50 SHADES OF DATA – CONVERSATION WITH DATA – Part 02

DATA – is it Dimensional OR DIMENSIONAL?

We have been using data every time we hit the keyboard and we’d even if we don’t. But are we
really conscious of the data per se in our day-to-day handling? Many a time, we treat them and more
so by the systems /programs we deploy treat them as bits of information; and that takes away the
LIFE out of them. When the RDBMS engulfed the digital information processing, first victim was the
“Dimensional” attributes of the data or dimensions of the entities they ascribe to.

Of course, ‘Relational’ approach was necessitated for data crunching, and structuring efficiencies
and that has changed the data handling capabilities tremendously and no one can deny that.
However, the LIVEABLE meaning and information beneath the data elements are ‘lost’ while
discerning and churning out the ‘relations’ among them and focusing purely on ‘relations’.

The inclusive approach emerging later in some form or the other - ‘Dimensional data’ treatment is
one such, has tried to undo some of the damages our zeal for ‘relations’ caused. ‘Data ENTITY’ has
multiple faces to different ways the system handles it. For example, a ‘Product’ has one face
(understanding and the defining columnar values) for MRP, a different face for the ‘Product
Management’, yet another face for the Financial Reporting and yet another face for the Strategic
Planning. For number crunching efficacy and for the proverbial ‘Commoner’ approach - defining the
Data ENTITY with its ‘short-listed’ attributes leaving out most of its ‘otherwise’ interesting attributes
has rendered the ‘New Field’ Analytic approaches for Business Analytics restricted.

Business Analytics has to depend upon the ‘restrained’ definitions of the data and more often than
not, they are forced to view the same ‘available’ data attributes from different perspectives and
different modeling approaches. Seeking and stitching together ‘NEW’ data elements is another ball-
game altogether. A ‘Supply History’ of a vendor is just that. But understanding that history in terms
of other scenario, such as Geography, Economic Status, supplier’s scale-economics, etc. are out of
question without some ‘out-of-box’ or ‘out-of-database’ thinking and data exploration; mere data
mining and data-harvesting will not suffice the purpose.

Even ‘Dimensional’ data approach is not fool-proof in the days of ‘wild-exploration’. What we need is
a ‘DIMENSIONAL’ data approach – every letter stands for a different perspective of the functions of
the data and without them, the ‘data’ as we know is not a ‘data’ at all. Well….those perspectives are
- Dimensional / Inferable / Measurable / Enumerable / Normalized / Specifiable / Intermittent /
Outline / Navigated / Accumulative / Livable.

Of course, these perspectives are handled effectively one or some of them together currently by our
approaches to DB architecting. But we seem to lose a sizeable quantum of information by not
catering-to many of them collectively. We shall see further on this in subsequent weeks.