16 July 2003

Steve Fenwick down at Yeovil College recently contacted me, and mentioned that their college portal is now running on 9ias release 2. I worked with Steve a while ago and he's a bit of a guru on SuSE Linux, Oracle and Oracle 9iAS. I remember Steve going home each evening with a server under each arm, and then coming back in the morning having solved the problem that had foxed us all day. The Yeovil College website is an excellent example of a fully featured 9ias release 2 portal, with its own distinctive look and feel, and it's used by hundreds of existing and potential students all of which get a great impression of what it's like to study at Yeovil. Last time I spoke to Steve, he was planning on implementing Real Application Clusters using SuSE Linux, Firewire and OCFS. I'll be more than interested to find out how he gets on. 11:17:07 PM

The Oracle 9i Grid Cookbook is available for download on OTN. I've got to put some time aside to look at this; part of me thinks this is going to be the biggest thing since the internet - being able to tap in to the power of the worlds biggest supercomputers, treating processing power like a utility - but there's just so much good stuff coming through at the moment it's difficult to separate the important stuff from the hype. I've got the feeling this is something special; must put some time aside soon to get my head round it. 10:11:45 PM

Oracle Financials (and, in all probability, all other accounting packages) has the concept of adjustment periods, where corrections to transactions already posted on the general ledger can be held in a 'holding area' until they are properly attributed. This has the effect of creating a financial calender where you've got thirteen or fourteen periods in a calender year. So far, so good. However, these 'virtual' periods sometimes do not have a date, or range of dates, that roll up to them, as they are not real periods and are just for accounting purposes only. This means that, when trying to fit these virtual periods into a standard OWB/Oracle time dimension, there's no lowest-level date_id that you can assign to them. So what do you do? You can't create a row in your time dimension without the date_id primary key, as it would break referential integrity. You could assign these periods a fake date_id such as '01/01/1900', but then if you rolled-up all the transactions for a specified year (say, 2003) you'd miss out those currently stamped with a virtual period id. The answer (although I stand to be corrected :-)) is to create a separate time dimension for accounting periods, that has, at its lowest level, the individual accounting periods (including our two virtual periods per year), and put both the primary key from the standard time dimension, and the primary key from our accounting dimension, within our fact table. This means that you slice and dice your fact table by joining to either your regular time dimension, or your accounting time dimension, depending on whether you want to analyze by a normal calender or the financial calender. The downside, however, is that you can't drill down from calender year (or month, or quarter) down to individual day, and then back up to financial period (or quarter, or year), as you could do if they were just alternate hierarchies in the same dimension. Any other thoughts on this? 10:03:54 PM

Steve Muench picked up on my comment regarding the long awaited patch for Oracle 9i, that provides the Analytic Workspace Manager, and enables the OLAP functionality within OWB 9.2 and OWB9.0.4. Steve helpfully pointed to a patch on metalink (2761332) which looked like it might be a contender. Unfortunately, it was just the 9.2.0.3 patch and what we're waiting for is the post 9.2.0.3 patch which is coming afterwards. And I was getting all excited as well... 9:42:24 PM