• Get started - What challenges will you face and what questions do you need to ask?
• Understand your requirements - Different Customers, Different Approaches: various structures for solving the enterprise data model problem
• Decide what fits best - Picking what works for you: the pros and cons of the approaches in different organizations

Building a comprehensive Enterprise Architecture is a difficult and daunting task. Many EA projects take years to complete and many more never bear the fruits of success. While a fully documented model of the wide array of data, systems, applications, and processes would be invaluable to any organization, it is often more practical to take a tactical approach and document a subset of the most strategic assets in the organization.

To be successful, EA projects must take on achievable objectives that are valuable in their own right, but still build toward the objective of understanding the broader enterprise. Understanding the business drivers and pain points of the organization will help ensure that your EA project gets the internal support it requires.

With an increased focus on Regulatory Compliance and Efficiency-driven Best Practices, the need to align data assets with business processes and initiatives is increasingly important. This session will focus on methods and techniques for aligning data with business process including:

• Integrating various IT and Business stakeholders
• Modeling Techniques integrating Business Process and Data
• Aligning Historical Lessons Learned with Modern Tools and Architectures
• Reporting for Impact Analysis and Enterprise-wide Communication

With data modeling tools like Embarcadero´s ER/Studio you´re able to design and manage even the most complex architectures. But as complexity increases, it becomes more and more difficult to ensure that your database designs conform to relational standards. Even the more common design flaws and errors can be challenging to identify, isolate and correct. Tools such as Schema Examiner automate the process of validating database design against relational standards. Used in conjunction with ER/Studio, Schema Examiner makes it easy to avoid and eliminate design errors whether creating a design from scratch, or analyzing an existing or recently changed design. Learn how Schema Examiner can be used to eliminate common design issues.

A comprehensive model of the wide array of data, systems, applications, and business processes would certainly be invaluable to any organization. But setting out to do everything at once makes the chances of success pretty slim. Companies need to approach their enterprise architecture one step at a time, and one achievable goal is to understand the relationships between business processes and their underlying data.

Learn how you can approach the integration of business processes and the underlying data that supports them.

• Managing both the information and business architecture domains
• Enterprise Architecture as a living process
• Understanding the impact of your data on your business processes

Whether it´s the pressure of regulatory compliance, a focus on data quality or a move to service oriented architecture, data governance is coming to the forefront for IT organizations. With so many disparate data sources and multiple data constituents, the data within your organization can quickly spin out of control. Implementing a data governance process is critical, and once that process is implemented, data architects must play a pivotal role in ensuring its success. Learn how the enterprise model and metadata management capabilities of ER/Studio, Embarcadero Technologies can help.

• Enforcing standards across models
• Incorporating stewardship in your models
• Systems for classifying data to meet compliance requirements
• Assessing and communicating the impact of changes

Far too often, complex SQL development ends up turning into a case of "just get it working". Especially when inheriting or integrating a legacy code base. With the right tools and methodologies, however, high quality standards can be maintained even on the most complex projects. Learn more about how the right tools can make it easier for you to develop high performance applications while minimizing debugging headaches, including advanced development topics such as SQL debugging, execution profiling, and impact analysis.

With less time, fewer resources, and increasing performance expectations, your data systems can start to look like stampeding wildebeests. Data volumes are mushrooming and becoming increasingly complex, and you are constantly being asked to do more with less. Meet the challenge head-on with advanced performance management solutions and best practices.

• Understand the recent trends that can undermine your database performance
• Discover how to successfully apply performance management best practices to your environment
• Learn the secrets of concurrently managing the performance of many database servers
• Find out how to effectively monitor the performance of your multi-partitioned databases
• Learn how to stay proactive through trend analysis and capacity planning

In today´s world, it´s critical that your database is performing at an optimal level. This discussion looks at different ways to assure that your database is meeting those levels. By practicing proactive monitoring and looking at performance metrics over time, you will be able to intelligently identify areas of concern in real time - leading to higher performance and peak efficiency.

CIOs named "ensuring data security and data integrity" their second highest priority in CIO Magazine´s "State of the CIO Survey" for 2006. Clearly regulatory pressure and increased incidence of data breaches are having an impact on this year´s IT agenda.

However, while IT security managers have many resources, defined policies and procedures, and mature solutions for infrastructure-level security, database security is often undefined and unregulated. Applying existing security concepts to the database can be a road block for information security.

• Terminology differences between database and OS audit logging entries
• Unique logging requirements for databases
• Different approaches to database activity auditing

Is your data at risk and you don´t even know it? Rapidly multiplying databases, sparse documentation, and geographic distribution may mean that you have sensitive customer or employee information sitting in an unsecured and vulnerable database that you don´t even know about. To compound the problem, privacy-related regulations such as HIPAA, GLBA, and PCI specifically require you to identify the regulated data and to provide employees with instructions on how to handle that data.

But the question is - how can you actually get a handle on the data you keep so that you assess risk, secure the information, and communicate appropriate usage policies? Learn how you can use metadata and modeling to create a roadmap for your corporate data assets that helps you understand and label your corporate data.

• Articulating a corporate data classification
• Understanding data classification and regulations
• Applying classification labels to an enterprise data architecture

Today´s privacy requirements place significant additional auditing burdens on databases. First you have to know which databases in your environment contain regulated Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Protected Health Information (PHI), then you have to monitor ALL activity surrounding that data-not just changes to it. In the world of databases, this means auditing all SELECT statements-something many native database auditing tools are not very good at. This presentation will demonstrate how you can log this activity across multiple database platforms (without bringing your database to its knees), and then what to look for in those reams of log entries your auditors made you.

As development cycles have become shorter and updates more frequent, and as new regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley demand more accountability, database professionals are increasingly pressured to report on any and all changes - when they happen, by whom and why. Learn how organizations can automate, manage and track complex database schema changes to minimize the risks associated with change.

• Capture an archive, compare archives and databases, and tell what has changed between those environments
• Synchronize changes among different databases from development, to QA, to staging and production
• Detect problems more quickly and easily, using email alerts to notify DBAs if there are problems
• Generate reports to share with management, and leverage key synergies to ensure mission critical success