my oracle dba...

my oracle dba wants me to generate a explain plan for the insert statement of a job that i wanted his help in tuning..Dont know if i should laugh or cry.........

Free Health Education Library

Dr Malpani runs a free-online health education library
Worth a visit for collection at the reading room ..

Stupid Movie Physics

I came across this great site which dissects in detail gimmicks used in movies from a physics point of view.
The articles on Flaming Cars and Cigarettes as Lighters are really great and explain in detail why the stuff shown cannot actually happen .......

Ethics in business intelligence

Richard Hackathorn's recent article on TD magazine on ethics in BI has a interesting perspective on a hypothetical scenario where the person's actions though legal are unethical ,as shown on the quadrant diagram in the article.
I believe in these situations even if the corporations have policies , penalties etc it is the individuals actions that could lead the corporation into messy situations . So in addition to the excellent steps that are mentioned at the end of the article , Employee education should also be made mandatory on these issues.A mandatory training on the lines of Environment and Safety that is essential for employees working in the manufacturing industry a training on Ethics is essential for "Knowledge workers".....

Learn quantum theory from the master

Cornell university has posted 3 lectures by Prof. Hans Bethe on Quantum theory.
It's a great set of audio,video clips a must visit for anyone remotely interested in physics.

US Supreme Court ruling on File sharing

http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?ID=221
The court has ruled that file sharing services are liable for copyright infringement , would be interesting to see how the ruling affects the so called slow-down of CD/DVD sales...

Pitfalls of the Fixed Price Model

A recent post on the Dizwell Blog
directed me to the site of Pythian , where i came across this white paper on the flaws of the FP model by Steve Pickard
I could'nt agree more with the findings detailed in the paper , especially( #3 )the one on Increased Risk , it is the whole "business model" of a FP vendor captured perfectly..

Steve Jobs at Stanford

Rashmi Bansal's recent post on her blog
provided me the link Steve Job's recent speech at Stanford Univ. This is really inspiring stuff.Worth reading.

Blue Notes Radio

I hit the Blue Notes Radio using the Stumbleupon plugin of firefox and now am hooked to the station
Check it out yourself : http://www.bluenote.com/radio.asp

ETL on unstructured data

Informatica is going to bundle Itemfield technologies with their Power Center platform
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1030259

Wonder when i will get to test-drive this stuff , support for unstructured data adds a whole new dimension to Power Center platform....

a new blog

Niall Litchfield's recent post directed me to the blog of Sue Harper , Her post on ERD is a gem

ETL framework for marketing by Steve Schultz

Steve Schultz details a ETL framework for a marketing database in a recent article on dmreview
What is missing in the framework is support to downstream applications like Campaign managers...

Oramag article

Jonathan Gennick's article in the current issue of Oracle Magazine
caught my eye in the context of what i mentioned in my previous post about Tibco's business event tool.
As Jonathan Gennick mentions in the summary of the article , the expression filter used in conjunction with oracle streams could very well be suited for a business event montioring and propogating setup ..this stuff is very interesting , i have to dig into some of the 10g manuals to read some more ...

Event Processing

TIBCO has launched a new product called TIBCO BusinessEvents
Which they say "proactively identifies and identifies complex correlated events" wonder how that works.Currently it is available on Windoze and Solaris platforms
Guess they will soon have to bring out something that works on Linux as well !
They have great products but it is difficult to find some good technical literature on how the products work atleast at a high level.
In that aspect i consider the DB Server Concepts Manual from Oracle is a great leader, and the fact that they have made the documentation open on technet is just wonderful.

Alan Alda's interviewing tips

I got directed to this Intelligent Enterprise article from Mark Rittmans blog-post.
It sure makes for some interesting reading, The quick study section summarized by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross says it all for anyone gathering requirements for a DWH/BI project.

Amazon selects Cognos

Amazon.com has selected Cognos -Report Net for their enterprise-wide reporting requirements, More interesting is the fact that it will be a Linux based setup.
Cognos news

Turning data into action for Customer Insight

In an article on sas com John Gaffney and Larry Dabrow defines customer insight as "Customer insight is where customer value and customer needs intersect. It is where data is transformed into understanding."
They further go on to mention that to get true understanding and retain existing customers enterprises need to get data from two places "The first source is the data from transactions, demographics and attitudes. The second source, which many companies ignore, is data about customer needs and values. It is this fusion, however, that results in the insights that lead to smarter decisions and higher profit."
Another key observation they make : "all available customer data must be deployed fully, because you can bet that the competition will deploy it."
Too often i find that enterprises in their data warehousing integration efforts "Reject" lot of records because of some data quality issues , Gleaning information for action from these "Reject" cases is a challenging task for any data-modeller , Lot of times it is just very easy to error out these records and proceed ahead with the routine , These error cases are supposedly sent back to the business for validation but in my experience business is just not bothered...wonder if we can get some statisitcs of opportunities lost because of this...

Al Green has released a new Album

Came to know about Al Green's new album "Everythings Ok "while watching the Daily show on comedy central with John Stewart.
am a big fan of the reverend's voice but have to wait for atleast 4-6 months before i will be able to get my hands on the CD here in India !!

some of the reviews on amazon dont sound too good but still it is an Al Green album :)

Check out the Radio 2 documentary

An Integration Competency Center

Harriet Fryman group director of integration technologies at Informatica Corp. has an interesting graphic for the 4 integration approaches that he proposes in a recent article in Teradata Magazine.

It is the Shared Services approach which intrigues me because many companies work on a Shared model most of the time and a factor that Harriet Fryman has somehow overlooked is the role of outsourcing partners in this model. An outsourcing partner currently plays a mission critical role in many of these 1 billion dollar companies that the writer mentions; in that the partner with his team of skilled developers monitor,maintain the integration processes and also play an important part in the actual development of these systems by working with subject matter experts.

sony's new phone

I got directed to Sony's phone the W800 from a Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/hinkmond/20050301#steve_jobs_better_watch_your

This one is surely going to shake the market , hitting the portable music player + the digital camera companies and at the same time challenging Nokia to match the offerings
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?section=platforms&id=1969

I personally find the Nokia handsets are unbeatable but when it cames to media players a Sony is a Sony ..now if only we could have both at the same time .. Imagine the products that would have become available if there was a partnership between Sony and Nokia instead of Sony-Ericsson....