Review of Oracle Magazine–March/April 1996

The headline articles for the March/April 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was Oracle’s first or early articles on Data Warhousing, including DW Architectures, what Oracle tools you can use, multi-dimensional analysis, Oracle Express and future directions of data warehouses.

Julie Gibbs, the editor of Oracle Magazine, wondered ‘What will be hot in 2005?’. Some of her predictions/suggestions were:

• Will Larry Ellison’s NC provide every home with a $500 internet box
• What will be the 3 biggest software companies and were any of them around in 1995
• How many people will use the internet everyday
• Will the internet be censored ? How and by whom ?
• Or will the internet be passe and will virtual reality be a reality
• What will be the size of the largest data warehouse
• Will Apple still exist
• Will you be reading your magazines in print or online
• Will your company have a woman CEO
• How many people will be telecommuting
• Will every desktop have built in video conferencing so that you can talk to your coworkers

Other articles included:

• Oracle Interoffice Suite was released and comprised Messaging, Document and Workflow servers based on Oracle 7.3. The product provided groupware functions, such as electronic mail, messaging, scheduling, directory services, document management, workflow and conferencing.
• Oracle 7.3 new features included Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Software Manager, SQL*Net 2.3, advanced replication and Oracle ConText.
• How to rename your database. It is not always optimal for a database to keep the name it was born with. A step by step guide is given on how to do this without loosing any data!
• A case study is presented from NeXT Computer on how to audit and clean up your Oracle Applications data as you prepare to upgrade to Release 10. These included:
• Review Usernames and unused responsibilities
• Unused menus and menu options
• Are outdate concurrent requests being purged
• Unused printers
• Identify cluttered production libraries
• Unused custom concurrent processes
• Unused database objects
• Inactive vendors and invalid distribution sets
• Unused payment terms
• Closed bank accounts
• Protecting your budgets
• Obsolete journal sources
• Invalid price lists
• Unbooked orders and unclosed orders
• Unused payment terms, transaction types, units of measure and inactive sales people
• How to design a database for OLAP. Most of the following steps still stand today for designing your star-schemas
• Define the question (business function/area)
• Use Normalized logic
• Identify Dimensions
• Create Hierarchies
• Identify Attributes
• Identify Measures
• Add Calculations
• There was a review of the very first Oracle Magazine that was published in June 1987.  Watch this space, as I will be posting the details soon.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

Solar Panels

I’ve just had a quick look at the solar panels on the house. This is one of the first truly sunny days this weak and by 11am this morning we have the water tank in the hot press reading that we have maxed out with 300 litres of water at 60C.

The panels have reached a temperature of 128C. Again this is at 11:30 this morning.

Based on the weather outlook for the next 7 days, we will not be using the Gas boiler to head any water over the next week

Oracle Magazine Collection–New addition May/June 2005

I received in the post today a copy of an Oracle Magazine that I’m missing from my collection.

It was sent to me by Kim Berg Hansen from Denmark. Check out his blog.

I owe him a beer at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham later this year in December.

This now means that I have a copy of every Oracle Magazine from July 1998 right up to the current Avengers special editions. Plus other editions with a few gaps going back to 1992.

To view the entire collection – click here.

Oracle Magazine–The Avengers Collection

I had a nice surprise when I arrived home from work last night. There was a parcel delivered during the day. When I opened it, I found 6 Oracle Magazines for the May/June 2012 edition. 

There was one magazine for each Avengers character. So I have the entire collection.

A big thank you to the person so sent them to me. You know who you are.

These magazines will be joining my collection of Oracle Magazine that spans 20+years. Check out the collection.

Domain Knowledge + Data Skills = Data Miner

Over the past few weeks I have been talking to a lot of people who are looking at how data mining can be used in their organisation, for their projects and to people who have been doing data mining for a log time.

What comes across from talking to the experienced people, and these people are not tied to a particular product, is that you need to concentrate on the business problem. Once you have this well defined then you can drill down to the deeper levels of the project. Some of these levels will include what data is needed (not what data you have), tools, algorithms, etc.

Statistics is only a very small part of a data mining project. Some people who have PhDs in statistics who work in data mining say you do not use or very rarely use their statistics skills.

Some quotes that I like are:

"Focus hard on Business Question and the relevant target variable that captures the essence of the question." Dean Abbott PAW Conf April 2012

"Find me something interesting in my data is a question from hell. Analysis should be guided by business goals." Colin Shearer PAW Conf Oct 2011

There has need a lot of blog posting and articles on what are the key skills for a Data Miner and the more popular Data Scientist. What is very clear from all of these is that you will spend most of your time looking at, examining, integrating, manipulating, preparing, standardising and formatting the data. It has been quoted that all of these tasks can take up to 70% to 85% of a Data Mining/Data Scientist time. All of these tasks are commonly performed by database developers and in particular the developers and architects involved in Data Warehousing projects. The rest of the time for the running of the data mining algorithms, examining the results, and yes some stats too.

Every little time is spent developing algorithms!!! Why is this ? Would it be that the algorithms are already developed (for a long time now and are well turned) and available in all the data mining tools. We can almost treat these algorithms as a black box. So one of the key abilities of a data miner/data scientist would be to know what the algorithms can do, what kind of problems they can be used for, know what kind of outputs they produce, etc.

Domain knowledge is important, no matter how little it is, in preparing for and being involved in a data mining project. As we define our business problem the domain expert can bring their knowledge to the problem and allows us separate the domain related problems from the data related problems. So the domain expertise is critical at that start of a project, but the domain expertise is also critical when we have the outputs from the data mining algorithms. We can use the domain knowledge to tied the outputs from the data mining algorithms back to the original problem to bring real meaning to the original business problem we are working on.

So what is the formula of skill sets for a data mining or data scientist. Well it is a little like the title of this blog;

Domain Knowledge + Data Skills + Data Mining Skills + a little bit of Machine Learning + a little bit of Stats = a Data Miner / Data Scientist

Oracle Magazine May/June 2012 Collector Editions

The good people at Oracle Magazine have produced a number of collectors editions (six) of the current edition (May/June 2012) .

I received my copy of the magazine in the post yesterday and the one that I received is the following

I’ve been collecting Oracle Magazine for over 20 year and I have almost the entire collection.

I would like to add all 6 special editions to my collection.

If you would like to donate your Oracle Magazine and help me complete the collection, add a comment to the blog or email me directly. I will be able to let you know what special editions I’m still missing

Oracle Magazine-May/June 1995

The headline articles for the May/June edition of Oracle Magazine included one of the first articles on Data Centers,using the prebuilt packages in PL/SQL and how to use object-oriented programming techniques in Oracle Forms 4.5

Other articles included:

Oracle 7 Internet Access Kit also called the Oracle World Wide Web Interface Kit. Developers could use this kit developers can create links between web servers and Oracle 7 databases. The Oracle WWW Interface Kit included:

• Oracle’s Web-Oracle-Web (WOW) PL/SQL gateway to web servers
• Oracle’s PL/SQL editor and development tool for creating dynamic PL/SQL
• PERL, a freeware interpreting programming language
• ORAPERL, an extension to PERL for use with Oracle 7 databases
• ORAYWWW, a PERL gateway
• WORA, a user-friendly database browser written in Pro*C
• DECOUX, a post-processing gateway that inserts query results from a Oracle 7 database into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents
• Navigator, a collection of PERL scripts and one Pro*C module that enables administrators to quickly configure HTML forms for end user queries
• Text Search System (TSS), an indexing and free text search system
• MORE, a collection of Pro*C gateways for maintaining an information repository
• HotMetal, a HTML editor

Fee access to Oracle ConText. Oracle customers were offered an opportunity to try ConText before you buy. According the the article Oracle ConText is a revolutionary linguistic analysis program that automatically generates back-of-book indexes and reduces the volume of text to a summary.

Ken Jacobs gives the second part of his in-depth article on the latest release of Oracle 7.1 and Oracle 7.2 databases. Ken was vice president of Product Planning and has been working with Oracle since version 2 of the database.

Mike Ault has an article on using DBMS_PIPES PL/SQL package, how to access the shared pool using the DBMS_SHARED_POOL PL/SQL package and how to use the DBMS_OUTPUT procedure.

How big is your database ?  Oracle conducted a survey of all its customers to see what was the typical size of their databases and how many users each database would have. The following diagrams gives the results of this survey and compares the 1994 results with the results from 1993. We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

In 1995, Oracle Open World took place in Yokohama, Japan between 18th and 19th January. It had 130 seminars and sessions.  In 2012 OOW will have over 500 sessions and will run over 5 days!

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

How big was your Oracle Database in 1993 & 1994

I’m in the middle of writing my summary of the May/June 1995 edition of Oracle Magazine (that blog post is coming soon). There was a one article about a survey that Oracle conducted of its customer on how big their databases were and the number of users for their databases.

The follow diagrams gives the summary results of these surveys.

We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

Does anyone know if Oracle has published similar survey results in the last few years ?

2 Day Oracle Data Miner course material

Last week I managed to get my hands on the training material for the 2 Day Oracle Data Miner course. This course is run by Oracle University.

Many thanks to Michael O’Callaghan who is a BI Sales person here in Ireland and Oracle University, for arranging this.

The 2 days are pretty packed with a mixture of lecture type material, lots of hands on exercises and some time for open discussions. In particular, day 2 will be very busy day.

Check out the course outline and published schedule – click here

You can have this course on site at your organisation. If this is something that interests you then contact your Oracle University account manager. There is also the traditional face-to-face delivery and the newer online delivery, where people from around the world come together for the online class.

Oracle Analytics Sessions at COLLABORATE12

There are a number of Oracle Advanced Analytics and related topics taking place this week at COLLABORATE12 in Las Vegas (http://collaborate12.com).

Date	Time	Presentation	Presenter
Sun 22nd	9:00-3pm	Oracle Business Intelligence Application Journey
Mon 23rd	9:45-10:45	Managing Unstructured Data using Hadoop, Oracle 11g and Oracle Exadata Database Machine	Jim Steiner
Mon 23rd	9:45-10:45	Environmental Data Management and Analytics-a Real World Perspective	Angela Miller
Mon 23rd	11-12	Public Safety and Environmental Real-Time Analytics using Oracle Business Intelligence	Raghav Venkat Therese Arguelles
Mon 23rd	11-12	BI is more than slice and dice	Peter Scott
Mon 23rd	14:30-15:30	In-Database Analytics: Predictive Analytics, Data Mining, Exadata & Business Intelligence	Jacek Myczkowski
Mon 23rd	15:45-16:45	Big Data Analytics, R you ready	Mark Hornick Shyam Nath
Tues 24th	10:45-11:45	BI Analytics and Oracle NoSQL. The Future of Now	Manish Khera
Wed. 25th	8:15-9:15	Oracle Data Mining – A Component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option-Hands-on Lab	Charlie Berger
Wed 25th	9:30-10:30	Oracle R Enterprise – A Component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option-Hands-on Lab	Mark Hornick

Here are the abstracts from the two main Oracle Advanced Analytics presentations by Charlie Berger and Mark Hornick

Oracle Data Mining – A Component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option

This Hands-on Lab provides an introduction to Oracle Data Mining and the Oracle Data Miner GUI.

Oracle Data Mining (ODM), now part of Oracle Advanced Analytics, provides an extensive set of in-database data mining algorithms that solve a wide range of business problems. It can predict customer behavior, detect fraud, analyze market baskets, segment customers, and mine text to extract sentiments. ODM provides powerful data mining algorithms that run as native SQL functions for in-database model building and model deployment. There is no need for the time delays and security risks of data movement.

The free Oracle Data Miner GUI is an extension to Oracle SQL Developer 3.1 that enables data analysts to work directly with data inside the database, explore the data graphically, build and evaluate multiple data mining models, apply ODM models to new data, and deploy ODM’s predictions and insights throughout the enterprise. Oracle Data Miner work flows capture and document the user's analytical methodology and can be saved and shared with others to automate advanced analytical methodologies.

Oracle R – A component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option

This Hands-on Lab provides an introduction to Oracle R Enterprise.

Oracle R Enterprise, a part of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option, makes the open source R statistical programming language and environment ready for the enterprise by integrating R with Oracle Database. R users can interactively and transparently execute R scripts for statistical and graphical analyses on data stored in Oracle Database. R scripts can be executed in Oracle Database using potentially multiple database-managed R engines - resulting in data parallel execution. ORE also provides a rich set of statistical functions and advanced analytics techniques.

In this lab, attendees will be introduced to Oracle's strategy for R, including the Oracle R Distribution, Oracle R Enterprise (ORE), and Oracle R Connector for Hadoop (ORCH). We will focus on Oracle R Enterprise with hands-on exercises exploring the transparency layer, embedded R execution, and statistics engine.

Book Case

I finally got round to finishing a 5 foot high, by 4 foot wide, book case. It is made out of Sycamore wood with Mahogany wedges

Sycamore is a Very hard wood and can splinter easily.

One of the things that I like about this wood is when you apply danish oil you get variances in the colouration of the wood. I’ve ended up with some darker patches and some light patches. So you don’t get a consistent coloured finished.

This is one of the joys of working with natural solid wood rather than manufactured wood or veneered wood.

This is why I like it working with natural wood. It has lots of character. Plus the colouring will vary over the coming months.

When I moved book case into its new home in the dining room I discovered that the floor in not level. The book case was leaning away from the wall This was easily fixed with a very small wedge placed under each end piece. This is not ideal.

Oracle Magazine–March 1995

In 1995 we have a change to the frequency of publication of Oracle Magazine. It is not published every 2 two months with 6 editions each year, as it is still the case.

The headline articles in the March/April 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included Integrating Unstructured Information, Minimizing Client/Server Network Traffic with Oracle Forms 4.0, Relational Objects and how the Canadian Postal Service was using Oracle Technology to deliver mail on time.

Other articles include:

Dynamic SQL Comes to PL/SQL: Introduces us to the DBMS_SQL package. A useful quick reference one pager is given giving the details of each of the 15 procedures and functions, including, BIND_VARIABLE, CLOSE_CURSOR, COLUMN_VALUE, DEFINE_COLUMN, EXECUTE, EXECUTE_AND_FETCH, FETCH_ROWS, IS_OPEN, LAST_ERROR_POSITION, LAST_ROW_COUNT, LAST_ROW_ID, LAST_SQL_FUNCTION_CODE, OPEN_CURSOR, PARSE, VARIABLE_VALUE.

Personal Oracle 7 for Windows gets released and it now has a graphical administration tool to allow us to manage the database, including users, backup and recovery managers along with export/import and SQL*Loader and Oracle Objects for OLE. The hardware requirements included 8Mb of RAM and less than 30Mb of hard-disk space. How things have changed!!!. It was capable of running on Window 3.1 and was Windows 95 ready.

Rollback segments in in Oracle 7 allows use to now effectively manage our transactions. It gave the following recommendations:

• Create a separate tablespace for rollback segments for administrative and monitoring purposes
• Se the size of the tablespace according to the number and storage parameters of the rollback segments
• Place your rollback segment tablespace on a separate disk device, if possible. Consider total I/O activities and spread I/O over available disk devices
• Create one rollback segment for every four concurrent transactions
• Don’t create more than 50 rollback segments
• Create smaller rollback segments for OLTP applications. This increases the likelihood that rollback segments will be cached in SGA according to the least recently used algorithm, resulting in performance gain
• Create larger rollback segments for decision support or back processing applications
• Set initial to you average transaction size, set OPTIMAL to four to eight times larger than INITIAL

Oracle Magazine goes digital and interactive with a CD-ROM containing every issue of published in the previous two years and also contained a map of Oracle offices worldwide.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.