DBMS, August 1998
David Ritter's article "The Middleware Muddle" in the May 1998 issue of DBMS was simply excellent! It is one of the few articles I have seen that cuts through all the new big tech hype. I know that most vendors are implementing the same basic technology; however, each of them has a variation (which is natural) that it attempts to call the standard. A lot of these acronyms and terms are really vendor-specific terms. It is difficult to keep track of emerging (and subsequent merging of) standards and products that implement them. Thanks for an excellent article that helped me decipher this information.
Anita Ballaney
banita@swbell.net
Thank you for Ben Lis's article, "Oracle Year 2000 Pitfalls." Its content was not only useful, but exactly what I needed to communicate the date formatting options clearly to developers. Keep up the good work, to the year 2000 and beyond!
Paul A. Passman
PPassman@prcnet.com
Please pass on my congratulations to Ben Lis for providing just the right amount of stimulus to a reader who is embarking on an Y2K project. "Oracle Year 2000 Pitfalls" in the January 1998 edition of DBMS is very apt while remaining very concise.
Guruswamy Periyasamy
Guruswamy_P@nse.co.in
Ralph Kimball's column in the February 1998 issue of DBMS is awesome - it brings me a major step forward in reviewing the design of a human resources data warehouse for one of our clients. Thanks Ralph, for sharing your expertise! I think I found, however, a small mistake in one paragraph toward the end of the article. The second query is addressed by the employee transaction dimension table. You can make a time-based cut through the employee database by choosing a specific date and time and constraining this date and time to be greater than (original was "equal to") the transaction date/time and less than the transaction end date/time. This is guaranteed to return exactly one employee profile for each employee whose profile was in effect at the requested moment. The query can perform counts and constraints against all the records returned from these time constraints. I'm looking forward to Ralph's new book (and more columns in DBMS of course!)
Andreas Marx
cananm@can.sas.com
Thanks for your comments. Yes, you are quite right about the constraints on the effective dates. It was a typo.
- Ralph Kimball