Parents of children in secondary schools will be aware that a slow walk through the basics of PowerPoint doesn’t exactly set the world alight for many teens but Gove went further by saying that current content isn’t just dull, it’s harmful.

Not injurious for our young citizens, of course, but a threat to our economic and entrepreneurial prospects. The mistake that has been made is teaching children how to use applications, not how to develop them.

Here’s a view worth listening to: “Programming a computer is really, really creative. And what’s disappointing now is that for lot of kids in school, the way they meet the computer is like the way they meet a fridge, it’s white goods.

“They don’t know that if they can imagine the computer doing something differently, they could program it.” So said Tim Berners-Lee.

Clearly, we don’t need to foster passive office skills but need to fire up the imagination of the able. Our global, inter-connected, furiously paced world demands that we continue to develop what Berners-Lee describes as ‘a human system mediated by technology’.

Shaping the future is the work of today and innovation only happens through a fierce engagement of the creative and the analytical. We need more of it. It’s out there; we just have to nurture it.

This is a nice video that outlines how you would improve your back management of data in QTP

The cube can be used to:

• Analyze coverge metrics of occurences of different attributes (reverse all pairs)
• Allow subset selection of n occurences of a particular distinct set of attributes
• See if a particular set of combinations of data already exists in your target database
• To provide strong data visualization of the types of data you have in development and production
• Identify invalid data and data quality problems.

This feature expands the data sources available with Datamaker and will help users create data by accessing useful information currently only available as web services.

• Open the data pool in the editor and choose row 1 edit.  Click on the preview button and verify there are no errors (marked as red).  If the preview is slow it may be that you are using an innefficient piece of SQL to retrieve data, look at the indexes or run an explain plan on the SQL
• If all looks OK then have a look around the cross table / column relationships.  If possible rationalize these to be a bit more more organized.  Datamaker provides great flexibility when referring to other columns across tables and rows however sometimes these can become quite complex.  Basically look for occurences of T2.C1 referring  to T1.C1 and T3.C1 referring to T2.C1 then you have a chain, it would be better to make T3.C1 & T2.C1 both point to T1.C1.  A bit of houskeeping also clarifies exaclty what you are trying to do as well.
• Next run the publish in batch mode – but select publish to file.  This batch publish provides very good log files, which break down each step of a publish.
• Take a detailed look at the publish and see where the time is being spent.  If it is in preparation then will be to do with building the lists in memory, maybe these lists could be preprocessed before the publish or you could add some memory to the machine.
• If a repeat has been specified take a look a the time it takes for each individual iteration.
• Run the publish directly into the target database and see how long the actual inserts take.  If this is a long time it may well be worth looking at the target database to see if there any problems there.

If none of these work, then send support the log files and we’ll take a look.

In the right click menu option in the editor you can choose to apply mass edits to data pools. This feature can be useful when you are importing existing pools of test data and wish to apply any kind of global edit or when moving data between versions.

To change a null cell to a value using the from value of ‘<null>’. You can run the mass edit in preview mode first to make sure the edits are correct.

Unique columns – picks up columns that are found to be unique according to the data sample

GUID columns – columns that have GUID values, any combination of braces/no braces; dashes/no dashes.

Empty columns – columns that have no non-null values but whose tables do have rows in them

Numeric character columns – columns of a char data type which have only numeric values in them.

Formatted numeric character columns – columns of a char data type which have formatted numeric data, for example 11-22-33, useful for picking up phone numbers
There is some additional bullet proofing around data sampling Oracle UDTs – these will get ignored in the same way as large data types get ignored

It will detect if you’re trying to do a row-limited sample against a view for Oracle, DB2 UDB and SQL Server (this is not allowed!) and will ask the user if views are to be ignored or sampled in their entirety (for other DBMS it is emulated so the restriction does not apply).
There is now an option in the Data Sampling Options to ‘Ignore Missing Objects’: this prevents the sampling process from popping up error messages when columns/tables are missing.

The BBC article goes on to talk about the potential difficulties in co-ordinating this strategy, due to ministerial overlaps over at least four departments, or private business’ reluctance to divulge the relevant information. However, no matter how much money, research or cooperation goes into protecting our ever-growing e-economy, our sensitive data (be it for national security, commercial and personal reasons) remains at risk until we understand that building a citadel outside the front door won’t stop data leaking out of an open back door!

A quick browse of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website tells you that this lesson has not been readily learnt. In the past year, the ICO has handed out eight substantial monetary penalties, six of which have been given to county and borough/district councils for losing copies of sensitive data, or distributing sensitive data to inappropriate and unauthorised sources. In almost all cases, these data breaches occurred because of unauthorised/inappropriate access internally, or production data being used and stored off-site on laptops.

To this observer, £650m is a difficult sell for such an austere government to make for external cyber-security systems when carelessness amongst local councils allows very sensitive information to, figuratively speaking, walk out of the back door. Later that week, the Chancellor asked the nation to continue to tighten their belts… maybe it’s time for us to turn around and ask that; in return, our governmental institutions tighten their data security.

Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, talked about the need to embrace the post-modern business landscape, one where ‘the customer is everywhere, and so must your business’.

Sondergaard added: “You must pursue simplicity by putting people and their needs at the centre of design. You must dare to employ creative destruction to eliminate legacy, and selectively destroy low impact systems.”

Later, Tina Nunno, vice president and analyst at Gartner added this insight: “Most IT organisations have 70% or more of their time, money and mindshare locked into reliability, keeping things going. Never taking risks means you are predictable and an easy target for your competition.”

Talking up a revolution in thinking is one thing but the realties are quite different. Most IT departments are viewed as indispensable as they ‘keep the lights on’, and that’s not to be undervalued as consumers place reliability very high on their mental checklist of requirements when interacting with a company. But they’re rarely in the driving seat when it comes to changing the strategic direction of an organisation.

The hope has to be that the Big Ideas floated at the Symposium aren’t left to CIOs to champion alone and that they become lodged in the consciousness of all at C-Level. CIOs are characterised as detail-oriented perfectionists – vital when keeping the lights on but less compatible when risk taking may be necessary.

Perhaps then the time is right for board level members to get to grips with this post-modern thinking and back CIOs who are attempting to re-engineer the way IT interacts with customers in this new and fluid business world.