[thelist] tip: use other search engines

Luther, Ron Ron.Luther at hp.com
Wed Feb 1 10:11:55 CST 2006


Ken Chase fed the troll:

>>Pretending to understand a culture other than your own is 
>>denying that anyone can think differently than you do. 
>>Think about it... would you like Google to disobey your government?


Hi Ken,


Sorry ... that's OT for 'thelist' ... and needs to be paid for with a
tip.

The good news is that evolt has you covered!  To discuss Google - China 
- and the 'bad speling' work around further, or to discuss any other 
topic not directly involving web development, or to just to take a break

and take a deep breath, subscribe and post to 'thechat' instead of 
'thelist'!

Recent threads have involved 'structural music theory', 'anime 
recommendations', 'a photo of a man walking his turtle', and 
'favorite squirrel recipes'.  It's a varied list where you can 
waste more time than following /.!  ;-P


RonL.

<tip type="Business Objects and Ad Hoc Calculations" author="RonL.">

Always remove any 'heavy lifting' from your report level calculations 
and put them back on the db engine where they belong!

Strong words and "A very good rule" (TM). Naturally it was one I was 
recently asked to break.

I was handed a hot request to add a 'number of working days' 
(week days) calculation to a report I had sitting around that 
contained two date columns.  Very time sensitive ASAP request.

Normally no biggie, but this particular report was constructed using 
Business Objects.  BO uses a multi-tiered backend structure for 
'abstraction' that has some strengths and advantages.  Sadly, 
making *really really quick* changes isn't either of those.

Naturally BO doesn't have a nice shortcut calculation for working 
days like Excel or Oracle.  No problem.  Just go 'old skool' and 
throw in some min() and max() functions involving day_of_week(), 
right?

No go.  BO only allows min() and max() to be used in an aggregate 
setting running over your entire result set.  In BO you can't use 
these command to compare an individual value against a scalar. 

Bummer.

For an ASAP one-off you need to go 'stone age' here and embed one 
or more 'if' statements to cover the various cases.  It's Very Ugly. 
It's Very Slow. But it can be done. 

For a serious production rollout to all users it would be better 
to take the time you need to move the heavy lifting back to the 
db engine where it belongs.

</tip>



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