WhereScape launched their new WhereScape 3D product, with
Michael Whitehead (CEO),
Jason Laws (Product Marketing),
Raphael Klebanov (Consulting) &
Scott Humphrey (Fisherman). WhereScape has briefed BBBT previously in November 2009. Read this blog
here for background on the company and earlier .
They have two products: WhereScape 3D, data warehouse planning tool and WhereScape RED, integrated development environment for building, deploying, managing and renovating data warehouses. Note 3D means "Data Driven Design"! Major partners are Microsoft and Teradata.
WhereScape 3D was launched at our BBBT session - complete with
T-shirts and
cake! I downloaded the beta version from
here. The download is 75MB as an EXE with version is 0.9.0. It requires Java Runtime and has many JDBC/ODBC drivers, plus the Teradata JDBC driver, which requires an extra license.
The install process create a local metadata repository using Apache Derby. After install, click on Help ->Tutorial->(one of the 3 tutorials). Follow instructions closely! The tutorials are concise and well-written.
I tried the first tutorial that explores the use case of designing a star-schema data warehouse. I did my first discovery! ...and generate the ER diagram at the right. Click to view full image. This
was so cool! It would take hours otherwise!
Also, the properties for a certain column in the CUSTOMERS table are shown at the left.
My brief hands-on experience was very positive. It was a similar experience to the first time I played with Adobe Photoshop. You actually need to know about DW design concepts and techniques, which is a tribute to the WhereScape team that designed this product.
Try it! You might learn some DW design!
