So what can I say? One of the phrases I hate most is “We’ve had problems with that.” I have seen that, or some form of that, question used as an excuse to not try new features, to not use best practices, keep a head in the sand, stick to Oracle7 features, etc.

As an example, in my early days with data modeling, I once created a new schema. It wasn’t a very big schema; probably 10 tables or less. I spent a lot of time doing the analysis to make sure I got the data structures correct. The ERD was sent around and got approval from everyone.

From The Database Geek

I like playing with new tools and software so I thought I would start a new weekly series, Cool Tool of the Week. I will just cover a tool that I have used or discovered that I think is cool. I’m not necessarily endoring it, just giving it a little publicity so that others will know about it and can give it a try.

This week is the open source data modeling tool Open ModelSphere. This Open Source project is available for windows with a GPL license. It was originally known as SilverRun. I used this windows-based CASE tool when I was at Yale.

As I mentioned a while back (a loooong while back), I have been thinking about writing up how I design data marts. The problem with that is that it is a huge topic. Even converting an existing schema (which doesn’t always exist) to a data mart (star schema style), still takes plenty of behind the scenes data analysis and prepwork. Still, I am not going to take a shot at it.

I could start with a laundry list of requirements but I don’t think that would be interesting to very many people.

From the Database Geek.

I’m not even going to try to explain why I wrote this. Let’s just say that it comes in handy on occasion.

What this very simple procedure does is use DBMS_SCHEDULER to execute a shutdown command in windows. This could easily be adapted to Unix and/or Linux.

Use at your own risk. By default you get a 30 or 60 second delay (depending on windows version, I think) before the shutdown/reboot.

If you pass FALSE in to the procedure, or don’t pass anything, the server will shutdown. If you pass in a TRUE, the server will reboot.