Assisting the Police with their inquiries

Back in 1998 I was doing some Pre-Sales Consulting for an Account Manager trying to sell a Data Warehouse solution to a local state police force. I badgered the salesman to let me use the above title as a tagline on the demo but unsurprisingly he didn't see the funny side.

During the demo the thorny question of Metadata came up. More precisely - Consolidated Metedata. As I'd just come off a project where I'd defined the Metadata Architecture and Solution I was well qualified to answer the query.

At the time we had three sources of metadata for our solution. These were:

- The Database Data Dictionary
- The CASE/Data Modeling tool in use
- The ROLAP Semantic Layer

Note that this we didn't use an ETL product that would have been a fourth source of Metadata.

Now the interesting thing here is that all the software was written by the same company in the same software labs so one would hope that some level of shared metadata would be possible. Alas no. Not only did the metadata in each repository overlap but there was no easy way of combining it into a single source of consolidated metadata repository.

I answered the question honestly that nobody had a good story here, not us nor our competition. I think the client appreciated my honesty here. The account manager obviously not wanting to leave a bad impression did what all account managers are prone to do and started promising vaporware with some cock and bull story about the software labs in California working on that problem.

The interesting thing is that here we are over a decade later and I've still to see a good answer to this problem.