PowerPoint is the Enemy

I went to Starbucks about an hour ago to treat myself to a mocha (even though it was nonfat). And while waiting for my coffee to arrive I noticed the front page of The New York Times. Right smack in the middle of the page was a horrendous PowerPoint slide and the title of the article underneath read "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint".


Even though I knew I could get the story online when I got home, I just had to buy the paper and read it immediately.

I'm a huge believer in the concept of "death by PowerPoint". There certainly have been a multitude of presentations that I have suffered through that nearly killed me! I follow and attempt to learn from the presentation methods of Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, Seth Godin and others who are out there promoting more effective ways to deliver presentations. While this article's title may paint with broader strokes than I would by saying "PowerPoint is the enemy", I mostly agree with the sentiment. PowerPoint itself may not the enemy, but surely the way it is commonly used is close to a criminal act.

Just look at that slide the article displays! Could you ever make any sense of that thing? It was shown to the General leading the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan last summer and he was quoted as saying, "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war." Other high ranking military officers said things like "PowerPoint makes us stupid" and "It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control." One General even went so far as to ban the use of PowerPoint presentations!

In my experience, PowerPoint presentations have replaced meaningful documents (like white papers) and are used in an attempt to distill all the knowledge deemed pertinent on a topic into a few bullet points. The hope is that a busy person (i.e. usually an executive) can "get the idea" of what is being conveyed without having to spend much time reading something more detailed. But, the supposedly concise presentations I see most often have entire slides filled with sentences (all preceded by the infamous bullet point) that are so busily annoying that I can barely stand to look at them. A presenter is really not even a necessary component of the presentation anymore as most people intend for their slide decks to stand alone and tell the story without need for a person to deliver the message verbally. When these presentations are delivered, they are (more often than not) simply read by the presenter. On top of that, many presentations are not verbally delivered by those directly responsible for the content, but instead are delivered by a high level manager who only shows up on the day of the big presentation to lead the show. I don't know...that just seems odd to me. I'm not going to say there are no merits at all to this use of the tool and this particular approach, but I do find that what is delivered is rarely what I personally want to see/hear.

The article states that military commanders say that "slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point." The technical presentations I see suffer from this in that they are not very polished nor persuasive. But even a "bad paper" that makes an attempt to provide detailed information on a topic is better than being bored to death with a slide presentation that either puts too much or too little meaningful content in front of me. But, the fact that the use of PowerPoint has become so commonplace, it is rare to ever get a detailed paper...you only get the slides. And even if you do get a paper, it is often full of grammatical issues and seems to have been written after the slides such that the paper doesn't offer that much more information but only slightly lengthens the bullet points from the slides.

There are a lot of people out there trying to change the way PowerPoint is used. They work to show that presentations can be used to support the speaker and the topic effectively. I think that most of these advocates separate presentation design and use from documents providing detailed information. I just wish there was a faster way to affect change in this area!

What happened to the days of speakers standing alone in front of the crowd? When was the last time you attended a session that didn't use PowerPoint? Maybe we all need to ban the use of PowerPoint (and all presentation software) for a while and return to a more simple way of sharing our message. Perhaps instead of propagating the use of PowerPoint, organizations could start hosting Toastmasters meetings and teach people how to become more effective speakers.

As I said earlier, I don't think it's necessarily the software that's the problem. But, it's sure an easy target on which to place the blame for the sad situation we find ourselves in every time we are forced to sit through another agonizingly boring presentation.

Oh, the places you'll go!

How do you feel about the place you're in, the places you've been, and the places you hope to go? As I was reading "Oh, the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss to my daughter this evening, I was struck by how much wisdom was held in that simple children's story. So, I did a quick search and found the words of the story for you.

For those sports buffs out there, check out this cool video using this story that aired as an opener for the 2006 SuperBowl.



Note (5/8/2010): This post originally included a video link that is no longer available so I removed the reference.

Yes, I'm still here

I admit it. I'm a binge blogger (I borrowed this term from a friend of mine who posted on the same topic). I make several blog entries over the course of a week or so and then it may be a month or two before I show up again. I suppose my good intentions of blogging regularly just get swept under the rug of day-to-day reality and how/where I choose to spend my time. But, regardless of frequency, I suppose it's fairly obvious from this post that I'm still here.

I was doing a bit of blog surfing tonight to catch up on a long list of blogs I enjoy reading and came across the following from a recent Seth Godin post:

"Firing the customers you can't possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty."

Amen! This reminded me a a time early in my days as a self-employed consultant back in the mid-90's. I took on a client that turned out to be a royal pain-in-the-backside. They'd call me to complain about their fax not working (among other odd things) and even though the services I had contracted with them to provide had nothing to do with most of the things they called to rant about, they expected me to address and fix them all. I ended up giving them back the initial fee they'd paid and canceled the contract. I felt better immediately and the time I was spending dealing with them was quickly filled with several new (and much nicer and "normal") customers.

So, I can relate to this quote. I also think it just makes good sense across the board. Whatever you give your time and attention to (careers, relationships, etc) should yield positive (whatever positive means to you) results. If you find that you're always unhappy when dealing with certain aspects of life, then I think it's entirely reasonable to look for ways to eliminate/reduce whatever it is and replace it with something that brings more happiness and positiveness to you. It may seem difficult and a bit scary to do so, but I think in the long run it's the way to go.

On a different note, I spoke today at the MAOP (Mid Atlantic Association of Oracle Professionals) Conference held today in Reston VA. I really enjoyed being there and got some good feedback and questions after speaking. In my current work I don't get the opportunity to speak in front of folks like I used to when I taught classes at least a couple of weeks a month. So, I'm really grateful to MAOP for asking me to speak and for having the opportunity to get a "fix" from presenting to a great audience!

And speaking of conferences, the annual Hotsos Symposium is coming up March 7-11 in Dallas. This will be the first one I've missed since they started having them 8 years ago (bummer!). But, if you want to attend one of the best conferences anywhere, and the only one focused specifically on Oracle performance, there's still seats available. I highly recommend it!

2000 columns - take 2

Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday's post. After Randolf's comment about the 1000 column limit, I realized that so far, I've not attempted to create the full table in one go. Instead, I've been building 20-ish separate tables that contain the needed raw data plus the computed/aggregated columns. This speaks to Noons comment about having separate tables that access and group data up that can be executed in multiple streams

The SAS guys want to be able to access a single row that represents all the information they need for one type of data (for example, a shipment). So far, as I build the separate tables, I've been using a couple of views that combine several of the tables. The SAS guys then use the view to build a SAS dataset and merge multiple datasets together.

Yesterday's post was prompted by the prospect of having to build a single table in Oracle that does what they're currently doing via SAS. And to Joel's point, SAS is certainly not Oracle! One of the original goals was to ultimately have a table built and maintained in Oracle and only accessed by SAS, not multiple objects in Oracle that have to be merged into SAS datasets.

I've been so busy and focused on getting the data formulated/aggregated, and doing so as efficiently as possible, that I hadn't even made the attempt to build out a full table with all the columns of all the tables included in that one table. When I started thinking about it yesterday, I got all freaked out about doing it and that's what prompted my post. I hadn't even thought about the Oracle imposed limits on the number of columns! I've been told more than once that the team had delivered 1000s of columns before, so I just hadn't given it much thought. But, given there is an Oracle limit, I'm guessing they've never delivered a final Oracle table like they want to do this time...so, it's either been done in SAS previously or the Oracle tables didn't exceed the 1000 column limit.

So, I've got lots to figure out over the next few weeks. This just may be more fun than I can stand! :)

2000 columns

How many columns does the largest table you've ever worked with contain? The current project I'm working on has 1 table with almost 2000 columns (and it's likely to add more!). This is the most highly denormalized design I've ever encountered and there's something about it that makes the performance optimizer in me cringe. But, the statisticians that have to munch and crunch this data in SAS tell me this format best suits their needs (based on similar designs used successfully in previous projects).

I think I'm really more concerned about the work that has to be done to populate these columns as most of the columns contain aggregations or formulations of some sort or another. So, perhaps it's not the number of columns that really is niggling at me as it is everything that must occur to produce the values contained in a single row (it's a lot).

What's your experience? Did the number of columns help, hinder or make no difference in the design and performance of the application that used such wide tables? This phase of the project is a proof of concept so it'll be a while before I get hard data on how well (or not) this design really works, but it has certainly made me curious about what other folks have experienced.

Let me hear from you if you have any comments or insights!

Compression to the rescue

We've had issues getting enough storage space allocated on the development server our project is intended to use. For this project, our team doesn't have full DBA rights on the box and have very limited privileges. Even before I joined the team, a request had been made for a little over 3.5 TB of space to be used for the development of a proof of concept datamart. The first project deliverable is due this week and we've only been allocated 200 GB so far. As you can imagine, it's difficult to get needed data loaded when there is less than 10% of the space we need available.

The data is supposed to span a 2 year period. A set of base transaction tables have to be extracted from various sources and loaded, then that data will be flattened out into a model that will represent the final design. With only 200 GB currently available, my initial loads for 5 (out of 50) tables took nearly all of what we had available. So, I had to do something to try and fit as much data as possible into the space we had available. Compression to the rescue!

I decided to compress the tables I had extracted using basic compression (just add COMPRESS to the table definition). But first, in order to try and get the most optimal compression possible, I collected statistics on the tables I wanted to compress and reviewed the num_distinct column statistic. Using this statistic, I sorted the data into my new compressed table using a column order from lowest to highest number of distinct column values.

When the new compressed tables were ready, I had achieved 86% compression! Using this method, I was able to load the majority of the key tables I needed to allow progress to continue for our initial project deliverable. I still haven't been able to get everything, but at least I got enough to allow our statisticians to produce some initial findings (the project is intended to create a predictive analytical model).

An additional 2 TB was allocated to us on Friday but of course it was on a different server so the initial data has to be exported and imported into the new location (sigh...). But the lack of available space gave me an opportunity to effectively use a feature I probably wouldn't have used if I had all the space I needed to start with.

Book Adverts

I'm very pleased to announce two Oracle related books I have co-authored are to be published shortly by Apress.


The first book is entitled Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table and it will be officially published in December. There are 9 chapters currently available for eBook download via the Apress Alpha program. The Alpha program allows you to purchase (at a substantial discount from the full publish price) an unedited, unfinished pre-release format. The full book isn't available yet, but when it becomes available, you will be able to download the full eBook at no additional cost. It's a good option if you want to get a jump on what's to come! I wrote the chapter on Managing SQL Performance. I'm really excited about the book and am very proud to be among the group of Oak Table folks who are co-authoring it together.

Not far behind the Oak Table book will be Beginning Oracle SQL. The book is a revision of the classic Mastering Oracle SQL and SQL*Plus by Lex de Haan originally published in 2004. Again, I was fortunate to be able to work with a fantastic group of co-authors to revise Lex's work to include many of Oracle's latest developments to the SQL query language. I knew Lex for only a very short time before his passing in 2006 but I knew him to be a brilliant and wonderful man and I'm very honored to be able to contribute to revising his original work.

These books represent my first time as a published author. I've written many whitepapers and articles for various Oracle user group periodicals and such in the past but never attempted the process of writing a book. After having this experience, I'm grateful that my first time was as a co-author. It's comforting to know there are other folks out there sweating the process with you!

The folks at Apress have been awesome and I hope that my first experience as an author won't be my last!