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Dr. Mark Whitehorn is an internationally recognised expert who specialises in the areas of data analysis, data modelling, data warehousing and business intelligence (BI).
His main area of interest is best practice – with reference to the design and implementation of data management systems is general and BI systems in particular. |
I first became aware of your work last year at SQLBits 5, when you presented a riveting talk about your application of SQL Server Analysis Services to Charles Darwin's research. And I know many of our readers will be very interested in the MSc in Business Intelligence, which I'll return to later.
But before we come back to that - you've had a very interesting career, Mark, one that's taken you from genetics to databases to business intelligence, as a database book author, OLAP consultant, computer industry journalist, trainer, researcher and lecturer. Please tell me about how you came to take such an interesting course in your work...
I went to University, did a degree in Biochemistry and followed that with a Ph.D. in Genetics which led me to collect a huge amount of data. The storage medium at that time was paper and the analysis was by calculator – it was all painfully slow.
My Ph.D. supervisor, John Parker, once asked me an off-the-cuff question:
“This looks interesting. Is this factor correlated with that one?” A week later - we are talking maybe 50 solid hours of thinking, paper shuffling, number scribbling and key punching - I was in a position to give him the definitive answer - “No”. Around that time I became very interested in the idea of storing data more effectively, making analysis better and faster and I started to become interested in databases.
I was offered a job in the Anatomy department at the University of Dundee to work on using computers for teaching and I began to use databases to store and manipulate the data.
My journalism also started around that time, purely by chance. The Anatomy department used Apricot computers and it subscribed to an excellent magazine “Apricot file” that was edited by Dennis Jarrett. Dennis advertised for writers so I replied and he commissioned first one and later several articles. Eventually he moved back to editing a mainstream magazine, “PC User” - of which noble publication he had been the launch editor, and asked me to write for that.
This was 1985, a time when computer magazines blossomed – everyone wanted to know about computers and there was no internet. So the number of titles grew and as the commissioning editors moved from magazine to magazine, they took their list of writers with them.
So eventually I was writing for most of the magazines as a freelancer. I was helped by the fact that very few other people wanted to write about databases whereas I actively wanted to try them all and find their strengths and weaknesses. So I got paid for fun work. At the peak I was writing about 100,000 words a year, in addition to the academic job.
From there it wasn’t a huge step to writing books – they are just very long, complex articles. Books don’t make serious money - unless you are J.K. Rowling - but they have an interesting side effect which is that they make you think very carefully about exactly what it is you believe to be true about a complex subject. So writing a book turns out to be a very powerful way of learning.
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