ORACLENERD: Random Thought: #19

Random Thought: #19

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Nickelodeon
I am lucky enough to get to watch The Fresh Beat Band every single day on Nickelodeon. It's one of katezilla's faves, after Dora the Explorer and Diego.

Anyway, one of the actors, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, is obviously very talented. She has an operatic (sp -10?) voice which overpowers her colleagues on the show. Doubtful it is intentional, she's just that much better.

Using the Google Machine, she's had a fairly impressive career. What I can't figure out, is how she ended up on this show. Nick does a good job at putting together shows with talented people (whether you agree with their...umm...whatever) who seem to be fairly normal (save Britney Spears sister, but that should be obvious now (and holy schnikeys, I know that...OMG...WTF???)).

Is it a good career move for her? Does she do it because she cares about the kids? Sadly, I ponder these things.

Percentages
How would you store a percentage? Would you store it as 40, 50 or 60? Or .4, .5 and .6? I opt for the latter. Why? Well, it's a decimal, it's a fraction of 1, right? If you store it as a whole number, what happens in 3 years after you are gone and the new person doesn't know? It's not obvious, is it?

OBIEE
I ran into an OBIEE project for a single business model that consisted of 2 separate design patterns, horizontal, and vertical fragmentation. That was fun. It was supposed to be easy, but it was not. I'd like to re-live that one soon. Maybe.

Labels: funny, random

¶ 3/17/2011 08:34:00 PM

Comments:

Note 40% = 0.4 and 0.04 = 4%. Better keep your day job because making change at McDonald's may not be a good option for you :)

# posted by

Dan Norris : March 17, 2011 at 9:05 PM

i hate you right now

:p

# posted by

oraclenerd : March 17, 2011 at 9:30 PM

A percentage means "x per hundred", so I'd always expect a column identified as using percent units to be stored/represented as such: 40 means 40% or 0.4; 0.4 means 0.4% or 0.004.

# posted by

Jeff Kemp : March 17, 2011 at 9:36 PM

@jeff

despite my bad math as noted by mr. norris...the column name even had PCT in it.

Barnacles.

# posted by

oraclenerd : March 17, 2011 at 9:38 PM

@dan

i have no idea what you are talking about.

# posted by

oraclenerd : March 17, 2011 at 9:49 PM

@dan

i have no idea what you are talking about.

# posted by

oraclenerd : March 17, 2011 at 9:49 PM

Definitely as fraction. It simplifies arithmetic operations a lot.

# posted by

stefanoravec : March 18, 2011 at 7:26 AM

I would store it as the real number, e.g. 0.00002

Or let the program compute the percentage itself from the raw data.

Surely you can comment/document in OBIEE?

# posted by

hillbillyToad : March 18, 2011 at 8:43 AM

@jeff

obiee can definitely do that. my point is that it shouldn't be stored as something which it is not (a whole number).

i certainly don't mind doing calculations using obiee (or any tool), just a pain that it's labeled PCT yet it really isn't.

# posted by

oraclenerd : March 18, 2011 at 11:16 AM

I agree with Chet on this one. Real number / fraction seems logical, no integers.

# posted by

Enrique Aviles : March 18, 2011 at 12:41 PM