Shane on October 31st, 2005

Actually, I’m not at the office, but I am doing what I would consider “work” today. I’m at the TDWI World Conference in Orlando. Today I attended Stephen Brobst’s class on “Designing a High Performance Data Warehouse”. While the course came highly recommended, I was somewhat skeptical going in that, being software agnostic, it would [...]

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Shane on October 25th, 2005

I think Microsoft may have a winner here.

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Shane on October 13th, 2005

Who would win in a fight? A bear or a wolverine? A shark or an elephant? These answers and much more here. Make sure to check out the “old school Pipeline” link for important background information.

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Shane on October 11th, 2005

Starting with release 10g, Oracle is phasing out Long fields. I have two words about this: Thank God! Long fields are an ETL nightmare. You can’t use any string functions on them. The OLEDB/ODBC drivers can’t read them. If you’re a PeopleSoft developer and you’re thinking about creating a LONG field, ask yourself if it’s [...]

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Shane on October 4th, 2005

The NYT has a good piece about the economics of airlines providing WiFi on their planes. I am not exactly a seasoned traveller. I’m one of the people who hold up the security checkpoint because I’m never sure what to do before I am told. That said, when I travel, which is usually for leisure, [...]

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Shane on October 1st, 2005

This seems to happen all the time: somebody writes some bad SQL on our SQL Server box and all the sudden our tempdb grows to the point where it’s taking up an entire job. Solution: create a job that checks the file size of tempdb. If it reaches a certain threshold, run the following command: [...]

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