A Data Geek’s Holiday Gift List

Well, the holiday season is upon us. For most of us, December is a time for celebration. Whether it is Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or other secular holidays, our days include excess eating, office and family celebrations and plenty of shopping. There is something about that cold December air and falling snow that just somehow entices me to buy, buy, buy. Unfortunately when January rolls around, I’ll pay, pay, pay!

I always exchange my holiday gift wish list with family and friends in early December. When I was considering what to blog about this week, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to share a data geek gift list with you?” Here’s the list, my holiday gift to you.

1. SQL Smart Developers – Santa, please send me a programmer that can join two tables and properly qualify a query. A bonus would be one that avoids unioning tables.
2. Data Smart Senior Management – I really could use a gaggle of IT managers who truly know the value of data and give it a higher priority than programming.
3. Invitations to the Party – I love a party and would love to be on project managers’ meeting invitation A-list when they meet with business users and perform business analysis.
4. Real World Project Plans – Just because the project sponsor wanted it in 90 days does not mean that we can do that. Hey, you can’t have a baby in 90 days. Be realistic!
5. A Really Big Monitor – OK, size really does matter. I am over 50, and these data modeling tools just keep reducing the font size on me.
6. Fast Color Plotter – Oh, visions of sugarplums dance through my head. I just need to print it fast as a color poster on a high speed plotter
7. Failproof Software – I’ve been a good boy and looked past program exceptions and blue screens of death. I just want software to work like it did when the salesperson demo’d it.
8. Easy Standards – Can we just stop people from rewriting the same standards time and time again? Give me a simple, easy-to-follow set to follow and I will be one happy guy.
9. A Good Data Modeler – Why are these people so hard to find? You can surely find me a person who knows normalization, how to talk intelligently, and can make a model look damn good.
10. Integrated Metadata – Yeah, you didn’t give it to me this year, and I did not forget I keep reading about it. So, where is it? This is supposed to make my job simpler. I need it now!

I hope you found this entertaining. I tried to make it insightful, somewhat off-the-wall, and often just not really practical at all. These are just things that we all want to make our work life easier. We all make do with what we have but wish we had a Santa that could solve our issues with what’s in his bag. Happy Holidays!

Image courtesy of http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/

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