Welcome to the career field of Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence is a concept that involves a certain level of interaction within an organism, analytically and dynamically, to come to business solutions which implement better, more effective and timely decision making. These solutions are reached by establishing an understanding of the right kinds of user data: what is going well, what is going wrong, taking and monitoring certain actions, previously unknown trends, and patterns, and improved collaboration. When all of this data is taken into account, the entire decision-making process, within a business, will inevitably improve. As an Oracle BI developer, there are specific skills which will drastically make your job easier and results more effective. As time goes on and technology changes, the list is constantly being updated. The following are skills an Oracle Business Intelligence Developer might need to know or learn in 2019.

Communication

Let’s face it, fad or not, companies are starting to ask themselves how they could possibly use machine learning and AI technologies in their organization. Many are being lured by the promise of profits by discovering winning patterns with algorithms that will enable solid predictions… The reality is that most technology and business professionals do not have sufficient understanding of how machine learning works and where it can be applied.  For a lot of firms, the focus still tends to be on small-scale changes instead of focusing on what really matters…tackling their approach to machine learning.

In the recent Wall Street Journal article, Machine Learning at Scale Remains Elusive for Many Firms, Steven Norton captures interesting comments from the industry’s data science experts. In the article, he quotes panelists from the MIT Digital Economy Conference in NYC, on businesses current practices with AI and machine learning. All agree on the fact that, for all the talk of Machine Learning and AI’s potential in the enterprise, many firms aren’t yet equipped to take advantage of it fully.

Panelist,  Michael Chui, partner at McKinsey Global Institute states that “If a company just mechanically says OK, I’ll automate this little activity here and this little activity there, rather than re-thinking the entire process and how it can be enabled by technology, they usually get very little value out of it. “Few companies have deployed these technologies in a core business process or at scale.”

Panelist, Hilary Mason, general manager at Cloudera Inc., had this to say, “With very few exceptions, every company we work with wants to start with a cost-savings application of automation.” “Most organizations are not set up to do this well.”

The RSS feed, which commonly stands for Really Simple Syndication, is an internet protocol that helps spread the availability of frequently published or updated Internet content.

RSS Benefits for an Internet Content Provider or Blogger
The use of an RSS feed saves immeasurable time for a content provider. When an interested person subscribes to an RSS feed, the owner of that feed now has a way to reach large numbers of people without having to resort to spamming techniques. The RSS feed also allows a content provider to send the requested topical information without specifically asking, every time, to those people who have subscribed. The content provider uses a program, written in XML code to make the information they post available to each person that has requested a subscription to that particular RSS feed.

RSS Benefits for the Average Internet User
The Internet grows larger by the minute. It is easy for a person to have information overload. The use of an RSS feed gives an individual more control over what information they see while on the Internet. It is also very useful for anyone that wants to stay up to date. Subscribing to the RSS feed for a topic of interest automatically provides the subscriber continued availability of the latest information on that topic. The Internet user relies on a small program called an RSS Feeder to gather the information on the RSS feeds to which they have subscribed.

Most browsers these days have built in RSS readers making that gathering the desired information easier than ever to accomplish. Joining an RSS feed is a very simple thing to accomplish.
 

RSS Benefits for Small Businesses

More and more Small Business owners are adapting targeted online marketing campaigns such as RSS Feeds in order to provide relevant content to new and existing customers. Maintaining web content such as:  company news; contests; promotional events; related articles; notifications; product launches; directories; and newsletters are examples of ways of staying in touch with customers in any niche market.  As search engines retrieve information from RSS Feeds and content is syndicated to other websites, chances of increased traffic are inevitable.  For active websites, RSS feeds are invaluable tools for small business owners.

USA.gov Updates: News and Features

Search for RSS feeds (search topics)

Welcome to Google Reader (find and keep track of interesting stuff on the web.)

NPR public radio station (popular, news, program and topics RSS feeds)

RSS in Plain English (video)

10 Helpful Uses of RSS Feeds for Marketing

Incorporate Google RSS feeds onto your site

Adding RSS Content on Yahoo

In programming, memory leaks are a common issue, and it occurs when a computer uses memory but does not give it back to the operating system. Experienced programmers have the ability to diagnose a leak based on the symptoms. Some believe every undesired increase in memory usage is a memory leak, but this is not an accurate representation of a leak. Certain leaks only run for a short time and are virtually undetectable.

Memory Leak Consequences

Applications that suffer severe memory leaks will eventually exceed the memory resulting in a severe slowdown or a termination of the application.

How to Protect Code from Memory Leaks?

Preventing memory leaks in the first place is more convenient than trying to locate the leak later. To do this, you can use defensive programming techniques such as smart pointers for C++.  A smart pointer is safer than a raw pointer because it provides augmented behavior that raw pointers do not have. This includes garbage collection and checking for nulls.

If you are going to use a raw pointer, avoid operations that are dangerous for specific contexts. This means pointer arithmetic and pointer copying. Smart pointers use a reference count for the object being referred to. Once the reference count reaches zero, the excess goes into garbage collection. The most commonly used smart pointer is shared_ptr from the TR1 extensions of the C++ standard library.

Static Analysis

The second approach to memory leaks is referred to as static analysis and attempts to detect errors in your source-code. CodeSonar is one of the effective tools for detection. It provides checkers for the Power of Ten coding rules, and it is especially competent at procedural analysis. However, some might find it lagging for bigger code bases.

How to Handle a Memory Leak

For some memory leaks, the only solution is to read through the code to find and correct the error. Another one of the common approaches to C++ is to use RAII, which an acronym for Resource Acquisition Is Initialization. This approach means associating scoped objects using the acquired resources, which automatically releases the resources when the objects are no longer within scope. RAII has the advantage of knowing when objects exist and when they do not. This gives it a distinct advantage over garbage collection. Regardless, RAII is not always recommended because some situations require ordinary pointers to manage raw memory and increase performance. Use it with caution.

The Most Serious Leaks

Urgency of a leak depends on the situation, and where the leak has occurred in the operating system. Additionally, it becomes more urgent if the leak occurs where the memory is limited such as in embedded systems and portable devices.

To protect code from memory leaks, people have to stay vigilant and avoid codes that could result in a leak. Memory leaks continue until someone turns the system off, which makes the memory available again, but the slow process of a leak can eventually prejudice a machine that normally runs correctly.

Related:

The Five Principles of Performance

In Demand IT Skills