European Highs and Lows

These last few weekends I have been visiting Spain and Switzerland. Sailing in Spain and Skiing in Switzerland. Down on the Coast in Spain and Up in the Mountains in Switzerland.

The car rental in each country demonstrates the major difference between these countries.

In Spain we pre booked a car, but the car rental place (Avis) was closed when we got there, so we rented from Hertz instead, but a new French car was very cheap.

In Switzerland, the Budget car rental was incredibly expensive, again for a new French car, but the service was excellent.

Similar differences was experienced in restaurants, bars and hotels. Spain Cheap, poor service, and Switzerland Expensive but great service.

Spain’s economy is on is knees. Youth unemployment is astonishingly high, and there has been a crisis in all sectors.

Switzerlands economy is very strong and their currency is dominant over Europe.

So how does this relate to OBI? I’ve always maintained that you pay for what you get. Pay cheap, you get poor service (bad code/wrong Data model/poor implementation). Pay well and your project impresses, you give great customer satisfaction and you get promoted.

Are you Spain or Switzerland?

Blogs of the week

1. OBIEE Patch 11.1.1.7.150120 now available

Paul Cannon blogs about the latest patch. It has no new features and is just a bug fix patch. Full details are available here.

2. OBIEE – Selecting column dynamically – part1, column selector

Boris Dahav, in part 1 of a 4 part blog, says, “In OBIEE, in Analysis, we can use column selector to dynamically change a column in the analysis. Unfortunately, in complex cases, when you have to use the selected column few times, or you have some complex dependency between selected columns, we have to move the selection to prompts.”

In the following 4 posts he will describe:

How to use column selectors.
How to use column names in prompts with presentation Variables.
How to use better looking column names in prompts.
How to do the same with session variables and why never to do it (hint, security breach).

3. APEXposed 2015 – Montreal May 6th

Martin D’Souza blogs about APEXposed. Martin writes, “APEXposed is coming back to Montreal this year for a 1 day event. This conference is lined with some amazing speakers and will be your chance to learn lots on APEX 5, ORDS, and so much more.” See more here.

4. If You Oracle Then You Should Twitter Too

Jeff Smith shares ‘Twitter for the OracleNrd’.

5. OBIEE 11.1.1.7.150120 ODBC driver returned an error Cannot Function Ship Error

Steve Yeung writes of how OBIEE Patch 11.1.1.7.150120 ODBC driver returned an error. He says, “The way to fix it is to edit the fact columns and change the “Aggregate Rule (Total Rows)” to “Sum” instead of Default. The strange thing is that the first fact column can be left as default from my current observations. Hope this helps everyone who encounters this error.”

6. READ ONLY TABLES In Oracle 11g

This blog talks of ‘Read only’ tables. “Since Oracle 11g we can place a table in read -only mode with the ALTER TABLE …READ ONLY statement. Read-Only tables are like normal tables, the only dissimilarity being it disallows any attempt to modify the data.”

7. Oracle Data Integrator User Functions with Regular Expressions and Dropped Square Brackets

Danny Byrant says, “Just the other day I described how you can use Regular Expressions Functions with Oracle Data Integrator. Well that was only part of the story. Immediately after that post went out, I had several notes from people who are way smarter than me say “put that in an ODI User Function for reusability”. This post was to originally be just that, but as I began to work through the example, I ran into an problem. The ODI User Function was dropping the square brackets I needed for my REGEXP example to work. This post now serves a dual purpose. I will definitely show how to put that REGEXP into an ODI User Function, but along the way you will also see how I address the square brackets issue.”

8. Oracle ACEs at OUG Ireland 2015

Brendan Tierney lists the Oracle ACEs presenting at the conference – plus their twitter and website details.

9. Separating numbers from characters in OBIEE 11g

Vishal Pathak talks us through what he is talking about – with a screenshot to help.

10. Why SQL is the natural language for data analysis

Keith Laker writes, “Analytics is a must-have component of every corporate data warehousing and big data project. It is the core driver for the business: the development of new products, better targeting of customers with promotions, hiring of new talent and retention of existing key talent. Yet the analysis of especially “big data environments”, data stored and processed outside of classical relational systems, continues to be a significant challenge for the majority companies.”

He then goes on to say why SQL is so popular: