Hello people

Ale Ale Ale

2006-10-14T02:51:00.000-05:00

I recently visited London and one of its country side called Cotsworld and this country side was an amazzzing site. Greenry everywhere, beautiful water bodies following through the town and absolutlely gorgeous houses and other structures. Pictures will come later but let me tell you about a kind of beer, which I tried and fell in love with.Its called 'Ale'. Its different than the normal beer we usually have. It doesnt have the fiz but gives you a good KICK. One needs to have the right taste buds to relish the taste of it and yes if you are like me then you will like this thing but will have to visit the door, having the MAN sign on it, quite frequently. It gives you a kick and keeps you on the move!!!
Let me now give some knowledge:
-Beer can be classified into two categories , Ale and Lager.
-Lager is a kind of a beer, which is made by fermenting bottom yeast, over a long period of time, at low temperatures.
-Ale is prepared by fermenting top yeast at warmer temperatures, for a shorter period.
-Ales include a wide range of beer styles from porters and stouts (porter is a heavy beer of pronounced bitterness, reddish-brown to a very dark brown, but is usually lighter in body and malt character than stout) to pale ales and wheat beer.
-Generally, ales are higher in alcohol, more robust and complex than lagers.

Thats all for now

cheers mate!!

Cheers!!

2006-05-01T07:10:00.000-05:00

Want something to drink?
yes, please ..a scotch would do!!

these lines are common but ever wondered what a scotch is ???

few terms need to be understood first:

Malt:
Malt is the product of a process called malting.

Malting:
Process applied to certain grains, in which the the grains are made to germinate and then quickly dried before the plant develops.

Types of Scotch Whisky:
There are two major categories, single and blended. Single means that all of the product is from a single distillery, while Blended means that the product is composed of whiskies from two or more distilleries.

-Single malt whisky is a 100% malted barley whisky from one distillery.
-Single grain whisky is a grain whisky from one distillery (it does NOT have to be made form a single type of grain).
-Blended malt whisky is a malt whisky created by mixing single malt whiskies from more than one distillery.
-Blended grain whisky is a whisky created by mixing grain whiskies from more than one distillery.
-Blended Scotch whisky is a mixture of single malt whisky and grain whisky, usually from multiple distilleries.

I am so DRUNK!!!!!

Surrogate Keys

2006-04-29T03:51:00.000-05:00

What are surrogate keys?
Artificial keys used as a primary key , instead of usual natural, multicolumn primary key, are called surrogate keys.

Advantages
1. Natural keys usually have some meaning for the business. If there is some change in the business then there might be a requirement to change the nutural key. This means change in the primary key, which would cause a cascading effect onto the all the promary pforiegn key relationships.
If we use surrogate keys then this problem can be avoided because the columns used in the natural key above, would be noraml columns and can be changed whenever required. The uniqueness can be maintained by have unuique indexes.
2. Surrogate keys occupy less space.A 4 byte unasigned integer provides more than enough values for any application and often occupies less space.
3. Surrogate keys can increase performance. As indexing a numeric key is better then indexing a multi column key.
4. Joins are much faster on integer keys.

Disadvantages
1. Surrogate keys increases the number of joins in a query. This is because the tables contain only the numeric ids as the foreign key. TO get the actual information joins have to be made between the tables.
2. Users do not understand the meaning of surrogate keys.So querying on the basis of keys become difficult.If there is an insert operation to be done then the problem becomes worse, not only understanding is required but also new keys need to be generated, which can be an extra burden on the user as well as the performance.
3. Extra indexes have to be built on the columns that were a part of the natural key, to preserve uniqueness and this may make the updates slower.

Conformed Dimensions

2006-04-27T08:38:00.000-05:00

Conformed means to be in agreement; be similar

Conformed Dimensions would mean, dimensions that are in agreement with many data marts in order to evolve an enterprise data warehouse. A conformed dimension is a dimension, which is standard across all data marts. Its quite a challenge to have one thing meeting everyone's needs. However, once done can have great benefits.

Advantages of Conformed Dimensions:
1. Independent data marts become a part of fully integrated data warehouse.
2 Deliver a consistent view across the business.
3. Data should never be defined for a specific function or department. Good data is one, which is widely shareable and conformed dimensions help in doing that.

Conformed dimensions should be defined at the most granular level so that each record in these tables corresponds to a single record in the fact able.

Points to consider while standardizing dimensions:
1. A set of dimensions (customers, products or geography) can be similar for Business Unit1 and Business Unit 2, but their hierarchical arrangements can be different.
2. Hierarchies may change over a period of time, business unit re-org or product re-categorization.

Having conformed dimensions, with above points considered:
1. The first thing is to arrive at a basic set of dimensions across as many data marts/business units as possible.
2. Compile a combined, de-duplicated, complete set of members for each dimension across all data marts.
3. Compile the linkages between members with each dimension by hierarchy.
4. All hierarchies are part of the enterprise but there are certain hierarchies, which belong to specific data mart/business unit. This would require an entity, which would store the information of hierarchy and the owner.

Given below is a diagram, which shows how product dimension can be made as a conformed dimension.

Effective date and End date can be added to the linkage details, if a hierarchy needs to be changed over a period of time.

Today's updates

2006-04-26T09:49:00.000-05:00

Information I gathered today:
1) Pepsi fined for condom in a bottle--- certainly yeh dil mange more :)
2) Aishwarya's 'Mistress of Spices' bombed in UK.
3) Low cost airlines are in red. Alomost all the lowcost airline companies are in loss because of cut throat competition and high cost of ATF ( aviation turbine fuel). This loss making will go on for about 2 more years till we have better infrastructure to handle more traffic and more public taking to flying. Jet airways still holds the max share followed by Indian and then airdeccan.
Airdeccan thinking of going for IPO to raise money.
4) IIM's planning to have pre-CAT to cut down the number of people reaching the final round, on the lines of IIT.

Divide and Rule

2006-04-26T09:22:00.000-05:00

This is one strategy that angrez used to have control over the population of hindustan. Well its been more than 50 yrs and nothing has changed still. If its not the angrez then its our leaderz.
I dont understand what is the need of having reservations in educational our institutions on the basis of caste??50% reservations for SC/ST in IITs and IIMs. Is it going to benifit the backward class people or is it in any way going to do any good for our country??
I dont think so...government should think of new ways of bringing the backward class people to level of , if I may call the "advanced people", insteaded of reserving seats for them.
Reserving seats could effect the nascent growth of economy and if the economy slows down then it will be difficult to uplift the poor and backward classes in any aspect leave alone education.
If a person has not had a good eductation background how can someone expect him or her to compete with someone who has had steady education background and has got admition only after passing through rigourous selection procedure. Its not only going to deteriorate the quality of people passing but also loss of opportunity for many deserving people.
Prakash Y Ambedkar, grandson of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar said that '..if you want different socities to come together, I think it is time that we decide that the use of word 'cast'..be banned in the country. But this seems to be a dream as our leaders want to maintain their votebanks and caste seems to a powerful tool.
So, the class welfare stays and so does Divide and Rule.

Inmon Vs Kimball

2006-04-16T04:20:00.000-05:00

I work on data warehousing, so today I thought of brushing up my concepts. Here are few, which I came across:

1. Success of a data wareshouse depends on effectively gathering business requirements first.

2. Inmon Vs Kimbal
These two are considered to be the god of data wareshousing. But had differences in their approach to design and architecture of a data warehouse.
Inmon believed in Top down approach : Data warehouse is one part of the overall business intelligence system. An enterprise has one data warehouse, and data marts source their information from the data warehouse. In the data warehouse, information is stored in 3rd normal form at the atomic level,which is then aggregated and made accessible across the enterprise.The CIF architecture embraces the star schema design for the data marts only, NOT for the design of the data warehouse.Inmon describes the Kimball approach as "brittle" because, in his opinion, the star schema is closely aligned to end-user requirements. Therefore, it does not produce a reusable form of data for the enterprise. In the Inmon approach, star schemas are only used for dependent data marts.
Kimball believed in Bottom Up approach : Data warehouse is the conglomerate of all data marts within the enterprise. Information is always stored in the dimensional model.His approach does not require a normalized data structure prior to dimensional presentation.The presentation in the Kimball approach is only through data marts. No physical data warehouse, as required by the Inmon approach, is required. His approach is considered to be faster because the data does not have to undergo multiple ETL before it is presented to the business users.However, Kimball's point is "If you make atomic data available in dimensional structures, you can always summarize the data "any which way."
Storing the atomic data in dimensional structures provides business users with the ability to get answers to immediate and, sometimes unpredictable, problems.
According to the Kimball approach, this puts usable data in the hands of the business user making the query without requiring a data warehouse expert to drill into the different normalized structures for the data.
Mr. Kimball also points out that his approach uses the enterprise data warehouse BUS architecture "with common, conformed dimensions for integration and drill-across support. Conformed dimensions are the backbone of any enterprise approach..."

To counter the idea of storing atomic data in dimensional structures, Inmon says that this will limit the analysis of data using only mulidimensional methods. The main reason for storing the data in 3NF form in data ware house is that the analysis is not limited to multidimensional methods.

So, it all depends upon what the business requirement is , what atomicity is required, type of analytical tools being used and the time and resource available for building and maintainting the data warehouse. Inmons approach might need datawarehouse experts to build summarized datamarts and explaining users how to drill down to the atomic level where as in Kimballs approach the users them self can summarize the data as it is presented to them at atomic level.

coming up next is Conformed dimensions....

Rickshaw!

2006-04-15T07:29:00.000-05:00

Rickshaw!

India Uncut

2006-04-15T06:21:00.000-05:00

India Uncut

Hello People

2006-04-15T05:04:00.000-05:00

How are you all doin?????? I was just sitting ..had nothing to do ..so thought of starting to write a blog. Had seen many friends writing blogs and I found it really interesting.
Just sitting makes a day very dull...today is saturday , suppose to be a weekend bash but no plans yet :(
Dont want it to be a lazy weekend..have a tough week ahead so there should be a bash before the week starts and a bash after the week ends..dont you think so??