Applied dimensionality

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 [...]

One more DIY article. This time we’ll talk about… You have more than a dozen Power Cubes (20?50?100?)? And since you can use only 2 CPUs per cube on Windows platform and “update-windows” are only narrowing, you have a couple servers (3?5?)? And so you get the task of carefully splitting cube creation tasks on [...]

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’ve nicked the term “Multi-Line” model out from some cognos best practices presentations. Never known it was called that way ) Multi-Line is only way to go when you have a potentially huge dimension only a tiny bit of which should be available to end-user at a time. Like employee planning, whole dimension of 10k [...]

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 [...]

After creating cube in Transformer you place on Cognos 8 as a data source, to allow everyone to access it. But since the reading process of Cognos 8Bi opens mdc cube file on file level, it locks and the problem of updates arises. No way to update a cube while it’s locked. There are two [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Since Analyst and Contrib macros are typically packed into .bat files, remote bat execution is a common task. If you don’t want user to access server via terminal session of some sort, but user still needs to start some administrative task (data transfer, reconciliation or such) remote execution comes into play. There are 3 basic [...]