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.  It is so obvious that Qatar has enough oil because I‘ve never been in a place where the AC is so overused.  The told me that a liter of oil is around 15 kr. Icelandic or roughly 25 US cents.  I cannot imagine how many Landcruisers there would be in Iceland if this were the case here.  So far, I‘ve only met nice Qataris.  They seem like a very friendly and relaxed people.  Easy going.  

Today was mostly spent on Oracle Warehouse Builder and Quality Assurance.  Börkur has developed some nice mapping techniques that I intend to take up.  Or maybe it was Mark Rittman or Jon Mead?  I‘m not sure.  Then I spent some time investingating query techniques for implementing a fully solved fact table or cube.  This is because the customer wants to have total flexibility in selecting indicators and dimensions from Oracle Portal and based on that selection the correct report should be selected.  For example, I should be able to pick an age group and country and show a report on infant mortality rate for any given selection.  This results in us having either to pre-create something like 40.000 reports or finding another solution.  So, we are finding another solution.  I will post it here on this blog if it works, which I am confindent that it will but  it involves a fully solved fact table/cube (meaning that all possible combinations of indicators will be precalculated).  Hopefully we will be able to keep the result set under 100.000.000 rows.  The number of rows isn‘t the problem though, that can always be tackled through careful planning, querying and organization.

The rate of construction here still amazes me.  There must be 50 skyscrapers being built in the vicinity.  24 hours a day, or at least they are still going and it is midnight.