Day 5 – A good day for Germany a bad one for the Netherlands

The first morning without having party the day before everybody appeared punctually rested to the breakfast. It was as “diversified” as the days before.

As the stereotype Germans we all were on time in class in contrast to our friends who are living in more southern regions of Europe than us.

Our day goes on with a lecture about ETL (Extract Transform Load) from our Belgium organizer Hans. The first part of the lecture was more theoretical, so far some of us had some more time to give one’s eyes a rest (special greetings to our Finnish friends :D).

After the theory the practical part follows as usual. So we’ve learned to handle with MS SQL Server 2005 and MS Visual Studio. We have started up filling the tables we created the day before. This process drains in this way, Hans put before on his own computer and we reproduce what he was doing (a lot of us did it without knowing what they were really doing, it was just clicking) à in Belgium this is called LBD (“learning by doing”, Marc Schaffer, Mechelen, 2008)

After so “much” work we really deserved the lunch. But the EU doesn’t spend enough money for our food, so we had to do some extra work after the meal in form of a kind of “slavery work”; we had to fold plastic bags for the BI congress taking place the next day.

Now our task was to transfer the theoretical knowledge into real work. We have to fill in unemployment data get from RESOC in the tables created from the star scheme model we constructed the day before.

First the dimensions age groups and city were filled easily with copy and paste, that’s “Belgium ETL”. The real usage of ETL then was creating the fact table with the measures of male, female and total amount of persons. As consequence of the good preparations we have all done our work in time.

After spending a couple of time relaxing we were paying attention for the most important highlight of the evening: Soccer (but only for guys).

At 8 o’clock we went to the bar just across the street to watch the game FC Getafe vs. FC Bayern Munich. Our friends from Netherlands were just a few meters away in another bar watching the game PSV Eindhvoven vs. Fiorentina.

After an extreme exciting game (Andi get nearly a heart attack) we won the game in the extra time and were able to blame our dutch “friends”, that were losing their game.

Having an exciting day and a “really good” soccer game and we went satisfied to bed unlike the students from Netherland.

By Alex and Ramazan