Debating

Earlier this year Mark Rittman and I briefly discussed the concept of a matching pair of conference papers on aggregation in Business Intelligence. Mark would look at the use of Oracle OLAP as an aggregation technique and I would do something similar on conventional (and maybe less conventional) relational techniques. Both papers would be standalone, but the themes would complement each other. From Mark’s Blog I see that he has submitted an abstract for the UKOUG November conference on Analytic Workspaces. Well not to be outdone, my abstract on a comparison of Group By, Grouping Sets and Group By Rollup went in last week. It is now down to our peers to decide if we will go head-to-head (or is it head-to-tail?)

Some of you may know my views of staged debates at conferences; I just do not like them. How can I take a side in a debate on ‘the best design’ for a data warehouse or whether to use ‘surrogate or natural keys’ when I know in my heart that the true answer is ‘it depends’. Such debates usually come down to the characters of the debaters and usually degenerate in vitriol that serves no good. But the idea of contrasting papers holds water; delegates can take the content away and make their own assessments, the presenters can argue both the positives and the negatives of their own cases; in short, a better quality of debate by not debating.