A new venture from shore

This isn't about anything really all that technical, but it is about boats. I have owned only a handful (as in one hand) of boats, all of them small, none of them powered. To date this includes an aluminum canoe (which I traded my rototiller for and subsequently lost in a divorce), one sailboard (yes, that is a boat), one O'day Widgeon 12' sailboat, and three kayaks.

I traded the O'Day for one of the kayaks (a really nice two-person) but recently have come up wanting to get under sail again. So now I am building or rather completing a Bolger Brick. It is a very simple craft, a box that is 4' x 8' with a square front and stern and the sail offset to the side. A really quirky little boat.

The boat hull was mostly completed by someone else who I found on Craig's list. Now I am in the process of fiberglassing the hull and then have to build the rudder and box along with the side board. The fiberglassing has brought back nasty memories of helping my dad lay supporting beams inder the front deck of a 14' overpowered runnabout. Nasty because al lthis took place outside in our carport in Scottsdale Arizona... hot and nasty. He ran a vacuum cleaner to blow some air under the front deck while I laid the glass and applied the resin/epoxy.

Anyway, I'll post my progress on this little venture here.

Birthday Non-Blues

Birthdays...wow they just keep piling up. Once I past the magic half century I started to notice a few things about birthdays.

1. Things became less important than relationships - I mean how many new tools, ties, electronic gadgets do you really need? I have a bounty, so many 'things' that I had to build an addition to the storage shed we built last year. I'd rather have family and friends around an capture memory than any item.

2. Food tastes better - yes I know I have to watch my weight more now but really, since I have to watch it, every morsel I eat should be important and taste good.

3. Less money - Last year I changed jobs, from high pressure to low pressure. From management to technical (see my other posts to this blog). I took a cut in pay at a time when we had 3 kids in college (thanks to my understanding and supportive wife!) but it paid off in mental health and because we now commute together the difference in wages is down to just a couple of thousand dollars.

4. Spiritual Self - I cannot believe that I, a devout non-believer have found religion. Of course it is still a journey but the 'faith' component of my life is sure filling in holes that were in need of filling.

5. Music - I took clarinet lessons as a kid, dropped them in the 8th grade, picked it up again four years a ago, dropped it when I returned to school and now am taking voice lessons. I'll never be a great singer but it is so enjoyable that I do it just for that alone.

6. Short time - OK, when you cross the 50 bridge (I crossed it a little while back) you know that the light at the end of the tunnel is your exit. I get it, time is finite not infinite. There is a limited supply and every day waste will never be given back.

So live, love, and follow your passions.

DataStage and SAP BI 7 continues..

So, it has been a while but we are finally over the major hurdles of the transition from BW3 to BI7 (SAP Business Warehouse releases). To date here is a micro summary of the problems discovered along the way:
1. BW sends NULLS, BI doesn't (watch all those stored procedures that tested for NULL fail!)
2. BW was ASCII, BI7 is Unicode (DataStage needs NLS to work with this and it is buggy)
3. BW worked through a proprietary interface, BI uses RFC services. The RFC is a resource hog on the BI side and does not like to release connections when it is through. DataStage 7.5.1 wont get the OHREQUID,DATAPAKID, & RECORD unless you patch a variable on the BI side
4. Watch for special characters in the BI data set corrupting the data when it gets to DataStage, IBM is working on this one.
5. Study the process for Quelling a delta load after it fails, you are going to need it
6. Timing is everything. If you are initiating the load from the DataStage side, be prepared to wait a while and set the timeout variable high enough. Better yet, set it up so that the DataStage job is activated by the BI side, then all you have to worry about is permissions

OK- there were many more problems, most of them were just the steep learning curve I or the SAP team faced in the transition. It is mostly working now and if anyone wants to know more they can post something.

DataStage and SAP extraction The Open Hub

So you are about to migrate (finally) from that ancient BW datawarehouse to the new spiffy SAP Netweaver enabled one you say? Well, thank goodness you have all your extracts in DataStage so migration should be pretty straight forward, right? Not so fast!

We started our migration almost a year ago. I was new to everything, new job, new software (both DataStage and SAP), new people. My first assignment would be to assess what the lelev of work would be in migrating our BW extracts to BI 7. I started with the Ascential (err...IBM) manuals for the SAP BW Pack. That's where I ran across this little tidbit..."During the initial install of the Ascential PACK for SAP BW you will be prompted to choose either the Open Hub Extract stage (3.5 or greater) or the Extract stage for supported versions less than 3.5 (less than 3.5). The
Open Hub Extract stage and the Extract stage cannot exist on the same machine."

Did you get that last line, "cannot exist on the same machine?" So, that's the first gotcha. You have to have a license to install this on another server. Fortunately, or DataStage (err. ..IBM Webshere) representative were great and they provided us with a time limited copy to help in the transition.

So, Lesson 1 - you need a separate server and license.

Of course the same is also true for your client install! So, you will need a second client install (on a different machine) so that you can migrate and test your DS jobs.

Lesson 2 - you need a separate place to put the client software if you intend on maintaining your existing code while you migrate.

I partially solved this second item by installing the client software on the new server and then just remoting in. But if you have several developers this can be a problem.

Next - DataStage and that pesky SAP GUI (along with passwords)