A new plan...

A new plan is taking shape in my brain. It goes like this: as much as I love my company, I am unlikely to see any career progression here. I have do the 'Z' move. The idea behind this move is to move laterally into a role that is close to your target position. After being in this position for some time, say a year or so, move to another company, negotiating a higher position. The reason why this move makes sense is that a lateral move allows you to step back, sort of dis-engage, from your work and gain experience in another area. The experience is important because your target is really a position at another company, a position at a higher level than what you have. Your current employer is unlikely to promote you within a year. However hard work and solid experience will allow you to get identified by other companies.

My plan is to execute 3 'Z' moves in the next 6 years. So far, my employment has been very steady and so at the end of this plan, I would have worked for 5 companies in 16 years which is not bad at all. Unfortunately this strategy requires me to focus on my target position rather than the one I currently have, but I think I can manage to make it a fair balance.

In order to complete this mission I need an EAD. My plan is to file this next week, i.e. 11/12/2007.

Data Warehousing

I am reading this article.

Being in the storage industry, I am trying to understand how companies store and use data. Data warehouses are huge silos of data and are used for Business Intelligence (BI).

The technical definition is something like this:

"A database designed to support decision making in an organization. Data from the production databases are copied to the data warehouse so that queries can be performed without disturbing the performance or the stability of the production systems. Data warehouses can become enormous with hundreds of gigabytes of transactions. As a result, subsets, known as "data marts," are often created for just one department or product line. The data warehouse is structured to support a variety of analyses, including elaborate queries on large amounts of data that can require extensive searching. When databases are set up for queries on daily transactions, they are often called "operational data stores" rather than data warehouses."

This suggests that these databases are point in time snapshots of the production database. This would allow BI software to track changes in things like inventory size. At some point data in the depot becomes old and irrelevant and is perhaps deleted.