Data Warehouse Architect Position Available — Dayton OH

As I was mentioning earlier, I am leaving my current client and moving on to new pastures. Apparantly I have been with them fulltime for five years, though when I started it was just for a quick two weeks to get them up to speed on some issues — time flies, it seems.

Here are the highlights of the requirements for my replacement:

• In-depth knowledge and prior experience of Oracle Data Warehousing concepts and features — partitioning, parallelism, materialized views and query rewrite, bitmap indexing, data segment compression.
• Strong SQL and PL/SQL development and tuning experience.
• 9i and 10g experience.
• Instance tuning for data warehouse environments.
• Knowledge of ETL tools (Informatica preferred).
• Knowledge of BI tools (Business Objects v6 and/or XI preferred).
• Prior experience of dimensional and 3NF modeling.
• Experience in supply chain management & accounting & finance preferred.
• Incumbent will be responsible for full life-cycle development, from requirement analysis through schema design and strong input into ETL and BI configuration.
• Must be U.S. citizen and be able to obtain a Department of Defense Security clearance.

Here is a link to apply for the job or to get more details, or you can email me directly at daaguard-jobs@yahoo.com.

Data Warehouse Architecture Decisions for Ad hoc and Predefined Reports

First, a disclaimer: the techniques herein represent “blue-sky” thought on an abstract problem. I have not implemented these ideas, although I am very willing to do so given the chance and if nobody can postulate a fatal objection to them. Or a near-fatal one. If you disagree with any of these ideas then you are not contradicting my experience and I’m not going to get all defensive over the matter.

And so to the substance …

Port Conflict Between Informatica 7 and Business Objects XI

When my Informatica v7.1.3 Repository Service refused to start this morning, I instantly thought of my recent install of Business Objects XI, with it’s myriad of services and required firewall rules. As the Windows Event Viewer revealed, the service had refused to start because of an “(356|1840) Error in opening Server Port [5001] to listen for client connections“.

AVG 7.1 to the rescue — a scan through the firewall log showed:

Date and time:      2006-08-07 11:51:22
Action:             Ask
Application:        D:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat\bin\tomcat5.exe
Protocol:           TCP
Direction:          In
Local address:      localhost:5001
Remote address:     0.0.0.0:0

There we go, Tomcat is using 5001.

Having not the foggiest notion of how to change Tomcat to a different port, nor what else might be required to prevent a meltdown of the entire Business Objects installation, I used the more familiar Informatica Repository Server Setup to change that component to port 5002, and he service then started right up.

Follow that with a reconfiguration of the Informatica Server service to look for the Repository service on the new port, and a similar process for the client tools through the PoweCenter Repository Manager, and I’m up and running again.

And you thought I was just some sort of Oracle geek … sheesh!

Business Objects XI Install

I just finished an install process so lengthy that I have forgotten why I started it in the first place — to whit, Business Objects XI Release 2 with Performance Management. I’d guess that properly undertaken the install would be a job of around three-to-four hours, but since I went camping for the weekend half way through, it actually took me around seventy.

I have to say that in terms of complexity this is one behemoth of an application. By my count it has installed twenty-one windows services and required the creation of around thirty-three new firewall rules. It left four warnings and fifty-nine errors in the Windows Application Event Log, most of which I’m afraid to even view. Those figures may be inaccurate as I lost the will to live several times during the counting, and doubtless when I actually start to use the applications there will be another host of firewall rules to create.

I encountered some interesting errors — “Product: BusinessObjects Enterprise XI Release 2 — Error 1904. Module D:\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 11.5\win32_x86\importent6.dll failed to register. HRESULT -1073741819. Contact your support personnel.“. Huh.

I recall that “back in the day” I changed employer on the basis of my promised ability to install Business Objects and get the first usable reports out of an OLTP system before lunchtime on my first day — a task that an Oracle consultant stated to be beyond the wit of man even with a generous allowance of one month. That turned out to be a bold claim that delayed my lunch until 12:30, but mostly through having to sign HR forms until around 10am. That was also with Business Objects v3, as I recall — in any rate it was a product that installed a darned sight more quickly and simply than this latest montrosity, and without more than a single Windows service.

It seems that nothing gets more simple in the world of technology, and that pretty soon Business Objects may have to follow Oracle’s lead and create an “Express Edition” that can be installed with less than a hundred or so mouse clicks. Or maybe Oracle will just buy them up and make ‘em do it.

At any rate, I’m beginning to think that I ought to make it a practice to read the documentation on new products before tackling them, so that I can judge how much of my personal information I am going to forget in the process of remembering the new stuff . In fact prior to that it seems that one could just weigh the documentation and base one’s decision on that.