Subscribe to RSS 2.0More ranting about data warehouses
Below the cut because it's too boring for normal consumption.
But honestly. The data warehouse 'upgrade' I mentioned? So much of the data has magically, and subtley, changed. If you are a human, for instance, (as opposed to a computer) you might not think there's much difference between this record:
Spectral Crossings - 9781905005918 - 01/Oct/08 - Paperback
and this:
Spectral Crossings-9781905005918-1/10/2008-Paperback
But there is! There is a universe of difference! Because the first has spaces either side of the hyphens, and the second doesn't, and the date format has completely changed. So now I have to update all my Access records to reflect their changes, so my Access queries can match their dumb layout (why there isn't a plain ISBN13 field available I cannot say).
It just incenses me that someone's done an upgrade, assumed that all their users are too dumb to actually want to manipulate their data in any way and now I've got a twenty minute task to add to my workload. I know, it's not much, but I've got better things to do than track down and fix bugs like this. It's really irritiating that people can make blanket changes without either appreciating the knock on effect of their actions or informing users of the changes they're making.
Bah. And I was so full of beans this morning. Data Warehouses have Ruined My Morning.
Comments: 2
You're too young to remember the days when these reports were only available on paper. We used to get paper reports several inches thick every month. You try importing a thousand pages of A3 dot-matrix report into Access, and then you'll appreciate what you have today!
Posted by: Stewart on September 2, 2008 08:23 PM
Oh you and your flattering age-related comments! My first job at Superdrug was logistics replen co-ordinator, and the first job of the morning was to carry two foot thick piles of green and white print outs up four flights of stairs!
That doesn't mean I let data warehouses off the hook. At the same time as we were using those print outs, we also had an old IBM AS400 which was still more useful than Cognos8. We could query it, get raw data out of it and manipulate it just fine.
Eventually, of course, Superdrug bought a data warehouse. Dreadful. And I remember that B&Q's data warehouse reporting tool was called Pandora. How apt...
Posted by: Em on September 2, 2008 08:31 PM