Stand up for the champions

Dream Run Time

Yeees after Dream life,Dream Wife :D, Dream team… now there 's a Dream Run Time.
But What is Run Time and who had ever dream of a Dream Run Time :D, at least I' m sure there are some people who they were always dreaming of a Dream Run Time :D.

When I attended my actual job as an IT engineer in LES EAUX MINERALES D'OULMES about one year and half ago, my boss said to me in our first meeting that my essential mission is to resolve the IT problems related to the sales department, so the first thing I did, was to get in touch with people working in the sales department.

What I retain about these meetings, that everyone was complaining about three major problems, the first was about our ERP system ORACLE JD EDWARDS; sales assistants said that the system is very slow and interrupts often, so entering sales orders onto the system was a painful operation who takes so many time than it should, even customers were complaining sometimes because they were spending too much time to make their orders, the second and the third problems were about our Reporting System which is based on Oracle Report Builder and Oracle Report Run time, they said that the Reporting system is very slow so we spend too much time to have data than to analyze it, they were also saying that the data provided by the reporting system is very poor to make their analyzes correctly and to take the right Business Decision.

So Run Time is a reporting tool from Oracle, using it, users can access reports already build with Oracle Report Builder, our IT department staff use Report Builder to develop reports which were demanded by other departments staff , the reports are composed essentially by SQL Queries upon Oracle materialized views which were created to make data aggregation.

Even I was hired by my company to resolve these problems :D, I didn’t have the opportunity to do it at the beginning , because I was asked to do other tasks; first I was involved to develop a lot of reports using Report Builder (daily sales reports, sales by regions, sales by product, pricing,... [Really a lot of reports :(] ) , helping the company staff to have the data that they need by making some data extraction from the database, initiating the project of the implementation of ITIL ( Information Technology Infrastructure Library ) into our Departments, helping to complete the integration of the sales order module of our ERP by driving some modifications in this module…, after that I was taking the responsibility of integrating the last part into our ERP which was the Fixed Assets part, this project took more than 4 months.

Waaaw, so many work :D, after finishing that I came back to my first mission hhh, and on the same time I was asking to take the responsibility of the DBA.

The first problem we had with our reporting system, it's that the ERP and the Reporting system used the same database, so both of them become slow due to the high activity of the two system, so we decided to put the reporting system into another database, as a DBA I took the responsibility of this task (I talk about this task in a previous post in this blog hhh :D).

That’s resolved only the first problem; the ERP works better :D, because there' s less activities in its database but the Report system remained slow and the biggest problem that in some times the reports aren't available at all due to the incompleteness of the refreshing process of the materialized views, imagine if the sales staff can't access in a whole day the information about their sales, it's like driving a car without a dashboard hhhhhh :D, this is what was happening hhhh :D.

So how can I resolve this problem :D ? at the beginning I tried to make a tuning to the Reporting database so the refreshing process takes less time and I succeed in this hamdolilah :), after I try to tune reports by creating appropriate indices, this make the reports very fast HoHoHo, for example some reports took about 15 minutes and after creating the right indices now they take less than one minute (great results :D).

But even at this level. I was not satisfied, because I had an aim which I didn't reach it yet hhhh, so I made a lot of efforts to recreate the materialized views with fast refresh option so they can be refreshed very fast (so never we will had to drive without a dashboard hhh), it was really a big challenge for me , I made a lot of efforts to do it, and I was so determined to do it, it took to me more than 3 weeks of hard work hhh.
But thanks to Allah who said إن لا نضيع أجر من أحسن عملا} الكهف 30} , I success to reduce the period of refreshing the materialized views from 8 hours to only 30 minutes (if you want to know How hhhh? be aware, soon inchallah I will provide a tutorial about materialized views in my BI blog http://bi-only.blogspot.com/), so we will never lost direction hhhh, and now really i reach my aim a Dream Run Time :).


NB:The picture Above show the database activity before transforming the materialized views to the fast option and the picture on the bottom after, I think you see the difference :D.

لك الحمد يا ربي

ذهب عنا ضيف عزيز

نعم ذهب عنا ضيف عزيز،ضيف يأتي ليكرمك لا لتكرمه،يأتي و معه خير زاد، زاد النفوس،يملأ عنا حياتنا طاعة و حب و إيثار وصلة أرحام و بر، فطوبى لمن كان فيه من الفائزين، فيا ذا الجلال و الاكرم تقبل منا ما و فقتنا إليه من خير و تجاوز عما قادتنا إليه نفوسنا من سوء، فلا يسعنا إلا عفوك يا عفو

insert into MyBlog values ('NEW ARTICLE') :D

It has been a long time,I wrote nothing in my Blog, really I m a lazy Bloger :D.

Today, I feel I want to do it ,but I have no precise idea about what I can write,let's make a choice:mmmm why not write about my new work task:yes I was recently assigned as the DBA of our work's beautiful Databases(hhhh) running with the strong RDBMS Oracle (Really, I m asking myself if Oracle was a man who will it be? :D),anyway like I spend too much time with Oracle since I became the DBA ,from more than 2 months ago, I would like to share with myself first (hhhh), through this blog, this new experience.

Two months ago I knew a little about ORACLE Administration. the first task I was asked to do as DBA was to install ORACLE 10gR2 in a SUN SOLARIS station, wawww :'( it has been a long time i didn't use any UNIX Commmad, but after some minutes i began to remember all what I needed :D : ls,cat,chmod,chown,grep,cd,date,... and all the family of UNIX commands :),installing Oracle was an amazing task for me :D.

The second task was harder than the first :D, like the purpose of the database, I installed, was to provide a Data warehouse which allows users to run their reports and Business Intelligence applications, I needed to make an appropriate replication between our two databases, I choose materialized views to make this,materialized views were very helpful.

But doing technical things isn't enough for a DBA, you must also help everyone who use the database to have the right access and use appropriately the database, so it took to me so many time to help them switch their TNS NAMES toward the new database and success to run their reports over this database .

After that it was necessary to get feedback from users about the database performance, apparently everyone was suffering from poor performance :D, it was a normal result because no tuning was doing yet to the database.

The first task of tuning was to create appropriate indexes over materialized views, this helped so much to improve performances but it was not enough because bottlenecks remained to occur so many times, a resizing of the redo log files and a tuning over the SGA had luckily get everything nice :).

To achieve these tasks , I used a lot of documents but essentially the book ORACLE 10g the Complete Reference, I think it's a very good book ;a must have of every DBA (hhh), I used also the official documentation from ORACLE and when I needed a seriously help I didn't hesitate to contact ORACLE support through metalink.

Finally,just for pleasure I want to publish one of my worksheets (hhh) and here it's:


desc mv_capabilities_table
select * from mv_capabilities_table


create materialized view MV_SALES_S4
build immediate
refresh fast
on DEMAND
as
select product,sum(quantity),count(quantity),count(*) from sales group by product



start with sysdate next sysdate + 1/1440
select * from sales
select count(*),count(quantity),sum(quantity)from sales group by product
drop materialized view log on sales

create materialized view log on sales
with ROWID,sequence(ID,product,region,quantity)
including new values;

So do you feel any pleasure after reading it (HaHaHa).
oh, I forgot,I need to confirm this article insertion to myblog so:
SQL>commit;

The last Castle (what does leadership mean)

Yesterday was a long day with a lot of activities, I came back home at almost 22H o’clock, after taking my dinner, I was tired but I needed to wait 2 hours to take a medicament before sleeping, I was so tired to try to read something, neither to connect to the Internet so I decided to try to find something interesting on TV.

After switching between some channels, I used the info button upon MBC2 to find out the next movie, it was scheduled within 20 minutes and the title was so attractive “The Last Castle".

The story of the movie took place in a jail (a castle used as jail) especially used for imprisoning military people, the last one to attend this jail was an ex highly decorated Lieutenant General who had made a military error. The jail was managed by a severe warden who runs the prison with an iron fist, questionable tactics and implied cruelty.

The General (a role playing by Robert Redford) was so famous by his courage and his military experience; he made a mistake which putted him into the jail for 10 years.

Prisoners tried to have their rights, they asked help from the General but he refused to take any other battle against anyone, he wanted only to spend his time and go home living with his family.

But after some circumstances he decided to participate with other prisoners in a plot against the warden to make him resign.

The plan was simple, taking command of the castle which means in military laws that the warden is unfit to manage it.

In summary the movie was wonderful (if you want more details about the story you can see it on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Castle, better you can see the movie :) ), besides its military contents which shows that war isn't only weapons but a science of management, tactics and ..., the part that interest me more in the movie that in the first hand the General who has no rank in the jail was chosen by prisoners to lead them in the other hand prison's guards disobey their warden even it's their officially leader.

What I get through this movie is the real sense of leadership, a leader isn't a sever person giving orders due to his rank ,trying to have more opportunities regardless of the aim of his team, but it’ s a person working with his team and for the principals of its community and his team, a person able to give self-confidence to his team, not a person who try to take self-confidence from his team to drive them like he wants, a person who sacrifices for his community and his team and not a person trying to have the best opportunities upon his team, a person who you can trust and work with , I think this film succeed to give a very good illustration of leadership through the General.

I saw this movie twice, I wrote the almost part of this article in the first time, but what I didn't notice in the first time is that victory needs sacrifice, the prisoners in the jail took the war against the warden even they have no weapons and a lot of them died , but they have the most interesting thing to win any battle: RIGHT, they needed only courage and sacrifice to win and this is what our brothers in GAZA are doing, they are taking a hard battle against enemy to take their rights their land, the enemy is very armed but our brothers are armed with faithful that let them sacrifice for their community.

At the end I want to apologize to our brothers in GAZA, excuse us we aren’t so courage as you are and I ask ALLAH to bless you and help you.

A week in a classroom

This week, I didn’t work (what’s luck). No I wasn’t in vacation but I was following a training program, a whole week of studies I didn’t do so from a long time :):), I know I m from the kind of people who likes very much to be more and more skilled so I love too much to follow such this training program.

The training program was about Oracle Database, the most robust database in the world, the training program was called Administration Workshop l, I followed this training program with 4 others person ,all of them were very sympathetic and the trainer too.

Sincerely, I studied before a lot of things about Oracle database in my engineering school, I also read alone some books about it, but what I learnt in this training program was better, it makes me to love more this software and decide to improve more and more my skills on it, I m now planning to take the OCA (Oracle Certified Associate) exam soon Inchallah.

But taking this training program wasn’t the only interesting thing for me in this week, Allahmdolilah it was the first time when I fast during the all first days of DI ALHIJA, I also enjoyed very much the social environment created by the preparations to ALAID, so I hope for all of you عيد مبارك سعيد .

Oh, wait a second please, I forgot to say that the contents of this training program is made by ORACLE UNIVERSITY a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation which ensures spreading knowledge about all Oracle products, I think they do a great job, the content of the training program was very good, but seeing the picture above which represents Oracle headquarters, I think people who work in a such beautiful environment must do a so good job :):), I think it has a beautiful architecture.