Last week our class had guest speaker Steve Topper, Marketing Director with 17 years experience in marketing technology, came to our class and spoke to us about what is a Marketing Database, and what the process is for creating a marketing database. This was my favorite speaker so far this semester. As an OMIS major I have built databases from scratch like Steve was describing, from conceptual design to fully operating database. I kind of hoped he would have gone a little more in depth about how important the conceptual designs and entity relationship diagrams(ERD) are and how much planning is actually required before the database can be built. Seeing as how this is a marketing class he just kind of touched on the topic very briefly. I also liked how much Steve emphasised the importance of "clean data" is in a database because any database is only as good as the data that is put into it.