Monthly Archives: December 2005

Comments off…

I’ve just had to turn comments on the site off, because of a (insert your favorite word for spammer here) who thinks people on my site like Viagra, Cialis, and shady financial offerings.

Suppose I’ll have to upgrade and see if there’s any word verification plugins for Movable Type. Know of any? Send me an email at “ngoodman” at the usual.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

KETL != KETTLE

I was having a discussion with the CEO of an Open Source company recently and we started discussing our opinion of the “kett uhl” Open Source ETL projects. It quickly became clear that we had different ideas about the project and its sponsorship. Until there was a clearly identifying difference… An “ah ha” moment.

Kinetic ETL (open source ETL project) is not the same as KETTLE (open source ETL project).

There’s only a handful of Open Source ETL projects currently. It seems silly that there should already be brand confusion for such a small group of players… Anyone from either of these projects care to comment on their choice of such similar names? Pure coincidence?

OWB Beta 4 Crosses 1GB requirement

Not earth shattering news, and who knows if there isn’t some “extra stuff” in it for the Beta releases, but I just realized that OWB is placing more than 1GB of it’s own bits on my virtual workstation. Beta4 would not fit on one CD (800 MB).

Of course the actual release might differ, and your mileage may vary, etc. That, and who really cares about disk space these days? Disk space is cheap! 🙂

Open Source BI getting real

Don’t want to get too far into it, because there has been some significant developments from when I last surveyed the scene about 6 months ago. However, I did want to point out that Pentaho has made significant progress in building their Open Source BI stack and are starting to build 1.x release candidates. They’ve sorted out $5 million in financing to really allow them to take this to the next level.

Congratulations on the progress, and I personally look forward to seeing more great work coming from Orlando, FL.

Paris Virtual User Group Meeting

I had organized an opportunity for Paris users to get together and swap stories, tips, etc. There were many different viewpoints represented and I’m glad that we had a chance to virtually meet up and discuss our experiences with the product. There is not another virtual user group meeting planned, but we are setting up an online forum to continue the peer to peer discussions.

If you are an OWB Beta program member (legal reasons) and would like to get on the forum, please email me.

PS – I’m happy to open it up to the community as soon as the developer preview release hits OTN.

Simple OWB Runtime Report

A slight variation on some SQL I posted a few months back:

For MAPPING executions list the Start TIme, clock time in seconds, number of records selected, and the throughput.
select
ae.created_on start_time,
ae.object_name map_name,
ae.elapse_time time_in_seconds,
mr.number_records_selected total_num_records,
trunc(mr.number_records_selected / ae.elapse_time) records_per_second
from
all_rt_audit_executions ae,
all_rt_audit_map_runs mr
where
1 = 1
and ae.execution_audit_id = mr.execution_audit_id
and ae.elapse_time != 0
order by 1

WARNING: While I think it poses little risk, use at your own risk and ensure it’s right for your environment… Same thing everyone says about code/SQL posted on the internet.

Best ETL for this in Oracle?

I’m usually posting pictures about fancy new features in OWB Paris, and doling out little tidbits about how to this and that… I thought I’d change it up a bit and ask a question! Now that I’ve got comments working I can do fun things like that! I don’t want to influence any ideas so I won’t mention how I would go about this, so, here ’tis.

What is the most EFFECIENT way using Oracle SQL to calculate effective/expiration for denormalized tables? ie, if you have two tables with the SAME natural key with their own set of effective/expiration dates what is the most EFFICIENT SQL to generate a new denormalized table with accurate effective/expiration dates?

Consider the following example ERD:

What’s everyones favorite solution?