Re: Use for Workspaces

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003 12:04:39 +0000, Daniel Roy wrote:

> I'm studying for my Oracle 9i certification upgrade, and a long
> chapter is devoted to "workspaces". I can't even come up with a
> situation where that might be useful, and have never seen it in action
> anywhere. Has anyone used it, or can think of a situation where that
> might be useful?
>
> Daniel

Yup. I designed an application years ago which was an inventory of land areas owned by local councils, and the things they wanted to do with that land ("This is a grass area, it's mown 12 times a year; this is a grass area that's only rough mown twice a year; this is a rose bed, it's pruned twice a year". That sort of thing).

Then the councils wanted to get clever: what if we only mowed that piece of grass 10 times a year instead of 12? How much money would we save over the lifetime of the grounds maintenance contract?

Similarly, there'd be queries such as: if we dug up those rose beds near the council estate and turned them into a children's playground instead, what would be the net effect on our grounds maintenance budget?

And they'd want to do this sort of what-iffing or modelling in the middle of the life-time of the existing contract, whilst getting ready to renew it. So you couldn't just monkey around with the existing frequencies or the existing inventory.

We did it OK: it was a fudge job though, involving the creation of modelling tables and the extraction of information out of the real tables into these faux-tables, where playing around with the numbers was safe. How much better would it have been to simply have different versions of the rows within the existing tables? Which is exactly what workspaces give you.

So: think what-if, think modelling, think projections.

Regards
HJR Received on Tue Feb 18 2003 - 02:01:14 CST