Sorry it's been so long. I've been scouring the internet and finding lots of interesting news in our space - here are my Five Fascinating Findings of the past couple of weeks:

1. Have you seen this Data Liberation Movement? It's a pretty funny new "movement" that Netezza has launched to encourage transparency during the data warehousing selection and testing process. I'm very curious to see where this thing goes - but in the meantime, I've created a Facebook group for all the data liberators out there!  The Data Liberators' Twitter page is also an interesting place to see what they're up to.  My only question is... who is the data liberators' mysterious leader??
2. Interesting article from "referencedatamanagement" on wordpress.com providing an objective point of view from someone who has used a variety of different tools for MDM projects, including short snippets on Informatica, Siperian, Teradata, GlobalIDs, Netezza, Talend, Pentaho, and Teleran. My favorite part is when the author says "I’ve done more ‘working around’ this product." with regards to Teradata.
3. From baselinemag.com - a short slideshow on six technologies that were hyped up in 2008 but didn't actually get funding. The ones I found most surprising: RFID, SaaS and On-demand Computing.
4. The anomalie of consolidating unstructured and structured data in a warehouse: "Data Warehousing Between a Rock and a Hard Place" by Lou Agosta on the B-EYE Network.
5. What is going on in the world of BI? The various factors affecting today's BI purchasing decisions are explained in Enterprise Systems' "How BI Habits Are Changing" article by Stephen Swoyer.