Applied dimensionality

I’ve made this simple web-based closed cube drawing tool to explain what closed cubes are and how they’re good in removing redundant aggregates from storage. I’ve wrote this for myself initially to get better insights on different aggregate situations and thought somebody might get interested as well. Go check it out, if you’re interested in [...]

I’ve been a long-term fan of oracle model by clause, talking about here and there, doing some small&funny examples (like eight queens solution in one select) but lacked some real-life necessity to use it. It always turned out that partition by was enough, or some tricky analytical function was already built-in (like trend calculations I [...]

If anything you do is somehow related to databases, you absolutely, definitely have to see these videos: Part 1:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Lnoyv-sXg Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbZgnAINjUw Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y70FmugnhPU Go the links from Tom Kyte’s blog.

I’m currently building a warehouse using ODI, so I’ll share some findings as it goes. And there’s be Cognos BI on top of it and EP is one of the sources, so I’m still close to the roots ) Disclaimer: I’m Oracle & ODI n00b — there are (?) better ways of accomplishing these tasks [...]

I spend some time tinkering with array-processing languages (think APL). They’re so nice & smooth when it comes to stats and multidimensional calculations. A nice video, showing how to solve Birthday problem in both Java and K (best of  breed, core of KDB). It’s all about counting probability of two people in a room having [...]

When gathering logs, or performing backups, it’s useful to append date suffix to the result file. But that’s all not so trivial calculating such suffix in pure bat-files. We’ll use system variables %date% and %time%. Try executing “echo %date%” and “echo %time%” from command line and watch the output. We’ll append date suffix, and will [...]

One of the main things I carried out of my alma-mater is passion for data. When you’ve got data, so many interesting things can be done . Various analysis, comparison, stats – just givе the data. That was a rather pathetic preambula. Let’s get straight to business. Problem. On recent project I was doing some [...]

Had a wonderful evening yesterday, trying to recover a lost database. Well, got a lot experience with MS SQL and found a very useful program — Lumigent Log Explorer. Recovering failed anyway. Had to redo it manually. When toying with gentoo, I’ve found a post, consisting of mostly “I’ll always use logrotate” “I’ll always use [...]

In heavy production we sometimes encounter situations, when Contributor COM+ or dllhost.exe grabs a lot of RAM and fails (or some contiguous memory errors). Cognos support recommends restarting COM on some schedule to fix such problems. In my experience this helps. Restart is very fast (less than a second) and rather reliable. So here are [...]

While implementing an idea of web-based execution of Contributor Macros (see previous post), I’ve encountered the problem of some kind of progress-bar drawing in asp page. When user hit’s asp page calling a Contributor Macro (which can take 15 min), he ought to see some action, telling him that “work is still going”. Mine idea [...]