Excel may send chills down the spine of us when we hear users talking about its [ab]use, but it has its place in the toolset. For my money, it is a very good tool for knocking out graphs which look decent. Of course, rrdtool is my geek tool of choice for dynamic long-term graphing, but when doing scratch PoC work, I normally fall back to Excel. One thing which has frustrated me over time is, well, time, and Excel’s handling thereof.

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This post expands on one I made last year here about sampling frequency (of I/O throughput, but it’s a generic concept). The background to this is my analysis of the performance and capacity of our data warehouse on Oracle 11g. Before I get too boring, here’s the fun bit: Pork Pies per Hour (PP/h) Jim wants to enter a championship pork-pie eating competition. He’s timed himself practising and over the course of an hour he eats four pork pies.

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I’ve added two new toys to my geek arsenal today. First is one with which I’ve dabbled before, but struggled to master. The second is a revelation to me and which I discovered courtesy of twitter. rrdtool rrdtool is a data collection and graphing tool which I’ve been aware of for a while. I wanted to use it when I wrote about Collecting OBIEE systems management data with JMX, but couldn’t get it to work.

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Introduction This is the second part of three detailed articles making up a mini-series about OBIEE monitoring. It demonstrates how to capture OBIEE performance information, and optionally graph it out and serve it through an auto-updating webpage. This article takes data that part one showed you how to collect into a tab-separated file that looks something like this: [sourcecode] 2010-11-29-14:48:18 1 0 11 0 3 2 1 676 340 0 53 1 0 41 0 3 0 2010-11-29-14:49:18 1 0 11 0 3 2 1 676 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 3 0 2010-11-29-14:50:18 2 0 16 1 4 3 1 679 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:51:18 2 2 19 1 4 3 1 679 32 0 53 1 0 58 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:52:18 2 1 19 1 4 3 4 682 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:53:18 2 1 19 1 4 3 4 682 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 2010-11-29-14:54:18 2 0 19 1 4 3 1 682 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 4 0 [/sourcecode]

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Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame observed: This is sage advice (if a little crude :-)) to bear in mind when building reports for users.

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In the following list, which two mind-mapping programs are rated best? Now look at the actual numbers, and answer again Different answer? I can’t be the only one in this frantic world whose eyes are drawn to the pictures instead of words and leap to conclusions. It’s only because I use FreeMind and was surprised it scored so low …. and then realised it hadn’t. Looks like the HTML rendering isn’t the same here (FF3.

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