[dba-SQLServer] Going over to the dark side

Charlotte Foust cfoust at infostatsystems.com
Mon Aug 16 11:16:04 CDT 2004


How are your data warehousing skills these days, John?  That's
essentially what you're looking at if you want to query data out of this
mess in any reasonable amount of time.  You're still going to have to
produce flat files for their clients, which will be direct marketing
firms doing mailings for their own customers, but to filter the data,
you'll probably need to break up the flat table into a main fact table
and a bunch of dimension tables, even in SQL Server.

Charlotte Foust

-----Original Message-----
From: John W. Colby [mailto:jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 7:49 PM
To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] Going over to the dark side


I will certainly ask that question but they seem to be selling data sets
to marketing companies.  The guy indicated that it was address data, not
email or phone numbers.  

They want the data on CD/Tape, FedExed to their clients.  There are
valid businesses doing exactly this kind of stuff, and valid plain old
postal bulk mailings that would conceivably use something like this.
>From what I've read about spammers is they often don't even bother with
demographics since it is just cheaper to blast out a million emails to
everyone.

I will not get involved with spam but I would have to consider doing
this for a marketing firm that does bulk mail.  I will be asking them
about "do not bother me" lists as a filter to see what they are up to.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Stuart
McLachlan
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 11:31 PM
To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: Re: [dba-SQLServer] Going over to the dark side


On 12 Aug 2004 at 23:10, John W. Colby wrote:
> 
> Is anyone out there doing something of this nature?  Any words of
> wisdom?
> 

I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.

1. It smells like  spam/scam so I wouldn't on principle

2. You are looking at *several* hundred gig of data and indexes and huge

processing power to be able to pull selected data sets.  

-- 
Stuart


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