I’ve been working at a customer site lately that has a lot of interesting security requirements. I’m obviously not getting into detail there but let’s suffice to say that it is probably the most complex such situation that I’ve come across.
Date:21.4.2009
his week I‘ve been giving Oracle Warehouse Builder training at a company in Dublin, Ireland. The people are extremely nice and likeable and Dublin has a lot going for it and those Irish pubs are to die for and and and the Guinness is excellent!
It has been an interesting experience since this is the first time that I‘ve ever trained on a Standard Edition One (SE1) database. Using it a lot has surfaced that I hadn‘t really thought about before.
Date:28.11.2008
Oracle has various ways of analyzing tables and table objects such as indexes and partitions. How these statistics are maintained and gathered is very important in terms of performance. Additional information can help the optimizer in creating the optimal execution plan for a query. Too much information can slow down parsing since the optimizer has more options to choose from. As a general rule, if there are any, do not gather table statistics if performance is adequate. New statistics can result in worse query optimization in certain cases. If it ain’t broken – don’t fix it.
Date:14.8.2008
SQL Server has been a part of my warehouse work for the last 4 years or so. Before that I used to do almost only Oracle as a target database. Now, I do both. I general I have not run into many bugs in SQL Server but yesterday I found a rather annoying bug.
Date:22.4.2008
So today I had an interesting battle with a partitioned table and bitmap indexes (or indices if you are adamant about English). I was writing this process for PEL (partition exchange loading) where I had a table with daily partitions and wanted to add a new partition to it on the fly.
Date:16.4.2008
Æ,æ,æ,æ hvað mér finnst orðið viðskiptagreind ljótt, vont og alls ekki lýsandi fyrir fyrirbrigðið sem það á að lýsa. Viðskiptagreind er nefnilega þýðing á hugtakinu “Business Intelligence” líkt og t.d. “Miðgreindarstofnunin” er þýðing á orðinu “Central Intelligence Agency”.
Date:8.2.2008
I meant to blog
on our recent trip to OUG UK trip last week.
But as always, time has a mind of its own, especially in December. There is never time in December. It is the shortest month of the year. If December were human, it would be a dwarf. If December were an arm, it would be my right
arm. Makes sense does it? Huh?
Date:11.12.2007
I ran into a rather annoying bug with Oracle Warehouse Builder and slowly changing dimensions, type 2 the other day.
Date:28.11.2007
This is a simple way to count how many times a certain substring occurs within a larger string.
Date:25.11.2007
This one always amazes me. How far people are willing to go to save them selves some tpng. I’m talking about the tendency of many developers to create some sort of a container for everything they do.
Date:19.11.2007
This journey ends tomorrow (tecnically not until Friday since my flight out is at 2 am Friday morning). This has been one rough ride with days lasting typically from 7:45 to 21 or 22. I must say that this has worn me out a bit and I am more than ready to spend the weekend in London with my wife and daughter. The days are very similar with so much work, not much going on. A funny TV station caught my eye though. It is in Arabic so I don‘t really know if it it that funny but its name is Al MustaKillah. If I were, let‘s say an Iranian, rapper, I‘d take up this name with out giving it further thought.
Date:7.11.2007
Today was a good day. Jon Mead arrived. For those that don‘t know, Jon is the Mead half of RittmanMead.com. I haven‘t met him before but he is a good guy. Appears to know what he is talking about which is comforting to say the least. The last week of my stay began yesterday with work as usual. We are just keeping up with the plan, I am done with 22 of 25 indicators planned for the first 2 weeks so I am slightly behind but I expect to catch up in the next 2 days or so. There is a slight scope creeping going on as to be expected but this always gets me, I somehow always assume that the customer has made up his mind. How naive!
Date:5.11.2007
The second and last day off since October 20. From now on it is work straight on through Thursday and my plane will leave Doha at 2 am Friday morning. Looking forward to meeting my wife and daughter in London. Anyway, today was great. I slept in the first time since I got here and then went to the mall with Börkur to withdraw money (yes, in Qatar you go to the mall to withdraw money). My creditcard got rejected again which was slightly serious since I am running out of money. I called VISA using Skype since my cell doesn‘t work here and found out that I should have used an ATM that can read the chip on my card. So for those that are travelling and have a card that gets rejected, try another ATM.
Date:2.11.2007
Still at work. Today is Wednesday. Only one more day for the weekend which is Friday for us. Last 2 days have been hectic. It is now just before 8 pm and I‘m still at work, waiting for a load to finish and a live demo to start with all the hotshots in town.
Date:31.10.2007
We had one of those long days today. Work was over at 8 pm and at 8:45 we were at the Sheraton celebrating Börkur's 42nd birthday. He may have another opinion on his age, but let’s face it – 42 is the number. Lisa finally got to touch the Persian Gulf as she has been talking about ever since we got here. We went to the beachfront and felt the water, it was really warm. No wonder, since the day temperature is still like 35 C. Nighttime it probably goes down to 25 C.
Date:31.10.2007
I am of course referring to my underwear (see my previous blog). My laundry was supposed to be returned before 9 pm today but so far no underwear. Luckily I have some extra. I‘m just wandering if the cirkus sized man that took my laundry is somewhere in the desert now, using my shorts as a tent and a sock as a sleeping bag. OK, maybe he wasn‘t that small – but almost. Börkur got his laundry. He just spoke with me, he got returned someone elses underwear. At least male ones. Look how interesting our days are. I blog of my laundry. This is what real men do. Really.
Date:29.10.2007
Today is Saturday and as such the second day of the Islamic weekend. We however were at work until 7 pm. These 11 hour days get to you since I also had a powerpoint presentation to do, my laundry and other stuff.
Date:27.10.2007
Wow, today was a fun day. Here in Qatar, as in other Islamic countries, the weekend is Friday and Saturday. Friday is their “holy” day. So, today was our day off. This was of course an occasion to go for beers at the Sheraton Thursday night which was a nice change. It wasn’t so nice this morning though. A hangover the size of a small planet woke me up around 7 am.
Date:26.10.2007
Last 2 days have been much better since the workday hasn't been split in two. Instead of working 7:45 – 15:30 and then 18 – 22, we worked from 7:45 until 19:15. Pretty long days. But the good news is that we got beer today! In Qatar in general there it is bloody difficult to get beer. Not even the hotel I’m at (The Mövenpick) has a license. But to our great joy and pleasure we discovered that the Sheraton, only 15 minutes walk from our place does have a license.
Date:24.10.2007
We had a breakthrough today almost completing our method of populating 1 fact table containing about 400 indicators! That has to do with the fact that one of the dimensions is an indicator dimension allowing us to create basically one basic query to retrieve any data we need.
Date:24.10.2007
Second workday. Start 8:45, back at hotel 10:05 pm, then dinner. These days are long and enduring. But there is a lot to do and so we have to roll up our sleeves and take it like men. I probably would roll up my sleeves if the temperature inside weren‘t -40.
Date:23.10.2007
The first workday in Qatar is over. We got picked up an 8 am this morning and were driven to the the offices of the Qatari Statistical Office. It soon dawned on me that this is going to be really tough task to deliver in the 3 weeks timeframe involving anything from backup/recover routines to Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Portal Applications.
Date:22.10.2007