One of the first calls I had after my end-2001
layoff was for a “data warehousing” contract in downtown Minneapolis at Wells
Fargo.
I was just starting the job search, was still in
outplacement, and had no real concept of how picky clients would be at finding
matching candidates – a practice which meant it was hard to break into any
other area of expertise.
A site that explains the concept is LGI’s, here.
Then in the early 1990s, we effectively had a manual
data warehouse of all of our salary deduction bills – microfiche. Rather like the way you used to have to look
at newspapers in public libraries. (It
was always hard to remember how to use those machines.)
The biggest danger in those days is that no one
tried to use the data, so if you didn’t force yourself to look at it (and read
it back somehow) as a programmer, there was a risk that a “warehouse” could
become unusable five years later when someone needed it. Preventing such a possibility was part of a
programmer’s “work habits”.
For Y2K we “warehoused” our tests manually, in
cardboard moving boxes, shipped to an iron mountain.
And for a disaster recovery exercise in March 1999,
we captured entire cycles of data on GDG’s.
It was all rather a crude exercise.
So I really didn’t have the specialized experience
one needed for that 2002 job.
Here’s something else. There is a “WikiHow” on
fixing scratched CD’s, which many small businesses use for their own local data
retention (since they’re optical, they can’t be harmed by magnetic attacks or
accidents). I find this link amazing.
Here it is.
Here's another little tip. If you have a lot of classical CD sets, make sure you throw away any foam separating the discs. Over twenty years, the foam can make a mess.
Wikipedia attribution link for commercial data warehousing diagram.
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