Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Welcome to this week’s Log Buffer, where we’ll take a look at some of
the hot topics and blog postings over the last few days.

As it’s Friday and we’re all starting to wind down for the weekend, we’ll start
off with Tom Kyte on The Daily WTF who has come
up with an example of the ultimate
extensible database – as long as your users never want to report off of it.
On a similar topic, Jeff
Smith’s SQL Server Blog goes through his "Top
10 Things I Hate About SQL Server", with #2 being "Datatype
conversions …What is the deal with data types?  I just use VARCHAR for
everything, since that’s the only way to avoid stupid error messages when I add
data to my tables. Works great,
until I want to get the month of a date or add two numbers — stupid SQL Server
makes me convert() the value first. How
dumb is that? SQL doesn’t
know how to add "12" and "5" — it thinks it’s
"125" !!!! To make things
even worse, SQL Server gives me errors half the time saying it CAN’T convert! Uh, you are a computer; you should be able to figure this stuff out."

Jonathan Lewis warns
us about downloading and running scripts you find on the
internet, whilst Jeff Moss writes about helping the Oracle CBO by adding
constraints, and then realises that it’s actually
all in Jonathan’s CBO book. Jeff’s presented a couple of good
papers at the UKOUG on data
warehouse tuning and partitioning
and compression which are well worth reading if you’ve got a
spare half an hour.

Jeff Hunter finds the idea of managers
actually judging database costs on annual TCA per user amusing,
thinking it’s better to perform real-world tests using real
applications rather than rely on artificial benchmarks, whilst Pete
Finnigan celebrates two
years of Bogging (is that anything like dogging, Pete?). 

Guy Bowerman from Informix talks about Finite
Field arithmetic and Communitive Division Rings, and
subsequently risks a breach in the space-time continuum, whilst Curt
Monash asks whether data
warehousing is all now about sequential access (perhaps we
should ask Fabian?).

Daniel Schneller presents a preview of the
new
mySQL Index Analyzer, whilst Eddie Awads comes up with a
way of making NULL=NULL (and does cause a breach in the
space-time continuum).

“Does anyone
still do logical data models” asks Ronald (depends
if your client is paying fixed price or time and materials, in my experience…) and thinks about the
difference between hobbyists and professionals. Duncan Lamb
points to an article on Oracle
Rootkits 2.0 (available shortly with Oracle 11g?) whilst the Oracle WTF guys post instructions on how
to capture spiders humanely using a one of Tom Kyte’s books -
the net surely closes on Mr. Burns; how long can this man stay free?

David Wheeler talks about Batch
Updates with PL/pgSQL (zzzzzzzzzzzz….) whilst
(Groundskeeper?) Willie talks about the secrets of a successful upgrade
to DB2 for z/OS Version 8. Time for some data warehousing articles I
think…

… Andy Hayler, one of the founders of Kalido and a writer on data
warehousing and enterprise software, takes a look at data
warehousing architectures over time and concludes that whilst
separate data marts and techniques such as EII have their place, if you
want proper reporting against multiple transaction systems you really
need a proper data warehouse, and an approach to deal with the issue of
master
data management. Although Andy typically pushes the idea of
packaged data warehousing, he makes some good observations in his blog
about the enterprise software market and in particular the efforts of
vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft to eat into the market previously
held by the specialist vendors. Check out “Data
Warehousing Dead” by William McKnight and “Logical
Data Modelling: A Key to a Successful Data Warehouse Implementation”
whilst you’re there.

Lucas Jellema from AMIS comes up with some questions and approaches for
tuning
SQL statements using execution plans, Neshan Bardolliwalla
talks about SAP’s
new in-memory BI accelerator that requires no tuning or need
to build aggregates (as my son says, "yeah…right."), whilst David Walker’s Data Management
Site has published and overview
architecture for Enterprise Data Warehouses.

Gabriel Fuchs talks about Business
Intelligence & Different Cultures, and concludes that
in a BI&W project, cultural considerations may equal technical
ones in terms of importance. Finishing off on data warehousing, I’ve
just had an article published on Oracle Technology Network on Data
Profiling and Automatic Cleansing using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2,
and I’ve also come up with some interesting issues around Warehouse
Builder’s handling of slowly changing dimensions that you
might find useful – if you can make it through to the end of what’s a fairly
lengthy investigation.

That’s it for this week, thanks to the team over at Pythian for inviting me to do this Log Buffer, and have a great weekend.

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