EBN - Demystifying The CMDB

Really good pragmatic primer on a CMDB and the hype around it.

In theory, a CMDB sounds like a vendor-agnostic resource that lets third-party tools populate a CMDB with information and draw on data stored there. In practice, that's not the case--at least not yet. While the ITIL describes the processes associated with a CMDB, it says nothing about just how a CMDB gets built, how various tools are meant to feed data into the CMDB, how data should be structured inside the CMDB, and how various applications are meant to use that data.
.....

Link: EBN - Demystifying The CMDB.