I've had a similar, although not identical situation some couple of years ago
that never fully corrected itself.

The CIO wanted a data warehouse & employed a math specialist with some database
experience to handle it.  My biggest problem was this toad went and got an OCP
certificate just from reading the books & thought he was the king of the hill. 
Anyway, he came up with this totally denormalized configuration, although
indexed, that was totally dumb.  Many of the management types were for his
design as the web apps he had also created were 'pretty'.  OK, so I asked him to
estimate how much disk space he would need.  His was about 30GB of disk.  I took
his demo app & calculated average row length, and all of the other stuff +
indexes and came up with more like half a terrabyte.  When the $$$$ needed were
presented to the CIO there were a lot of questions, recalculating, etc...
presented all of which supported my call for an extra EMC cabinet full of disks
(about $2.5M at the time).  The data structures then made some very dramatic
changes, initial implementation was done on 30GB of drives but out grew that in
2 months.  We then acquired an additional 30GB of disk, blew through that in 2
months.  At that point the individual submitted his resignation & we acquired an
additional 100GB of disk & limited the data retention to 6 months.

Completely redesigning the warehouse is a Q4 project this year.  So hang in
there, reality is one beast that does bite the hand that feeds it.

Dick Goulet
____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: Rachel Carmichael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date:       2/27/02 7:48 AM

You have this decree in writing?  

Okay, once you get that. Do what he wants, making sure everyone knows
that this great new database design and application are all his idea
(do this with a smile, with enthusiasm if you can manage it)

hang on and wait for it all to fall apart.


Otherwise, do you have any friends or connections in the user base? or
to his manager? Write up, without emotion, what you see as the problems
to this approach. Be very logical, with explicit reasons (not "this is
crap")

pass it around.  and be prepared to make an enemy



--- Don <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I've lost patience, my temper, and I'm about to quit a job because
> the IT 
> manager has decreed that we will have "his" data warehouse running
> within 
> 24 hours, and we will use his design.
> 
> 1 - We are NOT to use any kind of views, not even materailzed views.
> 2 - we are not to do any computations, summaries or rollups
> 3 - we are to have everything in one table
> 4 - "the" table name and column names will be meaningful to any clerk
> 5 - we are not to "start" or "snowflake" designs.  "That's just a
> bunch of 
> high power talk."
> 6 - all users will be trained to use MS Access to get at "their" 
> data.  (These are users that were just converted off from "green
> screen" 
> teminals within the last 45-days, to Windows 98 with 64k RAM.)
> 7 - We are not to just copy the legacy transactions.
> 8 - We are to load into "an" Oracle table, all legacy transction data
> 
> because "we don't want to limit how or what a user will look at"
> 9 - It is not necessary to talk with the users to see what data they
> want 
> to look at, or the atomic level.  "They are smart enough to fighure
> this 
> out on their own.  We just need to provide them the data."
> 10 - There shall be no long term maintenance required by "the" dw.
> 
> 
> Any ideas on how to deal with this situation?
> 
> For tomorrow, I've done a CTAS from a materialized view that we
> created to 
> support one departments known requirements.
> 
> 
> Don
> 
> -- 
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
> -- 
> Author: Don
>   INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
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