Any developer who has ever been tasked with consolidating data sources before performing analysis knows the challenge of silos, especially when data is sprawled out across multiple other services. But what about if you had to help a client pull application data from 47 different MySQL databases and then consolidate it into an operational data store (ODS) for analysis?

That's how the partnership between Charlie Killian (@cekillian) and Sarah Maston (@maston) began. As a solution architect at Bytecode IO, Killian encounters these data movement challenges all the time, but in this case, he reached out to Maston to draw on her career-long data warehousing experience.

In Episode 7 of The New Builders, Killian and Maston break down how they deployed a cloud-based data warehouse to solve the data silo challenge (3:14), how plug-and-play data movement tools enabled them to reduce an ODS project timeline from three months to three hours (8:03), how data warehousing differs at enterprises vs. startups (22:19), and share why "learning the data" is the best step any developer can take, even if they aren't directly involved in data warehousing (29:22).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]).

The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!