Instant Client in Oracle 10g

From Instant Client in Oracle 10g:

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to install the full Oracle client software just to get connectivity to an Oracle instance? Well, it is now reality with Oracle's new Instant Client software offering.

Yes, it would be nice considering the full client install is over 300 mb. This article explains how you can get an instant install of the client libraries needed for connectivity (i.e., instant defined as around 5 minutes per client).

SARBANES-OXLEY Problems

Sarbanes Oxley is a set of regulations in the US that many companies are struggling with trying to implement. Originally passed in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals, it centers on building in some transparency into publicly traded companies, with things like actually holding the CEO and CFO responsible for results they report.

Another component is tracking and escalating "operational" problems, something that is kind of vague, and ripples through the company. The intent (I think) is to track the number of these significant exceptions for reporting purposes. As one would guess, given the lack of clarity and different interpretations, problems can arise, and one is revealed in all it's glory at Delloitte & Touche:

Database Administrator: The DBA will insure the integrity and performance of the database environment. The DBA will not have access to security functions. The DBA will not have access to the physical servers. The DBA will not be able to view production data.

Good write up on how absurd this is at the link. Plain stupid, and unworkable.

Good Blogs

Just stumbled across a few blogs at ITtoolbox Blogs that provide some daily perspective in a number of areas. Some are quite insightful, including A Day in the Life of a Business Intelligence Administrator , A Day in the Life of a Data Warehouse Architect: Historical Lessons & Current Applications, and An Oracle Applications Implementor's Journal, among many others. The entries are very focused on the challenges with implementation with end users and are insightful.

For those of you with news readers, the feed URLs are next to impossible to find, best thing to do is add "index.rdf" on the end of the URL of each blog you'd like to track.

MDX in Analysis Services: Mastering Time: Period - to - Date Aggregations

The next article in this MDX tutorial (the 16th part), MDX in Analysis Services: Mastering Time: Period - to - Date Aggregations addresses important time-related functions, such as YTD(), MTD(), etc. Combined with ParallelPeriod, this offers a quick way to answer the questions "where are we so far this year" and "how do we compare to last year", both of which are excellent demonstrations of the power of OLAP and how it can allow business users to get meaningful intelligence from their historical data - very quickly and segmented however they choose.

TechEd 2004 Presentations

Even if you weren't there, you can get up to date on some of the latest MS propoganda with the Powerpoints from Microsoft TechEd 2004.

The Data Management section has a number of Yukon-related and High Availability presentations for download (including one on SQL Server 2000 64-bit for Data Warehousing), but there's plenty of other nuggets scattered around, including SharePoint Implementations in the Real World and How Microsoft Deploys Windows XP and Office 2003 to 150,000 Desktops Internally both (under Business Productivity Solutions).

Cox Communications Powers Massive Data Warehouse With MySQL

This is a white paper from IT Papers. Not alot of technical details in the 4 page PDF, but the numbers are fairly impressive.

The warehouse is a collection of historical diagnostic data from all the individual cable modems in the Cox network (1.2 million of them). The warehouse currently has around 2 billion rows, with 4 million new inserts every 4 hours. "Network usage mining" takes place overnight and lasts about 3 hours.

Looks like this division of Cox is firmly in the open-source camp, as the polling is done with Perl scripts, and the web-based front end and reporting interface is all LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

More and more of these case studies are popping up.

SQL "Megaservers" pdf

This is a Technet document about a year old explaining some of the special considerations required use SQL Server in a high availability environment. Covers clustering, disk usage, memory and CPU considerations, and SQL Server's way of faking a partitioned table.

A Practical Guide to SQL Server Yukon Beta 1 DTS

Here's a Yukon related Article: A Practical Guide to SQL Server Yukon Beta 1 DTS.
According to the write-up:

DTS in 'Yukon' has gone through a complete redesign and rewrite from DTS in SQL Server 2000. As part of that process, many of the design and administration paradigms were rethought. DTS is now no longer a stand-alone designer; DTS in 'Yukon' introduces the concept of the 'Workbench', which allow developers and DBAs to focus on specific tasks of development or administration.

Many, many screenshots of how the new DTS process looks. It claims to be easier to use than current DTS, plus, claims that it is now a full-featured Enterprise ETL tool, but of course, seeing is believing!

Introduction to SQL Server UDM

Here's a Tech-Ed Microsoft Powerpoint off the MSDN site. What is UDM? UDM is a term for the "Unified Dimensional Model" in Yukon Analysis Services, or a common interface for both relational and mdb sources for use with reporting applications.

Not a whole lot of detail on how it works, but some high-level explanation of supposed benefits. A few screenshots of the BI Workbench in Yukon too.

Web E-Mail: The New Hard Disk

I'm putting up this post by Jeremy Zawodny's blog because the idea he has is just plain cool:

I still remember filling up my first 1GB hard disk and being pretty pissed that it would have cost about $1,200 to get another. Yeah, it was a 5 1/4" inch full height Segate SCSI disk. A real brick and a half. I traded a whole laptop for it.

Nowadays, I just need to turn my files into e-mail attachments and store them on my various free e-mail accounts.

Or I could wait a couple months and use the freely available software that manages all this for me. Heck, maybe someone will write a Linux kernel module that presents it as a virtual filesystem.

The speed would be horrible, but the idea of having what looks like a normal filesystem actually tied to email attachments stored in gargantuan free webmail accounts is too cool not to take notice.

On his cost note for hard drives, I remember buying a Zenith laptop in college that had a 10 mb hard drive, and I was sure I'd never fill it up.

MySQL 4.1.2 Now available for Microsoft Windows

Off the MySQL List: MySQL 4.1.2 Now available for Microsoft Windows.

Tons of bugfixes, Download here.

If you have never messed with MySQL, give this a shot, as it is a simple Windows installation. To resolve some misconceptions about MySQL, it now supports all those things MySQL isn't supposed to support, including stored procedures, triggers, transactions, and much more. The big black mark against MySQL vs. other DBMSs used to be that it sacrificed the "ACID" test for speed. The ACID test was:

Atomicity: The transaction must be treated as an indivisible unit, and all the statements within it must be successful for the transaction to be considered successful. In the event of a transaction failure, the system should be returned to its pre-transaction state.

Consistency: Once a transaction has been completed, the system must be in a consistent state, with all of its integrity constraints satisfied.

Isolation: The changes made by a transaction should be invisible to other transactions while it is in progress.

Durability: Once a transaction has been completed, the changes it has wrought must be remembered by the system even in the event of a system failure.

As of MySQL 4.0, ACID-compliant transactions were available.

Simplified Oracle 10g DBA OCP To Require Only Two Exams

Via Mark Rittman's Oracle Weblog, the Oracle 10g OCA will only require one exam, and OCP status will only require two, down from 2 and 4 with the 9i tests. Read more.

How to Manage Enterprise DBMS Efficiently

Here's a free Forrester Report that is very basic, but free Forrester Reports are not that common so it's worth a read. It has few interesting nuggets, including:

The ratio of DBAs to databases is 21 across the industry, projects to grow to 30 in the next 2-3 years.

It recommends standardizing on a single platform, whatever that platform may be.

Develop a Formal Install Process.

Outsourcing DBAs can save 10-40% of administrative costs, but is not for everyone.

More GMail, and orkut too

Everyone that asked for a GMail invitation below received one, and along the way I got another batch of invites to give away, so if there's anyone else that wishes one, speak up.

Also, it occurred to me I have an Orkut account too, which is Google's foray into the social-networking hype, and is a lot like MySpace or Friendster, as well as a number of others. Orkut has a reputation of being a bit more "alpha-geek" than the rest, since all the root invitations went out from Google employees. I received one a couple of months back but haven't used it that much, although some people swear by it now from all indications. If you would like to see what all the hype is about yourself, just say so in a comment and I'll send you an invitation.

The Next Wave in Customer Relationship Analytics

DMReview has an article about The Next Wave in Customer Relationship Analytics. It provides an interesting view on using unstructured data as an additional data source in analytics. The example used is pretty interesting:



Taking that information out in an automated fashion and making sense of it would indeed be a leap forward. I'd like to see some of this in action though, or find an eval version of a tool I could run against my own email archives, and see what gets spit out.

Microsoft enhancing business intelligence in SQL Server

InfoWorld: Microsoft enhancing business intelligence in SQL Server: "Available free to SQL Server 2000 customers, Reporting Services SP1 enables exporting of reports to Excel 97 and 2000, which are older versions of the spreadsheet. The service pack also adds improvements in PDF rendering for pagination and matrix performance. Other highlights are greater control over series and data point styles in charts and enabling single sign-on authentication to systems not based on Windows authentication technology. "

It seems I hear from someone new every week that Reporting Services lives up to the hype. Download the service pack here.

For a jump start to loading and using Reporting Servers, see if there is a LoadFest scheduled near you. They are BYOS (bring your own server) events which will cover everything from installing to creating reports.

Active-active SQL Server 2000 cluster in VMware

Build Your Skills: Test SQL Server 2000 clustering in VMware tells how to do it. It requires 3 VMWare sessions, 2 for the cluster and one domain controller. Requires some pre-reading on creating a virtual shared SCSI disk and installing the windows clustering software.

This is a nice companion to my former post about Oracle RAC in VMWare.

What can't VMWare do?

Gmail invites

Seems like the thing to do, so if you are one of the tiny number of people that read this blog and don't have a gmail account, put your name and email in a comment and I'll send you one. I got in pretty early, so that means I have about half a dozen to give out right now.

I'll give two if you can match this.

Real-World Business Intelligence Solutions for Vertical Industries

And another: "Real-World Business Intelligence Solutions for Vertical Industries" has alot of tips regarding applying BI to different verticals, and uses Manufacturing as an example with extensive information. Despite that it is a Microsoft themed Powerpoint (showing some of the scorecard accelerators in action), the principles are applicable to any BI suite.

Data Mining in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005

Here's a nice Powerpoint: "Data Mining in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005". Speaks to some of the enhancements in Yukon (they are significant), but no screenshots or demo results (no doubt due to NDA).

The OLAP Report: The OLAP Survey 3

The OLAP Report: The OLAP Survey 3 has been updated with some new information. A sample:

There were big differences in the likelihood of competitive evaluations. For example, almost 70 percent of SAP BW sites chose it without considering any other products, whereas only 36 percent of MicroStrategy buyers had not also considered other products.

More than 75 percent of sites who had considered Microsoft AS went on to buy it, but some other products were only selected by less than 30 percent of those who considered them.

The Survey is a supplement to all the other valuable data on the site, including OLAP Market Shares.

Backup databases stored procedure - SQL LiteSpeed version

Backup databases stored procedure - SQL LiteSpeed version is a clever stored procedure to invoke SQL Litespeed to backup all user databases on a SQL Server.

SQL Litespeed is a great tool. On average, it can reduce backup and restore times by 50%, and reduce backup sizes by 75%, and does it while using less overhead than the built in backup command. Every single DBA I've met that uses SQL Litespeed swears by it.

Slicing and Dicing Microsoft's Freebie BI Tools

Slicing and Dicing Microsoft's Freebie BI Tools looks at some of Microsoft's recent offerings, with a special focus on Reporting Services, and compares them to other offerings. It gets a good review from everyone except Keith Gile, senior analyst at Forrester Research, who sounds like he has a bit of an axe to grind to be honest.

IBM gets intelligent about BI

InfoWorld: IBM gets intelligent about BI:

"While the company has delivered BI-related applications and tools for some time, Big Blue is now making a commitment across all of its major software groups to deliver core products with a healthy dose of BI baked in. One of the major goals of this multi-division effort is to seamlessly integrate the massive data stores of historical data that corporate users typically have with real-time analytics. Company officials see this as mandatory if corporate users are going to successfully establish a true on-demand environment. "

That's excellent business language anyone can understand.

Inventorying hardware and OS information on all SQL Servers

Inventorying hardware and OS information on all SQL Servers has a nice compact snippet of vbscript that will inventory the service pack level, memory settings, and all other important metrics on a server. Pretty convenient to add to your toolbox.

GIS and Business Intelligence for the Enterprise Tuesday

Nick Gray took some notes from a recent talk he went to about one of my favorite sunjects, GIS and Business Intelligence for the Enterprise.

He links to a number of Information Builders demos, including a 162mb mpg of a talk, and plenty of powerpoint slides and map demos showing the mapping technology applied to Fraud statistics, crime data, and insurance information. Really good examples that show how to take data warehouse data to the next level.

The maps themselves are also very cool - web plugins with full zooming features.

Demand high for Oracle DBA

Employment Digest: Demand high for Oracle DBA: "'We now have these new Web-enabled products that need more specialized skills and understanding,' said Shailesh Bokil, director of recruiting at Pittsburgh-based Computer Enterprises Inc. 'Now employers are asking DBAs to understand all the different modules available, so DBAs need to install these suites and make sure they are set up correctly and are tied properly into the other systems.'"

The article is much more generic than just Oracle DBAs, and speaks to the bright future growth of all database products.

Using Analysis Services with Office System 2003

This is a Tech Ed Powerpoint presentation from Only4Gurus.com. It is an overview of the Microsoft BI framework, with some specific examples of the 2 brand new releases, the Excel Add-in and the Scorecard Accelerator (mentioned a few posts ago). Lots of screenshots of the Scorecard app, it looks very interesting.

Ladder of Business Intelligence

I purchased the book "CIO Wisdom: Best Practices from Silicon Valley's Leading IT Experts" recently, and it's full of great insight into what CIOs have to deal with on a daily basis. Every chapter is written by a CIO or two, and with chapter titles such as "The First 90 days", "Governance", "IT Organization", "The Metrics of IT: Mangement by Measurement" and "Strategic Outsourcing" there are plenty of real-world lessons learned.

One chapter that caught my eye was "Ladder of Business Intelligence: A Systematic Approach to Success for Information Technology" that explains the method used by Brocade CIO James Cates to explain the promise of IT to business partners, and what is required to deliver the promises. Here's an interview in this month's Intelligent Enterprise, which has one of the most insightful approaches I've read about:

What if I were to ask you: What are the one to 10 questions that, if you could answer every day, would allow you to perform your job better? And you can do that across an entire company, which represents about 100 to 120 business roles. Then you say, which business roles are most important? Which ones do I want to automate first? I always start with the CFO because he or she has to go to the street. Then you check out the CEO. It's not so easy to see which roles, if you automate them, give the company the best value. It may very well be that automating your purchasing people — the ones who are cutting the deals with your suppliers — may be more important than automating a set of middle directors.

When I ask the requirements of business units, I no longer ask for an exhaustive list written in prose. I just ask them to give me the questions. They're only 10 or so questions and have nothing to do with technology. Then I just build this (what I call BRIA [business role information analysis]) table that shows question, information, data, and data source. And then anybody can look at the table and spot problems.

...

Most of your power comes when something is simple and a lot of people can look at it. You don't know right away what business role is going to give you the insightful question or answer — but if it's hidden in technology, my point is, they'll never see it.

For a fuller explanation (without purchasing the book) here's a writeup from CIO Insight, "Talking Tech to Business Execs."

Mark Rittman's Oracle Weblog: "What's The Difference Between OLAP And Data Mining?"

Mark Rittman has a very nice write-up on this question:

Generally, OLAP is used to tell you what happened, and data mining is used to tell you why.

With examples from the banking world and links to more indepth explanations, it's mandatory reading.

Analysis Services Operations Guide

Just ran across this wile looking up the SQL Server Operations guide. Microsoft has posted a very thorough Analysis Services Operations Guide.

Full list of SQL Server reference docs, which are a perfect template for any SQL shop to build a high performance group, are here.

Microsoft offers free licenses for backup servers

This Yahoo News story has the details on a new benefit for Software Assurance licensing program customers:

Microsoft Corp. has begun offering free software licensing for "cold servers" or networking computers that are kept off until they are needed, the world's largest software maker said on Friday.

Oracle giving away free money

At a client site yesterday the senior DBA told me Oracle had sent him a survey, and in the envelope with the survey was a crisp new $10 bill. He says he opens all his mail from Oracle now, which is a good thing, because shortly afterward came a new survey with a crisp $5 bill.

How do you get on this mailing list?

Locating objects and references when working with large databases

Fridthjof Eriksen's very first blog entry is a useful one titled locating objects and references when working with large databases, where he reveals a stored procedure that will search through the syscomments and sysobjects sys tables to find all occurrences that match a string. I can see how useful this can be when troubleshooting.

Microsoft Speeds BI with Two New Accelerators

From E-Week: Microsoft Speeds BI with Two New Accelerators introduces the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Accelerator, which seeks to help you "visualize and manage scorecards and strategies across your organization with speed and precision." The BI accelerators have received some very poor reviews, especially the Sarbanes Oxley one.

Probably a little more interesting is the Excel Add-in for Analysis Services. It makes building drillable views into a cube fairly straightforward, and lets you leverage the graphing capabilities of Excel with cube data. It still requires you know what you are doing, and it's not as straightforward to use as a tool like Databeacon, but it's a great free add-on.

Adding Demographic Data To Your Data Warehouse

Adding Demographic Data To Your Data Warehouse from Mark Rittman's weblog. Are you subscribed to it? You ought to be.

Good collection of SQL Server presentations

The Atlanta Microsoft Database Forum archives their old meeting presentations, which are always nice!

Competitive Intelligence

Always on has an article up titled How To Snoop On Your Competitors that speaks to how easy it is to use Google to get a quick idea of what your competitors are up to. As examples, it includes a lnk to the State of Idaho's Oracle contract.

It links to a Business Week Article about how having a small competitive intelligence group can pay big dividends for a company. The Goolgle technique is easy enough and well known, searching specifically for Excel Spreadsheets for example (whenever I need a quick overview on some topic, I myself always search for a ppt.)

Competitive intelligence is one of the low-hanging fruits in the BI picture that the majority of large businesses mostly miss, along with geographic data, demographic statistics (by zip code), and industry specific benchmark metrics. Specifically, SEC filings by public companies contain alot of detail about product sales and key industry metrics, broken down by quarter and product type, and in some cases by major markets. Extract this information, (manually is about the only way to do it right now), load it in to a financial or marketing data warehouse, and you can have excellent information that can turn heads in a marketing department, or on the top floor.

Heterogeneous Management Tools

SQL Server Magazine has an online article on Heterogeneous Management Tools, or tools that give a common administrative interface for SQL, Oracle, Sybase and DB2.

3 tools are briefly mentioned, BMC's SmartDBA, Quest Central for Databases, and Embarcadero's DBArtisan. Embarcadero is also planning to add support for MySQL.