Shane on April 12th, 2006

Some food for thought when working with NULL values. select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl COUNT(*) ———- 657662 1 row selected select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl where acad_sub_plan =’13′ COUNT(*) ———- 13 1 row selected select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl where acad_sub_plan ’13′ COUNT(*) ———- 148559 1 row selected select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl where acad_sub_plan is null COUNT(*) ———- [...]

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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 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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