Author Archives

Everything or Nothing in SQL

May 23, 2013 The following question recently came through an ERP mailing list (significantly rephrased): I would like to use the Microsoft Query tool in Microsoft Excel to extract records from the ERP database.  I would like the list of parent records to be retrieved into Excel when all of the specified child records belong to […]

Grouping Data Sets by Week Number of the Month

May 1, 2013 I saw a decent SQL brain teaser this morning in the comp.databases.oracle.server Usenet group.  The OP in the message thread is attempting to summarize data in one of his tables, with the summarizations broken down by month and then the week within that month.  Increasing the challenge, the OP required that the dates defining […]

Analysis Challenges

April 25, 2013 Roughly 12 years ago I was attempting to analyze customer order changes that were received through electronic document interchange (EDI), specifically X12 830 documents that show order forecasted demand for specific part numbers.  At the time, the EDI data was partially transformed and inserted into an Oracle 8.0.5 database, while that data […]