Data Helping To Fight Crime

In her role as the District Attorney of New Jersey, Anne Milgram found the crime fighting arena to be horribly inefficient.  For example, she recalls a time when an individual was arrested and held on a bail amount of $3,500 dollars and was unable to pay that amount.  As a result, he stayed in jail until his case was heard eight months later, which cost the public over $9,000 dollars.  Believing that data could help, Ms. Milgram developed a tool to help correct this, making crime fighting a data driven activity.  This is a great example of somebody who is taking data and turning it into something that is truly valuable.  She describes this experience in this TED talk.

Dimensional Modeling Video

Dimensional modeling is a very powerful technique in helping to enable excellent decision making.  This is a video that explains the business value that can be derived from using this technique.  For more information on dimensional modeling, including free data with which you can practice, look at the Learn, Grow, and Succeed links at http://www.brianciampa.com/careerindatawarehousing.html. 

Also, for those looking for a fresh way to market your skillset consider The Data Warehouse Portfolio at http://www.brianciampa.com. 

Extract, Transform, and Load Video

As a continuation of our discussion of ETL, consider this YouTube video, which is also available at http://www.youtube.com/brianciampa.  Designing the star or snowflake schema is a great start.  However,  the ETL populates that star, thus transforming your data into something that is truly valuable.  In a future post we will look at an example of a basic ETL job in Oracle.