Every now and then it is a pain to deploy mappings from the Control Center Manager, especially when you have a slow connection to your control center. Retrieving all mappings that can be deployed to a location can take some time (putting it very politely), and you can’t stop the control center from doing that. [...]

Enjoy: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/780092/on-being-a-contractor-at-a-shop-where-they-dont-use-database-indexes

Database Administrators,
Why not amuse and insult your developers at the same time by setting up the following situation:

explain plan for select * from dual;

explain plan succeeded.

select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plan hash value: 272002086

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
----------------------------------

I quick comment of mine on the Oracle Forums prompts me to add a further note of explanation here.
Many of us are pretty much wedded to the use of sequences to generate primary key values, either by using a trigger to populate the column or by referencing the sequence next value in the insert statement [...]

There are a number of OBEs available for the OWB 11gR2 release which range from an overview of all the cool new usability improvements in the mapping editor (auto-mapping improvements, copy-paste expressions, operators, operator groups, group/ungroup operators, spotlighting to name a few!), through basics of using the operators in a mapping for joining, filtering, pivoting and so on, then diving into building pluggable mappings (aiding reusability and good software design practice)  and last but not least an OBE on data profiling covering profiling, deriving rules and even cleansing th

Just a quick pointer to an answer on the Oracle Forum:  http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=3912341#3912341
If you are merging into a data warehouse fact table (not so likely) or a large aggregation of a fact table (more likely) then you can improve efficiency by adding a transitive predicate into the USING clause to promote partition pruning on the target table.
Unless [...]

I’m currently working for a customer that is using OWB 10.2.0.1 and a 10.2.0.4 database. All on Windows. Not the best environment in my humble opinion, but hey, it is a customer. They can decide that.
We were having some problems with OWB that have been solved in OWB 10.2.0.4 but also in 11.1.0.6. In other [...]

Rather than entertain you all with my own theories I decided to be a literature critic and discuss a paper / survey done by TDWI's Philip Russom. The report goes into "what a next generation DW platform should try to address and what it could look like". You can read an Oracle sponsored copy here. Do note that the research was sponsored by a large number of vendors - not just Oracle - and that this is just our way of getting a complementary copy to you...

Rather than entertain you all with my own theories I decided to be a literature critic and discuss a paper / survey done by TDWI's Philip Russom. The report goes into "what a next generation DW platform should try to address and what it could look like". You can read an Oracle sponsored copy here. Do note that the research was sponsored by a large number of vendors - not just Oracle - and that this is just our way of getting a complementary copy to you...

If you have used your locations to deploy objects to them (who doesn’t?), you cannot change the connection details easily. In the Design Center they are greyed out. The only way you can change them is by starting the control center, unregistering the location, reregister with the new details and deploy all objects again to [...]

This is no joke. Greenplum on 19 October announced a free single node edition of its analytical database.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Data warehousing for free! Terabyte sized data warehouse and business intelligence without license costs

The Map-Reduce model has become a popular way for programmers to describe and implement parallel programs. These custom map-reduce programs are often used to process a large data set in parallel. This paper shows how to implement Map-Reduce Programs within the Oracle database using Parallel Pipelined Table Functions and parallel operations.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to In-Database Map-Reduce

Come to this 2-hr interactive session to talk with a panel of OWB gurus about the latest release, OWB 11.2.

The spotlight will be on what many herald as the most significant enhancement to OWB in years--

hybrid mappings which combine:

One of the new features introduced with Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2 is “Code Templates”. This new feature allows you to develop mappings that use the “Knowledge Module” feature of Oracle Data Integrator (referred to in OWB11gR2 as “Code Templates”) to create mappings that leverage Oracle and non-Oracle ETL functionality in addition to that provided by OWB.

In the first posting in this series on code templates in OWB11gR2, I went through the background to the feature and showed how it provided access to both Oracle, and non-Oracle sources.

Following on from my reply about code comments at AskTom, here is a lovely example from The Daily WTF of how not to do it. It looks like we have something to learn from both ends of the spectrum.
Does nobody do code reviews any more?

Packt Publishing got in contact recently and kindly offered to send some Oracle BI and Data Warehousing books over for review. The first one that was sent over was a new one on Essbase System 9 that I’ll be reviewing shortly, but shortly afterwards a new one on Warehouse Builder came along which I took a look at on my flight over to LA this weekend.

Continuing on with this theme of securing your data warehouse…The next stage, having secured the transmission of all data be accessed via SQL net, is to make sure that all tools and applications, or as many as possible, use these encrypted network transmission processes. Lets look at some of these tools in more detail:

New Solutions Reduce Costs, Improve Efficiency And Maximize Performance

Well, I have been called out of my blessed retirement and cajoled into working for a living again. Rats. Just as I was getting used to life as a Country Gentleman of Leisure.

It was all so unexpected as well — yesterday at 2pm I casualy extended a finger and pressed an “Apply for this Job” [...]

I was intrigued by this article in the New York Times. In brief, it reviews some tests on the relationship between colour and cognitive performance, and highlights the ways in which the brain is affected by colour in the environment. For example studies seem to suggest that exposure to the colour red promotes accuracy, attention [...]

Does anyone take data security within their warehouse seriously? This is not a trick or facetious question because, according to news posting on the web a few weeks ago most of the major systems, including the data warehouse, of a well-known Telco company were hacked. This made me wonder: how secure are most data warehouses?

Tyler Muth has a useful addition to the date functions I have published here before.
If you ever want to know how long ago a date is and you want to display it in ‘human readable’ format you (and I) could use his function.
Like this:

select date_text_format(sysdate - 3/86400) the_date from dual;
select date_text_format(sysdate - 5/1440) the_date from dual;
select date_text_format(sysdate - 1/24) the_date from dual;
select date_text_format(sysdate - 3.141549) the_date from dual;
select date_text_format(sysdate - 15) the_date from dual;
select date_text_