Back at the hotel. 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. So, tonight I had 3 beers and 1 sandwich at a 5 star hotel and paid around 4.000 ISK or 65 USD for it. Expensive sandwich, expensive beer, but I’m going again tomorrow. Friday is our day off.
As I’ve said before, the AC units here are used to the maximum. We had the strangest experience at dinner time last night. We were sitting outside, because inside was too cold (yeah, some Icelander) and every time the waiters came out from the restaurant and opened the door a cold breeze came from the inside giving us the shivers. I would think that this would only happen on the other side of the equator where everything is upside down, but not in this hemisphere….I find it amazingly hot here. The website where I check the weather says 32 C, but it really felt like 40 C or more. It cools down quickly after sunset though and is very pleasant at night. I am told that winter is around the corner with 3 days of rain, then a few very windy days with a temperature drop (sometimes even down to 20 C). Irregular weather is what I am used to, this is too strange for me.
As for work, things are moving. Some changes along the way as always but hopefully this will all go well. I promised to post one of the population scripts and here is a part of it. It will then be incorporated into OWB and done properly, but this is more or less that code that we will use (sorry about the formatting). Below this there are some explanations.
(script removed)
These are 2 insert statements. They add 1 indicator to the fact table forming all possible combinations. The latter statement is used to form combinations at a higher hierarchy level that the first statement. The cube operator (in the group by) is responsible for creating a cube out of this. Read the Oracle Data Warehousing guide on how to use it if you are interested. The Grouping operator returns 1 if there current row is a summary for the argument in the Grouping function. Don’t worry if you don’t get your head around this immediately, the cube m rollup and these functions are quite daunting and believe me when I say that it took me a while to figure this out, test it and convince myselft that my logic was correct. Enjoy! (yeah,, right)