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January 2007 - Posts

• Do you know what your requirements are, Part 2

  . . . so they're not out of scope , but are they actually requirements? A colleague forwarded the following link on to me yesterday which although brief, is a good reminder that the customer will always ask for more than they may really need, and Read More... Posted 30 January 2007 03:54 by James.Pipe | 2 Comments Filed under: Business Analysis, Conchango, BA, Requirements gathering, Agile methodology, Agile, Agile development, Requirements prioritisation

• An update on Analytic Functions for T-SQL

  Hi, following on from my previous two posts about Analytic Functions , and specifically about the lack of a T-SQL equivalent to the LAG and LEAD functions I demonstrated, there is a SQL Server feedback vote currently active which you can participate in Read More... Posted 30 January 2007 03:42 by James.Pipe | 1 Comments Filed under: Oracle, PL-SQL, SQL, Analytic functions, Previous row, T-SQL

• Agile and the flat world

  Recently I have been reading The World Is Flat by Thomas Freidman, an account of the continual trend of globalization and what this means for countries, companies and individuals alike. In it he postulates that globalization is resulting in the leveling Read More... Posted 25 January 2007 04:21 by James.Pipe | 1 Comments Filed under: Conchango, Thomas Freidman, Agile methodology, Agile, Globalization, Flat World, IT Development, Globalisation, Agile development

• SQL Analytic Functions

  . . . Or making the complex simpler. Following on from my previous post , Analytic Functions are powerful tools for performing complex operations in a more compact and efficient query, but they are not appropriate for all occassions. They have nuances Read More... Posted 25 January 2007 03:09 by James.Pipe | 2 Comments Filed under: Oracle, PL/SQL, self join, PL-SQL, join, Analytic functions, calculations

• PL-SQL: Returning a value from the previous row in a query

  For any number of reasons which I won’t go into, you may have a need, or desire, to return a value in a query from one row next to a value from another. A typical example might be in a daily sales database, where I want to see yesterday’s Read More... Posted 24 January 2007 20:33 by James.Pipe | 9 Comments Filed under: Oracle, self join, PL-SQL, join, SQL, Analytic functions, order by, Previous row, partition by

• Requirements gathering; Do you know what your metrics are? And is it really out of scope??

  Yesterday I accompanied my colleague Dan Williams to a meeting with one of our business users to discuss some requirements for the next section of the application we're developing, and it reminded me of some key points regarding requirements gathering, Read More... Posted 16 January 2007 16:48 by James.Pipe | 1 Comments Filed under: Business Analysis, Out of scope, Conchango, BA, Defining metrics, Requirements gathering

• Oracle SQL - Generate a list of dates

  I have over the last couple of days been working with Jamie Thomson on a sql query to return a daily value inferred from periodic data readings throughout a month. One of the requirements to creating this query was to generate a list of days in the month. Read More... Posted 15 January 2007 16:43 by James.Pipe | 38 Comments Filed under: Oracle, Connect by, PL/SQL, List of dates