Articles/Blogs of the Week: 01/05/2007

Every week, we try to outline the best articles and blogs from the past week. Below are the articles/blogs for this week:

• CDC without triggers, timestamps, or other source table modifications. This is a post by Milind Zodge that I think provides a unique approach to dealing with Change Data Capture (CDC).
• 2007 Vital Signs Flat budgets and slow hiring are on tap for 2007, according to our quarterly survey of IT executives. Most interesting in this article is the impact of all things data throughout the statistics. Two of three "top priorities" were data related, as well as the #1 item listed under "Quick Hits. (Data management/business analytics)
• Aetna to offer patients access to online data. If you're not in healthcare, don't read this article. I'll quote the most interesting / BI related item for your convenience: "An analytic engine developed by Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management Inc. will analyze daily the information in [a database with patient data in it] and notify a patient if anything in the data falls out of line with commonly accepted best practices, said Robert Heyl, architect manager of Aetna’s E-Health business unit. For example, he said, if a physician prescribes a medication that would have an adverse reaction with medicine prescribed by another doctor, a patient would be called and e-mailed about the potential problem." That's cool. BI and Data Mining doing some serious good.

Thanks for your time.