geordee

Yes Sounding No

“Yes! I will do. But…”

For those who prefer closed-ended questions, the second part of the answer causes problems. Certain questions are expected to be answered yes or no. Not yes and no.

That’s not how the majority of population in this world thinks. The answer can be yes and no. And it is not a conditional yes. Even after we include all the conditions to the question, it is possible to get an answer which is neither yes nor no. And that is usually a no, which sounds like yes. It is contradictory. Well, almost contradictory!

In linguistics the yes/no...

Err on the Safer Side

Many years back, I was given an assignment to estimate a project. I put my best efforts to ensure that the estimates are as accurate as possible. Then I consulted with the manager, who was a veteran in the industry, well into his 60s.

He reviewed the estimates quickly and asked “Geordee, have you erred on the safer side?”

I said, “No!”

“Well. Go and change the estimates. Err on the safer side.”

I wasn’t very happy with that then.

Recently a colleague described an incident. The client asked him to increase the estimates, just to ensure that quality is...

Encoded Images in OBIEE 11g Report

Business Intelligence tools are not omnipotent. Different tools have different capabilities, and once the tool selection is over we generally live with what the tool can offer. In this context, I often suggest that the requirements gathering can be done in a tools context, both to ensure we can achieve what we want and to best utilize the tools capabilities. Once in a while, clients express a requirement that is just beyond the tools capabilities and we wish we could somehow push the boundaries a little.

Recently one of the clients asked whether they can display thumbnail images along with...

Layered Knowledge

The world’s knowledge is layered.

There are industries that make metal, industries that make airplanes using that metal, and industries that operate airplanes. The travellers on these airplanes are in turn doing something else - producing and servicing various things across the world. There are people who build operating systems, people who build software tools, people who make applications using those tools and people who use applications and run businesses.

There is hardly anyone who knows all the layers in a single supply-chain stack very well. But it may be a good idea to look into those adjacent layers to...

Data Warehousing is Dead, Long Live Data Warehousing

Data Warehousing has turned over a new leaf. Analysts are thinking beyond databases and ETL tools. Vendors are talking loud about their Big Data solutions, Hadoop integration and NoSQL products more than ever.

The old data warehouse understood our data through metadata. The old reported the patterns and trends we have asked. The old helped us find answers to our questions. The old just talked. And now, the old is dead. Data warehousing is dead.

Long live data warehousing! The new will make us understand our data. The new will go beyond dimensions and facts. The new will do more...

From Data to Mining

The Internet is abuzz with Big Data, Hadoop, NoSQL, petabytes and portmanteau words starting with Exa, of course only if you care about databases and data warehousing. It was all good, until the hype hit, and surely it has hit. We are now trying to fit in available big data processing techniques everywhere. How do you store big data? How do you process big data? How do you crunch big data? Hardly, I hear questions like what do you do with big data? We hope that the hows will lead us to the whats. Sort of means justify the ends...

Expanding Universe of BI

Recently, we had a discussion on how the future of BI is shaping up. As I was exploring the trends in business intelligence, it seemed the new developments are not in any particular direction. Today business intelligence is expanding in all directions. The presentation aspects of BI have already embraced rich UI, Flash and Ajax. It is now reaching out to HTML5 and mobile platforms. There is also a trend towards data visualization, rather than traditional tabular representations. The analytical aspects of BI are now developing towards massively parallel platforms - be it MPP databases and appliances or frameworks like...

That Which Is Unseen

There is a well-known parable by Frédéric Bastiat – a classical theorist and political economist. It reads “Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas” meaning “that which is seen, and that which is unseen”. You can read the parable and the essay that contains it in WikiSource. Quickly, the parable goes like this – a shopkeeper’s careless son breaks a window, and the spectators look at that incident from various perspectives. Now that the window is broken, it should be fixed, and that initiates a flow of...

Real-time Data Warehouse & Mixed Grains

Increasingly, the trends point to real-time data warehouses. There are quite a lot of discussions on what is meant by real-time and the purpose of real-time data warehouses. Whatever it may be, the very fact that analysts, and hence enterprises, are increasingly interested in real-time data warehouses demands us to think about how to architect such a data warehouse.

There are two distinct problems in real-time data warehousing - real-time data integration and real-time decision making. Changed data capture (CDC) tools and trickle-feed techniques are addressing the real-time data integration problems. Increasingly, the application integration techniques are aligning closer to ETL...

Implementing Master Data Management

Software applications were process-oriented for a long time. With new technologies and architectures being introduced with tangible benefits at rapid pace, lifespan of software applications have considerably reduced. Mergers and acquisitions, tool/technology rationalization efforts, competitive business practices have all increased the likelihood of shortening application lifespan. However, one thing remains fairly constant – data. Organizations now consider their data as an enterprise-asset, and more so with master data which is the information about an organization’s physical and realizable assets.

Master data refers to information regarding non-transactional entities in an organization, such as data related to customer, product and accounts. Master...