19

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Technical Article

BUSINESS METADATA: HOW TO WRITE DEFINITIONS

  • Article

Many errors and accidents are made/caused by misunderstandings of the meanings of terms used.

How many times have you been in a meeting when the words you heard being said did not match what you thought they were?

Many business decisions are made (and later regretted) due to a misunderstanding of the data, and what the data element used in a report is signifying. Some of these accidents and misunderstandings are large enough to be reported in the media. In prior papers I refer to the Mars Lander episode, where the unit of measure was assumed and not made explicit, miscalculations were made and the equipment was lost. Our businesses are filled with many such examples, although not as costly perhaps, are still quite impactful to the business.

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2005-05-16

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Question of the Day

The Empty Aggregate

I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder]
(
[OrderID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[total] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
What is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
       COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;



See possible answers