AMIS, Data Driven Blog – Oracle & Microsoft Azure
Getting value from IoT, Integration and Data Analytics
Business Intelligence such as OLAP, BI Beans, Discoverer, Data Mining and Data Warehousing such as OWB
My colleague Alex Nuijten did a very fine presentation on Oracle Analytical Functions during the recent ODTUG 2006 conference in Washington DC. His paper for this conference was nominated for Best Paper award. The paper has appeared in the Conference Proceedings, was published in the June issue of the Dutch […]
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0 Last night, the ODTUG 2006 Conference Committee announced that all handouts and presentations from this year’s (well, in fact that is last week’s) conference are available for download from the ODTUG website at http://www.odtug.com. Until August 1st, all material can be downloaded by the general public. After that date, you […]
0 0 During one of the sessions on last week’s ODTUG 2006 conference, I saw a very interesting demo by Keith Laker. He discussed the problem of having several dozens of dimensions or descriptors for a particular fact and utter uselessness of a report with more than 40 or 50 qualifiers. Like […]
0 0 Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, ETL, OLAP, Data Mining, Management Information, Dashboards etc. were among the most frequently heard terms at this conference. Much more so than on previous occasions was BI a hot topic. A larger number of presentations, more attention and a prime position in both general sessions. BI […]
0 0 It's Showtime! Today at ODTUG 2006, Alex and I are presenting our Oracle Quiz on SQL and PL/SQL – the water is still burning. We will present our audience with 15 questions on SQL and PL/SQL features and functions. Even though most questions are on core database features, many of […]
0 0 After a long delay OWB 10g R2 (previously known as Paris) has finally been released for production and can be downloaded from OTN. OWB 10g R2 will not be packaged with the Oracle Development Suite as was the case with release 1 but will now be found packaged with the […]
0 0 Queries that contain calls to user defined PL/SQL Functions can be performance killers. If a function call is part of the WHERE clause, depending on the execution plan it can be performed for every record that is considered for returning in the query result. For large tables that can lead […]
0 0 It is not terribly important. But since I found the solution, I thought I’d share it with you anyway. During our Oracle 7Up workshop on SQL last week we discussed at length the use of Analytical Functions. Part of that discussion is of course the use of the Rank function […]
0 0 Query Rewrite is an increasingly more important feature of the Oracle database. Linked intimately to Materialized Views, Query Rewrite is used by the CBO to make queries leverage intermediate results – often aggregate values or pre-joined records – available in Materialized Views when executing a query, thus preventing the need […]
0 0 In preparation for the Oracle 7Up Workshop as well as the Oracle Quiz – The Water is Still Burning (presentation and paper) with Alex for the ODTUG 2006 conference in June in Washington DC, I revisited some old pals of mine: the ROLLUP and the GROUPING SETS aggregation operators. Let’s […]
0 0 Last week, my colleague Marcos guided us through the still relatively new Oracle offering called XML Publisher. During a session of our Knowledge Center on Oracle Development Tools, we saw XML Publisher in action and used it ourselves. We also had quite a bit of discussion, whether XML Publisher will […]
0 0 Today I attended – and presented at – the Database Systems 2006 conference – an annual Dutch conference on Database Architecture and Technology, Enterprise Integration and Service Oriented Architectures as well as Information Architecture and Business Intelligence. The main theme – at least in the sessions I attended – was […]
0 0 We at AMIS have a fairly long tradition when it comes to having developers attend the annual ODTUG (Oracle Development Tools User Group) conference. My first conference – while I was still at Oracle – was in 1997, in San Diego. And I haven’t skipped a single one, presenting on […]
0 0 It is not well-known how the Oracle built-in Soundex exactly works. This article explains the basics and also describes the Dutch variation of this algorithm.
0 0 Since December 2004, we participate in the Oracle Warehouse Builder beta program for 10gR2 – the Paris release. Yesterday, I downloaded the Beta 4 Release, the most recent stage in the Beta program. It seems that we are now quickly converging on the production release. There is a list of […]
0 0 Today I attended the workshop that Steve Adams is giving in the Netherlands this week. We were with a group of four AMIS employees. The day started in a strange way. We all got a calculator. The reason why became clear during the day. Steve really showed us the internals […]
0 0 Yesterday just prior to our AMIS Query on ADF Faces I was talking to Toon Koppelaars about quite something else: the end_date column in tables that contain contiguous records with BEGIN_DATE and END_DATE where there is no overlap and there are no gaps. Every BEGIN_DATE is the day after the […]
0 0 Trying to make myself useful by answering some of the questions on the OTN SQL and PL/SQL Forum, I came across this question: Group Above Report problem…not able to display absent rows in date range. The question could be translated to: I am trying to aggregate records by date and […]
0 0 The 10gR2 or Paris release of Oracle Warehouse Builder is attracting a lot of attention. During Oracle Open World 2005 of course, and in a number of Blogs by among others Mark Rittman and Nicholas Goodman. At AMIS, we have participated in the Beta Test program since December 2004 and […]
0 0 Oracle’s latest database release 10g R2 does not support OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder). All OWB’s up to and including the current version 10.1.0.3 are not certified by Oracle 10g R2 and therefore do not work on the 10g R2 database. The problem is that when you install the OWB Repository […]
0 0 I just read in a Dutch IT magazine (Computable) about the release of Bizgres 0.7. Bizgres is an open source project: The Bizgres Project (www.bizgres.org), a Greenplum-sponsored, community-supported, open source project with the goal of building a complete platform for Business Intelligence (BI) exclusively from free software, announced today new […]
0 0 AMIS is participating in the Oracle Warehouse Builder Paris Release Beta program. Unfortunately I have not had too much time for in depth involvement myself. However, from what I have done and seen, from the work my colleagues were doing as well, I am pretty – t0 use an Americanism […]
0 0 This article is about a very interesting Oracle tool: Warehouse Builder. A tool that is much more versatile than its name suggests. OWB can be used for diverse activities as graphical Database Design and DDL generation, Data Profiling and Cleansing, Generation of PL/SQL code for loading and transforming data, generation […]
0 0 Put on the trail by Tom Kyte – and after many useful discussions with my colleague Andre, we will take a look in this article at implementing complex business rules declaratively using Materialized Views. A previous post – Declarative Implementation of Mandatory Master-Detail relationship (Order must have Order Lines) – […]
0 0 If you really want to have some fun – and have your co-developers start wondering whether they are losing it altogether – you could consider spending a few minutes getting your head round the dbms_advanced_rewrite package, first introduced in Oracle 10g. This package is primarily intended to inform the CBO […]
0 0 All statistics on the visits to the posts in the AMIS Technology Weblog are gathered in a MySQL database that sist underneath WordPress. We would like to do some analysis on these statistics, for several reasons: to try out the Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 Beta Paris Release we have currently […]
0 0 As in most project the need for a representable test data set existed in a recently started one. The data was available in a small MS Access database (7 tables). In this case a two step conversion was chosen. The first step was to use Oracle Migration Workbench (Release 10.1.0.2.2) […]
0 0 Analysis and functional design for regular application development has been standardised over the years. Now working on Business Intelligence (BI) projects for the last one and a half years, it seems to me that these kind of standards do not yet apply to Data Warehouse environments and more specific to […]
0 0 In a previous post Making up records in SQL Queries – Table Functions and 10g Model clause I discussed how you can make use of either a Table Function or the 10g SQL Model Clause to make up records in queries – as alternative to using a large table or […]
0 0 As was announced early in 2004, Oracle has just released the Oracle Business Intelligence Spreadsheet Add-In. This is an add-in for Excel. OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In enables end users to display and navigate Oracle OLAP data from within Excel. Users can treat the Oracle OLAP data as regular Excel data. For […]
0 0 Today I looked into a pre release of Oracles Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (Paris). This comprehensive tool can be used to create complex data warehoused holding data from many different data sources like tables (in different databases), files etc. I was really pleased by the very good reverse engineering capabilities of […]
0 0 I have some vague plans for presenting statistics using SVG and a World Map. I was thinking for example about the spread of the visitors of our Website across the countries and continents of the world. And also about a world map with time zones that displays the current time […]
0 0 One of the Christmas presents from Oracle this year was the release of the 10g Business Intelligence tools. Most interesting among them was probably the long awaited Drake release of Oracle Discoverer. Mark Rittman’s weblog provides some details in this posts Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Available For Download and Taking […]
0 0 This post discusses how data retrieved from a MySQL or Oracle database using the JSTL SQL tags is processed as XML document, transformed using XSL and rendered as SVG objects – Bar Chart and Pie Chart. It is a sequel to the post XSL Transforming XML generated from SQL results […]
0 0 In this post we discuss pivoting of records in SQL – either splitting or merging records. Typically this is done using PL/SQL based Table Functioins, UNION (for splitting records) and fairly complex, tricky SQL statements. In Oracle 10g, using the MODEL clause, there is a clean, fairly straightforward way to achieve elegant pivoting – even nested pivoting – in single SQL statements. This post shows the pivot operation using the Model clause.
0 0 Last Friday we enjoyed one of the special privileges we have in our partnership with Oracle in The Netherlands – we have a private session on one of Oracle’s latest products Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (announced as early as 2002 as successor to OFA and OSA – Oracle Financials and […]
0 0 In this post I explore the parallel execution of Table Functions. I was told it could be done, I have seen the examples and now I have tried it myself, using my single CPU machine running XP and Oracle 10g Database (Enterprise Edition). Parallel Execution proves to be an enormous performance boost – in certain circumstances.
0 0 From both the Oracle website as well as Mark Rittman’s weblog the release of Oracle’s new enterprise level Business Intelligence product Enterprise Planning and Budgetting was announced. This tool deserves a lot of interest, for a variety of reasons: It has been promised as the advanced successor of OFA and […]
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