Bartlett Publishing has put together several lists of books available from many various publishers which are essential reading for anyone interested in the topic. Check them out today!
You can view the articles from the blogs which preceded these at the following URLs:
Had some thoughts today, thought I'd write them down:
Been looking at Google refine. Some of this is pretty obvious, but I'm thinking it would be pretty awesome to port this to use on a database backend. Basically, do the transforms on the data in the database, and, if you want, it will serialize it back out to a new table, or replace the existing one.
What would also be cool is a generalized report generator for Rails, possibly using AREL. You could do security by defining mandatory filters for tables, limiting the tables/columns, and other things. It could predict the time the report will take to run by using PostgreSQL's "explain" command.