End of week catch up

A somewhat slow week blogwise; loads of events that are not blog worthy, or just unusable for confidentiality reasons. Some may be written about later, but others will be locked away for ever.

At long last one of my customers is going to upgrade the Oracle version of there multi-terabyte DW. When I designed it I was forced to use Oracle 9.2 as the customer wanted to run against a certified database for their corporate query tool (it always beats me how a vendor could argue that Oracle 10 may not work with a tool but 9 will – all we are doing is vanilla SQL!) But a long last the query tool is being upgraded (which was forced on them by a change to the OS that query tool runs on…) So, come summer my colleagues will be battling with a database upgrade. Or at least battling with the CBO and query plan changes. Our other upgrade projects this year have OS changes as well as database changes. That makes life so much easier – we hire-in an identical machine and do the upgrade, test exhaustively and then cut it over or we could just swap the serial numbers on the machines and hand the old one back .

Doug Burns mentioned money laundering in passing this morning – one of the hotter topics around my office these days is how to detect suspect transactions and report them. In a way this is not the BI stuff of old or even traditional data mining, we are looking for patterns in purchasing and especially large cash transactions, perhaps of goods that can be readily resold. We are looking at some fairly novel techniques to give the realtime analysis the customer needs. Early days, but encouraging progress,

When I was a kid, school trips were a short bus ride to the zoo or a museum. My eldest has just been invited on an environmental studies field trip to Malaysia – that’s half way round the world from here, somehow I suspect this trip will cost more than a bus ride across town