Off To Ireland, The OLAP Survey and Dual Core PCs
I'm off to Ireland tomorrow to work with one of our public sector clients. They're putting in a data warehouse and I'm helping out with the initial requirements definition and data model. It's nice once in a while to do some "business analysis"-type work, nice to step away from coding and debugging and think instead about some of the bigger picture questions. One of the challenges for this one is that the warehouse will be "dual-use" - part of the use is as a decision support, business analysis type system - lots of OLAP cubes, crosstabs, dimensions and hierarchies, whilst the other use will be as a way of providing operational reports for a new customer admin system that's coming in. The question I was thinking about earlier this week was whether you could still build the warehouse dimensionally whilst meeting the operational reporting requirements, and if you're interested in a few opinions take a look at the comments to my earlier posting.
Gordon Laver from the OLAP Survey got in contact with me yesterday to let me know that the data gathering for the OLAP Survey 5 is now up and running. If you're a user of Oracle Express, Oracle OLAP or Oracle Discoverer, here's a few words from Gordon:
"We would very much welcome your participation in The OLAP 5 Survey. This is the largest independent survey of business intelligence//OLAP users worldwide. The Survey will obtain input from a large number of users to better understand their buying decisions, the implementation cycle and the business success achieved. Both business and technical respondents are welcome.
The OLAP Survey is strictly independent. The vendors do not sponsor the survey, nor influence the questionnaire design or survey results. As a participant, you will not only have the opportunity to ensure your experiences are included in the analyses, but you will also receive a summary of the results from the full survey. You will also have a chance of winning one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers. Click here to complete the survey on-line."
Finally, I'm just about to order a new PC and just thought it worth commenting on the sort of spec you can get now for 1000. The last full PC I bought was from Gateway 2000 back in 1998 (I think) and had a 10GB Hard disk, a Pentium 2 400Mhz processor, 256MB of RAM and cost about 1500. The one I'm about to order is 1099, has a dual core Athlon 64 4800+ processor, 1GB of RAM and a 300GB Hard Disk. Note the dual core bit - I was looking for a dual processor machine (either dual core, dual processor or HT technology) as my understanding is that Oracle works slightly differently when running on single CPU machines as opposed to multi-CPU ones; for example, with single processor machines the kernel sometimes takes shortcuts, such as not bothering to spin latches because there's no other processor that can release the latch in the meantime, so I thought that if I could do so, I'd do my testing and development on a multi-CPU machine in the future as this would be more representative of "real-life" systems. Anyway, should arrive in a couple of weeks, I'll let you know how I get on.