Data Academy 6 introduces the Data Academy Console - a Visual
Studio-like development environment, dedicated to your data warehousing
project!
With Source Code Control, team working is easier than ever: you can
check modules in or out; 'diff' selected versions; revert changes you
don't want to keep; and see the full history of an object - who changed
something, what they changed, and when they changed it.
Data Academy 6 introduces the Data Academy Console - a Visual Studio-like development environment, dedicated to your data warehousing project!
The Warehouse Explorer is equivalent to the Solution Explorer in a
Visual Studio project - it allows you to zip around between Data Academy
modules with unprecedented ease.
One of the most "interesting" aspects of with working on Data Academy is that I often don't understand the full nature of the problem I'm trying to solve.
In short: the problem is that I don't know what the problem is!
This isn't because I'm stupid... not entirely anyway!
It is because I tend to work by taking a micro problem - for example, a transformation with 500 input columns, called Period_1, Period_2, etc. - and solving it at a macro level - by (in this case) adding the capability to match any number of input columns via a Regular Expression.
The difficulty is that, although it is straightforward to test my code against the micro case, there is no macro case until someone takes the functionality and starts actually using it... usually in ways I could never have anticipated!
This is one of the reasons why we (as a business) have to have the ability to turn around code fixes quickly, and for the customer to implement them straightforwardly - and we pride ourselves on this. If you find a bug we will fix it rapidly and provide you with a new binary, which you can install in just a few clicks.
You may find the same thing in your data warehousing project too - you don't know what questions are going to be asked of it; so you need to be able to turn around fixes quickly when it comes up against one it can't answer - which is when Data Academy itself really comes into its own, with its focus on the data warehouse as a development project, complete with source code control and package-release support.