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. 

I didn’t blog yesterday, I simply didn’t have much to say and I really didn’t feel  like it.  The good news is that I received my laundry back with all my underwear undamaged.  My wife keeps telling me to buy more underwear and it probably supports her case that the cirkus sized laundry guy insisted that my perfectly fine woolen underwear was damaged…

Anyway, I just read in the paper this morning that by 2011 Qatar is going to supply 1/3 rd of the natural gas used in the world!  They are now supplying 1/6th according to the article.  The are amongst other things bulding a 585 thousand ton aluminium smelter .  I have no idea how big that is in comparison with the Icelandic smelters but apparently it is the worlds biggest built in one go.  It will be powered by electricity manufactured using natural gas which is a relatively clean energy source.    More on the way, apparently.  Iceland is not alone.  The difference is that here there is very little in terms of nature to damage, no vegetation, no mountains and no (and I mean no) surface water.  Plenty of sand though.  Good sand.

We did a cool Discoverer trick today.  The thing is that due to various reasons we need to be able to do dynamic reporting using Discoverer, without exposing the Discoverer interface to the user.  This means that a  user can select 1 – 5 dimensions and dimension values from a drop down list along with 1 of eventually 3 – 400 indicators to  display.  We have solved this by creating less than 20 reports which are dynamically called using the indicator as one of the dimensions.  One of the problems we were facing was that a report which could server for let’s say a population count and a population ratio would have to display the numbers differently, one as a number formatted i.e. as 123.456.789 and the other one as a ratio, i.e. 23,55% and 45.22%.  Otherwise it was the same report, since its dimensionality was the same.  (Both using i.e. Time. Product and Store, but one displaying total sales and the other displaying ratio of total products).  Since Discoverer doesn’t have dynamic formatting (remember, it is the same report, displaying the same measure, just a different indicator name).  This we solved by creating a calculaton which was basically TO_CHAR(“INDICATOR_VALUE”,:FORMATSTRING) where FORMATSTRING was retrieved from a dimension table containing the indicators DIM_INDICATOR.  This worked beautifully, allowing us to have dynamic formatting on a fully solved cube.  The problem that arose then was that the graphs no longer worked since the displayed value was a character not a number.  We solved that by adding the unformatted number to the report as well and simply minimizing the row width to 0 so it wouldn’t show. Then we had our numbers formatted dynamically and out graphs showing.  Saved us tons of work.

One happy puppy.