Oracle-L: RE: Manager decrees "his" data warehouse design. Help!

From: Boivin, Patrice J <BoivinP_at_mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 10:02:28 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.0041A018.20020227100228@fatcity.com>

Oracle Discoverer? Users could poke around with that, without knowing SQL. They won't be very quick about it though.

I don't know the context, why did management come up with this scenario, is there a history behind all this?

Sounds a bit strange to try to impose an impossible situation that just won't work. Decrees don't make reality.

Even when the tools work and the data is there, sometimes users don't use systems because the informatics setup does not dovetail nicely with the way they go about their daily tasks.

If it's not natural to them, or it complicates their lives, there will be resistance.

>From the description though it seems there is more than that to it here.

Regards,
Patrice Boivin
Systems Analyst (Oracle Certified DBA)

-----Original Message-----

Sent:	Wednesday, February 27, 2002 11:24 AM
To:	Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject:	RE: Manager decrees "his" data warehouse design.  Help!

When I was consulting at a particular client, I saw the effects of this "approach" after the fact. Massive amounts of data were loaded into tables that were never accessed except to load data because the users couldn't do anything with it. Later it was thought that to fix this all they had to do was send the users to training on the reporting tool. After they spent lots of money on training nothing changed because the users still didn't understand the data and couldn't do anything with it. Meanwhile, damangement checked off it's "accomplishment" of an objective on the HR management forms. I suspect that may be what you're dealing with. After all, isn't it more important to report that you did something that to actually do something worthwhile? ;-) The notion that DBA's aren't needed and all you have to do is load data into a relational database and give the end users a point and click GUI tool is foolish but not uncommon with shortsided damagement.

Steve Orr

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 11:48 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

I've lost patience, my temper, and I'm about to quit a job because the IT manager has decreed that we will have "his" data warehouse running within 24 hours, and we will use his design.

1 - We are NOT to use any kind of views, not even materailzed views.
2 - we are not to do any computations, summaries or rollups
3 - we are to have everything in one table
4 - "the" table name and column names will be meaningful to any clerk
5 - we are not to "start" or "snowflake" designs.  "That's just a bunch of

high power talk."
6 - all users will be trained to use MS Access to get at "their" data. (These are users that were just converted off from "green screen" teminals within the last 45-days, to Windows 98 with 64k RAM.) 7 - We are not to just copy the legacy transactions. 8 - We are to load into "an" Oracle table, all legacy transction data because "we don't want to limit how or what a user will look at" 9 - It is not necessary to talk with the users to see what data they want to look at, or the atomic level. "They are smart enough to fighure this out on their own. We just need to provide them the data." 10 - There shall be no long term maintenance required by "the" dw.

Any ideas on how to deal with this situation?

For tomorrow, I've done a CTAS from a materialized view that we created to support one departments known requirements.

Don

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Author: Don
INET: dondealy_at_teleport.com

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Author: Orr, Steve
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