License to ErrEileen Bermingham (“CRM Breaks Out of the Gate,” March 9, 1999) reports the AMR Research revenue projection for the CRM market by 2002 to be $7.5 billion. Actually, the AMR figure is $11.5 billion.
Mark Greer Eileen Bermingham responds:My apologies for neglecting to state that I was referring specifically to license revenues in the CRM market, which the AMR Customer Relationship Management Software Report, 1997-2002 says will reach $7.5 billion.International IncidenceRalph Kimball’s article “Warehousing Without Borders” (March 9, 1999) very much interested us here at the Wisconsin Alumni Association, because we too have had to deal with many of the situations Kimball presents. I’d like to expand on his comments, which get people started in the right direction but do not, in my opinion, go far enough. First, the Universal Postal Union (www.upu.int) has a downloadable PDF file showing each member nation’s preferred addressing conventions. You don’t have to wait for Windows 2000 to get Unicode support; Macintoshes have had it since System 8. There’s an element of the person’s identity that needs to be captured; it’s what I call Name Title: Mr., Ms., Sr., Col., and Rev., for example. Kimball advocates breaking the person’s name down into component parts, but falls into the cultural trap of labeling the parts First and Last. We use Personal and Family. Furthermore, we have several additional fields: Patronymic, Matronymic, Extension, Nickname, and Name Sequencer. Slavic cultures customarily use patronymics as part of the personal salutation. Hispanic cultures use the matronymic. Angel Lopez Martinez might be a person’s full name, but if Martinez were the matronymic, you would address the person formally as Sr. Lopez. Nickname, when entered, overrides the personal name in informal address; such cognomens are an extremely important part of usage in Southeast Asian island nations. Extension is for Sr., Jr., 3rd, and so on. The Name Sequencer can take on any of four values: W=Western, H=Hispanic, O=Oriental, and S=Slavic. It tells us the order in which to assemble the name components. We’re still trying to figure out how to accommodate those cultures where people change their names at various stages of their lives, such as manhood or menarche. In assembling addresses, we don’t have just a single field for Street Direction, we have three: one preceding the street number, between the number and the name, and following the street name. Again, the address is assembled from the non-null components. We are working on a coding scheme for assembling the address components in the order preferred by each country. Finally, Kimball’s comments about the multiplicity of phone numbers are also true for addresses. Plan accordingly. One thing we can say is that cultural diversity offers a terrific opportunity for the continued employment of folks like us!
Richard Russell Query InquiryI have some questions about Ralph Kimball’s article entitled “What Didn’t Happen” (Feb. 16, 1999). Why, in the second SQL code example, does he join the SALES_FACT table to itself in the subquery? What columns are used to correlate the subquery? I also notice in the subquery that the table alias P2 is not defined.
Fred Hillebrandt Ralph Kimball responds:1. The fact table in the inner (second) query must be correlated to the same fact table described in the outer query. As with all “what didn’t happen” queries, you must first describe the context of all possible events, then identify in that context the events in which you are interested. So the inner fact table has to be related to the outer fact table, in this case with a kind of self-join — more properly called a correlated subquery.2. There is a typo in the article. The reference to the promotion key in P2 should say R2. My mistake. CorrectionIn “Business Rules Everywhere” (David Plotkin, March 9, 1999), the editors printed incorrect figures with the article. You can find the correct figures in the full-text version of the article at Intelligent Enterprise Online.We would like to hear from you! If you have suggestions or comments about our publication, write:
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