Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

Some days… Some days the questions just make me scratch my head….

ROW TO COLUMN CONVERSION   April 30, 2008 - 5am US/Eastern 

Reviewer: ROOPA from india 



HOW TO CONVERT YEARLY DATA INTO MONTHLY DATA? 



Followup   April 30, 2008 - 10am US/Eastern: 

BY MAKING IT UP I GUESS? 

Could it be more ambiguous?  I have yearly data (one presumes that is data aggregated to the level of a year).  How do I convert that into monthly data.  Short of "making it up", I have no idea… do you?

Now, they did followup later with

table1 formatMONTH                  AMOUNT_PAID01.12.2006 00:00:00        539501.11.2006 00:00:00         56701.11.2006 00:00:00        197401.04.2007 00:00:00        246201.04.2007 00:00:00        197401.11.2006 00:00:00        539501.02.2008 00:00:00        5395   

table2 formatMONTH         JAN  FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT  NOV  DEC01-DEC-2006   0    0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0    0   539501-FEB-2007   0   5395 0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0    0    001-NOV-2006   0    0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   5395  0

how to convert table1 format into table2 format i.e yearly data to monthly data.

Now, I don’t know about you - but table1 looks suspiciously like "discrete observations with an associated date - the date consisting of year, month and day".  I certainly do not see "yearly data".

I also like how they used 5,395 three times, just to make it as ambiguous as possible (wonder what happened to 567, 1,974 and so on?)  They skipped what are likely the interesting output examples - their "yearly data that is not yearly" that has more than one observation in a month.

I guess, I GUESS, their date format is DAY-MONTH-YEAR now, that changes table1 to look suspiciously like "discrete observations with an associate date - the date consisting solely of year and month".  But, we’d be GUESSSING.

And I see a 01-FEB-2007 in table2, but I see 01.02.2008 in table1.  I have to presume that is a "typo"

sigh, and there wasn’t even a create table, insert into table supplied - they want me to do that.

And the output looks utterly useless.  If column 1 is "01-dec-2006", why bother having a DEC column in the output?  We already KNOW what month this is for - every row will have 11 zeros, every single one.  Seems a bit "silly".

Asking good, well formed questions is not an art, not magic.  It is however a skill.  And I find many times that when I frame my question for someone else - I find my answer.

Goes back to yesterdays post.  Writing software requires some things - a plan being one of them.  Until you can phrase your requirements in a detailed fashion - I’m not sure you know what they are or why you are doing something…..

Oracle-L has been hosting an interesting thread on migrating to another (cheaper) DBMS. It seems like the company in question has not targeted a specific product yet, they just want a cheaper one. The entire thread has much to recommend it but I would like to highlight Mark Brinsmead’s analysis of the definition of ‘processor’ in the Oracle License and Services Agreement, because it complements my post on licensing multi-core servers.

“[The OLSA] certainly adds a new wrinkle to SE licensing that I had not noticed until just now. Probably a lot of IT professionals, few IT managers, and even fewer lawyers, know the difference between a ‘chip’ and a ‘carrier’. What’s more, how many people *know* when they are purchasing a system with quad-core X86 ‘CPUs’ whether the carriers in that system contain a single chip with 4 cores, 2 chips with two cores each, or four single-core chips. It makes little difference when purchasing the hardware (well, okay, it might make more than you think), but it can make a *huge* difference to your license costs and compliance.”

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