| September 2006 |
| By Elie Grunhas |
As a child, playing “monkey in the middle” was always fun. Kids on either side kept me hopping, trying to catch that ball. Today, as a business intelligence architect at a busy telecommunications company, I find myself playing the same game.
On one side are the UNIX servers populating an Oracle 10g financial data mart with daily reams of customer and revenue data. While on the other side, management is insatiable with reporting requests to glean KPI metrics and trending from this data deluge.
And then there’s me – in the middle – trying to catch, and help my clients decipher, that elusive ball of information.
So what’s a “monkey” to do?
Management is not interested in how I came by the data. They don’t care about how Oracle Data Warehouse Builder goes about extracting and transforming spreadsheet data and then populating the star schema tables. The SQL I’m using to validate against our source systems is of no concern. And the bit map indexes and materialized views I maintain to enhance performance never even comes up in conversation.
Instead, I’m asked lots of “how to” questions about our DSS tool Discoverer and about data mining in general: how to log on; how to create rolling averages; how to interpret trends within a scatter plot; how to apply market basket analysis; how to make reports faster.
Some of these questions I answer directly. Others require I return to the source: the data mart, my PL/SQL packages, the ERD.
That’s my job. Playing middleman between raw technology and management’s need to intelligently scan through mountains of company data. And it’s this continual “methodology versus practical application” interaction that makes my work so intriguing.
I find myself pouring my soul into the innards of Oracle’s suite of tools. For example, I am a frequent visitor to Oracle’s technology site (http://technet.oracle.com). I’m always downloading the tutorials and white papers, especially those dealing with warehousing and business intelligence. There’s no time during my workday to look at these, and so, I’m often spending free time (nights, weekends) reading, practicing, learning.
Ultimately, every tool I use, whether Warehouse Builder, Discoverer, or Portal, uses SQL to interact with the database. And so, knowing how to read and use SQL is what makes me most effective. When first learning, I would browse through so called “SQL beginner’s guides”. In fact, here’s a good launching off site for this material (http://www.justphukit.com/sql/beginner-sql-tutorials.php). After mastering these, I found it more instructive to bring up the SQL actually created on the fly by the various tools I use. This often plopped me in the middle of some complex code. But having learned the fundamentals, I was able to make sense of it and then found I could write my own. That’s how I quickly became intimate with this lingua franca of the IT world.
This is a good point to mention one of the neatest tools I’ve come across: Oracle Application Express (previously called HTML DB). I installed the recently released 2.2 version from the technology site mentioned earlier. This tool makes building a database centric, web based application so easy. It is filled with menu driven, ease-of-use features: building web pages or custom built templates, incorporating images, importing spreadsheet data, connectivity to multiple databases, interaction with JavaScript and even a SQL wizard that guides in creating complex scripts. Just as important, there are several online tutorials that give excellent hands on experience. For someone wanting to get a good overview of how to build a “front end – back end” system, this is a great tool from which to learn.
Wielding this technology makes my job interesting. But what whets my appetite even more is seeing how it empowers my clients. That’s the other side of being a middleman - creating value. I’m able to do this, in part, by using Discoverer to design a business friendly reporting layer. It is so satisfying when a manager discovers unexpected customer churn in the revenue report he or she built from this layer. Or a business dashboard I built reveals a never before seen expense pattern that’s consuming revenue in specific locales.
For readers considering a move to an IT profession, the best “perl” of wisdom I can offer (pun intended) is to take advantage of the many free tutorials available on the web. With respect to business intelligence, the links in this article are good starting points. In my career, Oracle has been the predominant database.
Furthermore, I would offer one more great resource, the magazine “Intelligent Enterprise.” Registering at their web site (http://www.intelligententerprise.com) will bring free monthly magazines mailed to home or business. It contains informative reviews of the major concepts and tools in the business intelligence arena.
Playing monkey in the middle at my age! Never thought that would happen. It’s been fun, though. And judging by the ever-increasing volume of data needing to be intelligently sifted, it’s a skill that is sure to be in demand.
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