Update, Awards and Articles

Time for a quick update.

If you read my posting a couple of weeks ago, you'll have seen that I've been working away on a few articles recently, hence the lack of updates. It's all a bit embarrasing actually as the Oracle Magazine ACE of the Year 2005 article was recently published, and I also just got an email through from SearchCRM.com to say I'd got their "BI Blog of the Year 2005" award, and if you take a look at the site there's been precious few updates to the blog now for several weeks. So if you're a new reader - it's not always like this, I'm just a bit busy at the moment...

The main thing that I've been working on (apart from proper work, of course) is a couple of articles for OTN and Oracle Magazine. The OTN one is on the data profiling and cleansing features in OWB10gR2 "Paris" and is due for publication when the product comes out, whilst the Oracle Magazine one is on the DML Error Logging feature that's in Oracle 10.2 and should be out in the first half of 2006. Both technologies are going to have a big impact on how we do ETL going on from now; the data profiling and cleansing feature in Paris allows you to automatically profile your data, derive data rules and then auto-generate mappings to correct your data, avoiding the need to write loads of SQL*Plus scripts, put lots of spreadsheets together and work out your own mappings. The DML Error Logging feature in Oracle 10.2 means that you can direct-path insert data into tables and not worry about the data load erroring and rolling back - the error logging feature just moves the "dirty" rows into a logging table, with details of the error, and lets the load continue. All good stuff and you should be able to read the articles next year.

I've been working with the UKOUG BIRT SIG committee on the next SIG meeting in January and it's shaping up to be a good one. The last few meetings have been quite business and tools focussed and so for the January session, we're going to have a bit more of a data warehousing and methodology focus to the meeting. So far we've got the following speakers lined up:

• Jeff Moss, on Five Tips for Tuning your Data Warehouse,
• Kevin Lancaster from Oracle EMEA on Oracle OLAP Tips & Techniques
• myself, on XML Publisher - a talk and a demo
• Donna Kelly, on Running a Successful OWB Project
• David Walker, on Process Neutral Data Modelling

Not a bad line up if I say so myself. If you're a UKOUG member book up soon as I think we're going to sell out this time round.

Now I've finished the two Oracle articles I've got a bit more free time, although I should really be starting my sample chapter for the book I'm collaborating on. I'm doing the talk on XML Publisher at the next BIRT SIG so I'll probably make a start on working out how that works, and I'll try and post some updates and findings on the blog. I've also got the article I promised to write on using OLAP_TABLE with analytic workspaces, it's a good one actually so I'll try and wrap it up next week. Until then, bye for now.