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Things Your Mother Never Mentioned About Setting Up an Oracle Database – Steps 3 to 5
This is the second article in the series that discuss tasks you should do to set up an Oracle database following its initial creation. This article discusses steps 3 to 5: Setting up a password file for SYS, an OPS$ account for batch jobs, and a scheduled job to compute statistics
BI Projects – Best Approaches
[Send in comments/thoughts here]
Kurt wrote in with some important thoughts: "I agree with Scot. Senior project sponsors normally need to see a basic BI implementation for a single data-set before they begin to truly understand the power of the solution.
Trying to implement “big bang” style with BI is a recipe for disaster. When the sponsors and users see how accessible their actionable information is for the first time, they generally shift their requirements and get more specific and more demanding.
This often causes a shift to a lower level of granularity in the DW…very expensive if you’ve tried to conceive of every possible report in the first pass. I realize a lot of experienced BI implementers will say that good requirements gathering will negate this issue. I think with BI especially, it is difficult to get project sponsors to understand the power of the solutions without showing them something. Then iterative development kicks in and the sponsor gets continually improving access into their systems and the appropriate level of granularity in their DW.
This is the least expensive way to implement BI. You don’t waste money developing too low of a level of granularity. And you get the sponsor and users the detail they need. Perfect balance achieved over time via development cycles."
…and Glyn writes: "I’m just working my way through a resource management, planning and reporting system for a UK Rail Company.
I find that I always revert to the methodology that saved a Dutch security project I was called in on many years ago. The supplier (large very well known and respected computer company) was trying to apply formal techniques including UML, sandboxes, etc to the project, but the customer (effectively a government department) had no-one on their team who understood anything about projects, project management or database design.
I convinced my new colleagues to switch to an informal RAD/JAD process. We built plenty of working models and iterated through them rapidly. The process is messy, but we were able to deliver in under a year on a project that had been stalled for 18 months or so.
Later I did the same thing with a well known ratings agency.
And now I’m doing the same thing again!
In the first 3 months we went through two major iterations of the database design and many minor changes. We are now nearing the end of the project (10 months) and the database structure has been stable for most of that time. The changes were identified as necessary because early on I created a number of ASP.NET pages for the users to play with. This delivered the true user needs rather than what they thought they needed.
Having ensured that the underlying structures were sound and that there was plenty of real data to work with I did the same thing with the reporting –Lots and lots of examples for the users to tear apart. Normal (non-geek) human beings need to see what they don’t want before they can visualise what they do want.
In the real world customers don’t have time or budgets to waste on pampering developers’ egos. If you looked at some of my code you would probably be horrified (it all works and is robust but some of it is UGLY) – But I take the view that the customer’s needs are paramount, and if that means that I leave some awful code behind so that we can deliver earlier, so be it."
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