All posts by Johnnyq72

About Johnnyq72

Jan has been working with Oracle since the early nineties. As an administrator, consultant and solution architect he has contributed to the ongoing development of informations systems, mainly for healthcare purposes. As European business developer, Jan recently took on the challenge of establishing a firm basis for Dbvisit Corp. Combined with this effort, his passion for the Oracle Standard Edition database helps to carry out the message for the necessity of high quality IT solutions.

My Oracle 2014, what a blast…

Business, Development, General, User Groups, , , , , ,

Twenty-fourteen… What a year!

As the year draws to a close, I just wanted to take a few minutes to look back at the passed crazy 12 months… Crazy from a personal as well as a professional point of view!

ougfIn June things took off for the Oracle stuff with a visit to OUGF14. My second real talk after starting to speak in UKOUG-Tech13. Plus the bonus, the first ever Round Table on Oracle Standard Edition, together with my friend Philippe Fierens and the support of Ann Sjökvist. Always imagined, never experienced, the way technology binds people. For all the events happening in Haltia, Finland, please read this post.
OUFG14 was also where I met Gurcan Orhan for the first time. My partner in (hard) rockin’ Oracle stuff!! Together with my international peers, we have quite a team and this makes me super proud.

I owe an apology to the Scotts! I should have been in Linlithgow presenting. I was honored to be selected to travel to the beautiful city of Edinburgh in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, but there were to many things going on, so I had to cancel. I am so sorry!!Scotland

The next stop on the agenda was Oracle Open World. But before I could pack my bags, up and leave, there was A LOT of work to be done at VIR e-Care Solutions coordinating and rolling out a brand new Oracle infrastructure to all of their clients.
And not alone that, there was a trip to Hamburg for Dbvisit with a presentation at the DOAG Data Replication SIG meeting, organized by Johannes Ahrends. Of course, also Björn Rost was present, plus a number of the other representatives of the data replication scene in Germany.

Oracle Open World was not the high-point of 2014, which was somewhat surprising, actually… I cannot really put my finger on it, because the days were packed with good stuff, unexpected encounters and many more goodies… But somehow, the second time around, and with a lot more OUG-experience, it didn’t crack up to be event Numero Uno of 2014! I can safely say, looking back, that national Oracle User Group events are more interesting. You get to have more quality time with the people you just get to meet a few times a year.
Still, with all the content and with everything that happened… And especially the lunch with Martin NStretchedLimoash in the sun at the CCM as well as the unparalleled drive by Stretched Limo to Treasure Island, hosted by Portrix (Henning and Björn) with Yuri Velikanov, Ilmar Kerm and others. I am not complaining!!

Coming back from America there was a huge surprise and honor for me.

ACEAssociateNominated by my peers, Oracle Corp. saw it fit to award my efforts for the Oracle Community with the Oracle ACE Associate recognition. I had never thought or expected this to be a possibility for me, so this was a complete surprise which started a chain of events, ending at the end of this post.

The final event for 2014 was the DOAG Jahreskonferenz in Nuremberg. I guess the biggest event in Europe and the biggest even for me by means of contributions. I had my “Pre-APEX” talk, there was the second edition of the Standard Edition Round Table, co-hosted by Philippe and chaired by Johannes Ahrends!! What a shock 😉 There was the Data Replication forum and Dbvisit #RepAttack!
DOAG also, and again, brought a sheer endless list of new and re-encounters with Oracle Hero’s. My good friend Peter Raganitsch was also there…

At the end of the year, you would think that you would be “home free”, right?

Well 2014 had a last trick up it’s sleeve! The year ended with me saying goodbye at VIR e-Care Solutions BV. After 16 years we had to decide to break up. It’s like tearing off a band-aid. You do it quick and it hurts less, but still…

So, I am a free man!

With this last development, set in the light of everything I had the chance of doing this year, it has been a great deal to handle. The first visit to Oracle Open World, back in 2010 has started a chain of events that has invoked some quite unforeseen twists and turns. It all looks and feels like it has been worth it, but it has indeed taken it’s toll.
Currently I am enjoying some well deserved but also much needed time off with my wife and family and I will start thinking about new ventures in a bit.
Please take a look here and here for some more information!!

Rest assured, there are some new ideas and they are EXCITING!!!
One of them being that  I will be speaking at #OUGN15, better known as the boat conference, with a brand new talk.
But hey, we’re looking back here and I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the surprise.

Stay tuned…


A new form of on-line data protection

Business, Database Replication, Development, Oracle tips, Standard Edition, Technical, , , , ,

In the last few years I have been active with data replication solutions in the Oracle realm as you may know. This data replication field is one that has many angels, so there is something new to learn every day and sometimes there even are really new possibilities!

Take heed…

The first and most familiar form of the data replication forms is ‘physical data replication’, also known as ‘Standby Database‘.
In this form of replication, both source and target database are binary identical. Changes are propagated by copying the archived redo logfile from the source database to the environment for the standby database lives. Most often this is another server, preferably in another building in another town, far enough away to not be struck by the same havoc.

There are basically 3 ways to accomplish this;

  1. Use Oracle Data Guard (in Enterprise Edition Oracle database)
  2. Use Dbvisit Standby (in all Oracle database Editions)
  3. Write your own scripting (not recommended in any case)

The second and more emerging form of data replication is ‘Logical Data Replication’.
In this form of replication, there is not real relationship between the source and the target database, other than that the target database houses data coming from the source database. They can live on different systems, be from different database version, a different operating system or even be from a different vendor.
Data is harvested from the source database, converted and copied over to the target database / system. On the target system this data is being applied, in the native speech of the the target database.

There are a few ways to accomplish this, but basically every vendor has the same technique. It is more a matter of pricing, basically.

  1. Oracle Golden Gate (expensive, complex)
  2. Dell Shareplex (somewhat expensive)
  3. IBM Infosphere (ComPlex, expensive)
  4. Dbvisit Replicate (easy, affordable)

So, having discussed this, as this is not new, why this blogpost?

Well…

A Standby database is more or less closed. You can open it occasionally to query some data, but that interrupts the apply-process.
On-line data replication does what it says, you have an active database, where data is continuously added. This way you can, for example query, the same data on two sources to spread load.

The case I mean to discuss is the following:

“I have 10 source database and I want one target database (ah, presto, on-line data replication) and I want to backup 5 tables from each source to the target database (again, on-line data replication, but wait, backup?) so I can easily copy back specific data to the source (eeeuhm, yes…) whenever a user messes up the source tables (aï…) and I want the target to be update each day at 23:00 (so… okay!)

This reeks after somewhat of a hybrid approach!

We cannot do regular on-line data replication, for this is aimed at being real-time.
And we cannot leverage Standby database, since it needs to be centralized in one database and not 10. Next to that it would take some administration to open up the standby database in read-only mode, take the copy, and close the database again.

Working with Dbvisit, we came up with “Pause Apply” and “Resume Apply”, which we combine to form “Delayed Apply“.
This delayed apply would neatly answer the question posed.

  • By “delaying” the application of changes to the data, we could make sure the requested tables are only updated from 23:00 on;
  • We can combine the 50 tables (10 databases x 5 tables) in one single target database, since it is a logical approach to the matter;
  • We can easily restore or copy back corrupted data, since both the source and the target database remain continuously open.

Using Dbvisit Replicate, having this kind of protection for your “logical test-cases”, what this company was doing to require this solution, is really affordable.
It can help in dynamically and quickly resetting specific data-sets or test-cases while remaining much more flexible than creating scripts to reset a specific data-set or test-case! And, of course, there are many more ways to use this neat feature…

DOAG 2014, Nüremberg visited

Database Replication, Development, General, Oracle APEX, Standard Edition, User Groups, , , , ,

Traveling to Nuremberg, anticipating three days of Oracle submersion. There are so many speaker heading over there it cannot be anything but successful.
This will be the first conference I will attend after being accredited as Oracle ACE Associate which, for me, makes it again a little more special.TurboProp
The first surprise, though, was just that. Arriving, by bus, at the boarding-location, there was a Bombardier DASH8-Q400 waiting, which turned out to be a turbo-prop aircraft. Okay, I jumped from a Cessna Caravan twin engine turbo-prop before, but this was still a first. As I am writing these lines, we’re descending upon Nüremberg.

On the first day of the conference, which started with a beautiful but rainy morning stroll to the conference center, The action started to really kick in from about 12:00 with the first session of my good friend Peter Raganitsch, talking about the 10 worst practices in APEX. A refresingh way of looking at software development by focussing on how to do it wrong!
The day ended with one of the “most pleasantly unorganized sessions” of the conference, where Johannes Ahrends and Philppe Fierens joined me on stage for the Standard Edition Round Table, #DOAG14-edition.

The second day was full of sessions, and I vistited Joel Kallman “APEX fast=true”, discussing the the knowledge needed to do serious application development on APEX, creating #DBADev. And, off course, the sharp presentation of my friend Franck Pachot about interpreting AWR-reports!
At 17:00 it was time for my third event, the “Electronic Patients Records system based on Oracle APEX” talk, which had quite a good turnout.
GatheringThe day ended with a super-cool meet-up with Mia Urman, Lonneke Dikmans AND Brynn Llewellyn… And later on we had a real nice depiction of #DBADev 2.0, involving Joel Kallman, Philippe Fierens, Illoon Ellen and myself.

Gathering

The third and last day of the conference was spend executing #RepAttack. This session concluded 3 full days of hands-on hacking with cool software and getting a feel of some of the new stuff.

RepAttack

A few of the cool new meetings (which we’ve dubbed the e-people to real people conversion by IRL) involved:

Thank you, DOAG, for a superb conference. I thoroughly enjoyed it. To all the Oracle aficionados, until next time!!

My wordpress site just disappeared

Business, General, User Groups, , , ,

I was just thinking about re-checking something I wrote. That happens.

So I went to my blog-site… Just to find out it was gone…

GONE?

Yes, gone!

I got the message that this domain was reserved by my provider, TransIP. And that was not exactly what I was looking for.

The mystery was quickly resolved.
By checking out the ControlPanel at my TransIP account, I found I had received a message:

Dear customer,

Because of complaints of high load on our web hosting platform we have regrettably been forced to (temporary) block your website jk-consult.nl. We have done this to ensure the stability of our servers.

WHAT!!

This high load is caused by the (automatic) posting of a high number of comments on your WordPress-website. It is highly probably that this concerns unapproved comments.

In many cases this is a form of automated spam. This leads to a high load on our web hosting servers, which leads to performace problems for you and other clients on this same server.

Eeewww…

And this was followed by some comments to quiet down this spamming.

I have now installed these two plugin’s from WordPress:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spam-comments/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/spam-comments-cleaner/

And I just checked. In stead of 8000+  there were now just 2!

Another problem solved.

Thank you Arjan van den Berg (I see these are not the first kudos you’ve received)

Printing directly with APEX

Business, Development, General, Oracle APEX, Oracle tips, Technical, , , , ,

When looking for a print solution with APEX you will find .PDF

You will find a lot of .PDF

And .PDF is good. There is nothing wrong with .PDF. In fact, .PDF looks cool and you can do a lot of neat stuff with it. With toolkits like pl/pdf you can create .PDF’s directly from PL/SQL.

But sometimes there is the need to be able to print directly.
For instance with batch-processing or with nightly print-runs or whatever. And this is where you would find yourself locked out with .PDF and, glancing Google, you would guess you’d be out of luck!
Since we had:

  • created a web based solution
  • the need to print directly
  • print in nightly-runs

plus we had:

  • about 400 reports (.rdf files) which we need to reuse (without having the opportunity to rebuild them in something like pl/pdf)
  • combine different output / distribution mechanisms

we needed to tackle this challenge!

So we did !!

It was fixed by using some old and new technology mixed together:

Oracle reports builder
and
Oracle Fusion Middleware, more specifically, Oracle Reports Server, aka WLS_Reports

By using this combination of products, you can create a printing solutions which is capable of printing directly to your network printer, create HTML or PDF reports.
Schedule them, e-mail them, and all this by URL-control!

http://<your-reports-server-node>:8888/reports/rwservlet?command=argument&command=argument&and-so-on

Use the following (much used, but far from a complete list of) control-commands:

  • report=<name of your .rdf>
  • userid=<userid/password@database>
  • desformat=HTML/PDF
  • destype=type of output of the report
  • desname=name of your output (device, file, whatever)

More commands in the link to the documentation on the bottom of this post!!

Notes:

  • You can post these parameters to the Reports Server without calling them in the original URL!
  • You can set a “local” on your Reports Server for omitting <@database> in ‘userid’ for your default database
  • Actually you can set all environment variables, like TNS_ADMIN, NLS_LANG, REPORTS_PATH, etc.

What we found is we needed to run Oracle Reports Server on Windows, just to take advantage of the Windows Printing System which is quite stable and easy to configure. (So, yes, okay, there you have it, a good thing about Windoze!)

Basically you can create a simple solution, but you can easily expand it quite a bit, making a printing and reporting solutions worthy of and enterprise environment, with distributing reports via e-mail, creating reports in file-systems, embedding reports in websites, and basically anything you want or would need.

And, you get a nice Management Console for free with this installation!

08-forms-em
Oracle Enterprise Manager Console

From this management console you can administer your print-jobs, set all kinds of parameters, which is quite neat!!

But, wait… the catch… It’s gonna cost you!

Or, can you keep it under control?

But of course!

Printing is mostly a half-on-line thing, and for a lot of stuff, it’s not extremely performance / time critical… So what can we do?

Oracle Reports Server is licensed as “Oracle Forms & Reports Server” and it will set you back € 370 per Named User or € 18.200 per CPU (being Oracle CPU’s according to the Core Factor Table!)
It’s still a whole lot of money, but would you really need more than 2 cores? If you give the machine enough memory and fast disks? Probably not.

Is it worth considering taking another node in your environment? Perhaps. This print-solutions could be a viable reason to do so. It brings you quite a bit of functionality straight from the box. But, as always, do your math and make educated choices.

The documentation link promised:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16764_01/bi.1111/b32121/toc.htm

If you would like more info, please just drop me a line!

Upgrading 11.1 to 11.2 and the time it takes

General, Oracle tips, Technical, , , ,

As many know, Oracle 12 has not reached each and every corner of many production sites. Okay, running Oracle 7 or 8 is becoming tricky…
Moving from anywhere to Oracle 11.2.0.4.0 is still a valid action as it is still the latest and rock-solid stable release out there.

I wanted to share what I ran into, upgrading 11.1.0.7.0 to 11.2.0.4.0 with in-place upgrades (catupgr.sql). As 11.1 to 11.2 is a relatively small step, in quite a few instances we have chosen an in-place upgrade over ‘ye old fashioned export/import with the main reason; saving time and reducing chances on error as you factually stay in the same database.

On the topic of “saving time”… this is what I found…

At some point during the upgrade, tailing the log, I noticed that an unreasonable and unexplainable amount of time (50% of the entire upgrade duration in my example) was spent on just this one statement:

— revoke grant with grant option privs

Note: Contact me for the actual statement…

This got me puzzled to such a state, and since The Internet didn’t hold any of the answers, I decided to turn to MOS and raise an SR.

And after just a few messages to and fro, the issue was found!

The time this bit of program spends, is spend on ORDIM and SDO, better known as Oracle Intermedia and Oracle Spatial. Bringing me to the task (which I knew that answer on already, as a matter of fact) of finding out if both of these technologies were used, and that was easy enough:

connect / as sysdba
— ORDIM
select owner, table_name, column_name
from dba_tab_cols
where data_type in (‘ORDAUDIO’,’ORDDOC’,’ORDIMAGE’,’ORDSOURCE’,’ORDVIDEO’)
order by 1,2,3;
— SDO
select owner,index_name from dba_indexes
where ityp_name = ‘SPATIAL_INDEX’;
select owner, table_name, column_name
from dba_tab_columns
where data_type = ‘SDO_GEOMETRY’
and owner != ‘MDSYS’
order by 1,2,3;

Which in my case returned “no rows selected” as expected.

With this knowledge “in pocket”, it was a matter of removing the unwanted matter

  1. Deinstall Oracle Spatial (SDO) following the steps listed in Note.179472.1.
  2. Deinstall ORDIM per $ORACLE_HOME/ord/im/admin/README.txt, see Note.337415.1.

And do the upgrade in half the time.

Well, hope this helps to save you some time.

Post #OOW14

Oracle APEX, Standard Edition, User Groups, , , ,

Back at San Francisco International. Unfortunately in the knowledge that Alex Nuijten and I (probably amongst others) found out to be standby for this flight. –> During the writing of this post we found out we will be home in time, which is great news in any case.

This time around Oracle Open World has indeed been different. Usually I always like to post a list of people I had, until now, just met on-line. Each and every gathering I went to, there would be a bunch of new people.
I am going to skip this habit because the post would just get too long 🙂 There is a big difference attending a conference of the magnitude of Open World, knowing people or being here as a solitaire visitor, which I did in 2010.

As I wasn’t just a visitor at Open World, I actually had the chance to actively contribute to this technology fest. #RepAttack, as an opportunity to share knowledge about logical data replication. Together with a fine crew of Dbvisit replication specialists!

DataTitansMy colleague Vit Spinka spoke about the evolution of redo logs, which gives a great background to this technological solution. Vit spoke, as did other members of the Dbvisit crew, like Arjen Visser and Mike Donovan.

The major highlight for me personally was to have the ability to host #RepAttack at the Oak Table location. Together with the champions of Delphix and Confio, we occupied the Children’s Creativity Museum Community Lab and explained and taught about different technologies. Our subject being Logical Data Replication (of course).

RepAttack CCM

Un-very-fortunately, I attended Oracle Open World on an exhibitor pass. This meant I got to see no session at all (Okay, except the on or two I snuck into). All the more time to stroll around the exhibition terrain, see the demo-grounds and have lunch with Martin Nash in the sun (which was a very nice experience), especially since Martin persuaded my to go out and hand out the left-over lunch to some homeless people around the Moscone Center. Thus heading the call of Connor Mc’Donald.

Okay, so before I forget… A big thank you to Björn Rost and Henning Voss of Portrix Systems for making the Appreciation Event a night worthy of remembrance! And to my friends at Dbvisit of course, for getting me to San Francisco in the first plance!!

Time flies when you’re having none…

A saying all too true! Having spent too little time with too few of my Oracle friends in the great city of San Francisco, it was again time to fly home… As you saw, in the beginning of this post.

Next stop… #DOAG14!!

Oracle Open World 2014

Database Replication, Development, General, Standard Edition, Technical, User Groups, , , , ,

In flight to San Francisco on the 27th of September 2014. Heading out to Oracle Open World for the second time.
Much has changed since my previous visit.

The previous time I came to this biggest of IT events in the world, I came as a spectator, representing an IT company, where my mission was to soak up as much knowledge as I possibly could, submerging myself in the flow of the event.
This time ‘round, I come as a participant, representing another IT company that wants to add to the scene and deliver a smart alternative.
And also personally there is a huge difference! Previously I went alone and was thrilled to find Frits Hoogland at the gate, which was already a familiar face to me back then! Now I am travelling to meet up with many more friends… listening to Metallica on the flight already reminds me that I will meet Gurcan Orhan over there! And in the pervious weeks many promises were made for quick meet ups and catch ups on the grounds of what we call “Oracle Open World”!

Clock set to Pacific Summertime, good morning world!!
Time has come a long way since my previous trip! Where I was bound to the onboard entertainment system a few years back, now I can work, prepare and write this text in flight. Hoping to meet all of you guys out here.
And today, Oracle Open World came to a real kick-off, when we went to the Golden Gate Bridge Run, organized by @thatleffsmith, where we ran or walked with a great number of Oracle celebrities, ranging from @oraclebase through @helifromfinland and Frits Hoogland to @dbvisit!
After this @ilmarkerm, myself and two lovely ladies from Finland shared a cab to Moscone where we met up with the RACAttack Ninja’s at the OTN Lounge…

image

It is turning out to be a good day, with the building of the Dbvisit stand, sneaking into the sessions of the Dbvisit speakers and meeting many, many friends!

#RepAttack, it’s all about learning

Database Replication, General, Standard Edition, Technical, User Groups, , , , , , , ,

Everything we do in our daily life is about learning. Especially in IT we are used to continuously learning. Digging through documentation, figuring out how this or that piece of software should work. Downloading, installing, configuring, trying, tweaking, tuning…
Dbvisit Standby

For Dbvisit, it all started with Dbvisit Standby. Logical data replication, but, logical data replication is not so hard in the end. To get it running stable, to make it do exactly what you want it to do, is an oversee-able task. With it’s wizard driven installer and the clear task of having two exactly the same databases and a little bit of time, you’ll have this process of shipping archived log files, nailed. Getting it stable and reliable is built in, so not much worry there.

Logical data replication on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame!
For a long time logical data replication was just for bigger companies with intricate information needs. And it is a little more challenging than physical data replication. There are database, schema or table considerations, what and what not to replicate to where, making sure you get it stable and reliable in your environment. Checking and following up on changes and doing all kinds of work to make sure you get the best our of your setup.

Nevertheless, Logical data replication will help you in doing:

  • “Zero downtime database migrations”
  • “Report offloading”
  • “Schema consolidation”
  • “Real-time business intelligence” operations

And because these things are about you…

You deserve a “flying headstart”

with Dbvisit Replicate!

Dbvisit_Replicate_HR croppedTo be able to bring you this, we looked at the heroes from the Oracle Technology Network for inspiration. This special group of gurus called the RACAttack Ninja’s have been involved in educating and supporting any and all with a setup of Oracle’s Real Application Cluster technology on your laptop.

Inspired by this example, Dbvisit created #RepAttack! A techno-opportunity that will be traveling the world with it’s inaugural session nowhere less than at Oracle Open World 2014.

#RepAttack is a great opportunity to network with your peers who are just as curious as you are, and to access a fantastic team of warriors who will work with you one-on-one to ensure you are up and running quickly and leaping over any hurdles effortlessly. The session will include a deep dive into core concepts to make sure you return to your organization with an in-depth understanding of how both replication and virtualization really work. Take the time to attend and be that “go-to” person when questions around these concepts come up at work.

Keep an eye out as new details will emerge over the coming days and weeks!
Make sure you checkout Twitter hashtag #RepAttack or just submit your e-mail address below!

#RepAttack sessions by her warriors have been confirmed to be at:
Oracle Open World 2014 in San Francisco, USA
Deutsche Oracl-Anwendergruppe (DOAG) Jahreskonferenz 2014 in Nürnberg, Germany

And remember!
#RepAttack is about YOU!

Watch this following video of one of my personal heroes Ronald Rood playing with Logical Data Replication in Dbvisit Replicate:

TCL, Total Cost of Loss, a new business perspective

Business, Database Replication, General, Standard Edition, Technical, , , ,

‘Total cost of Loss’ (TCL) was launched at the World Premiere of the Standard Edition Round Table during the OUGF Harmony 2014 annual user conference.

“Doing nothing does not mean it costs nothing“

Joel J. Goodman, Finland 2014

“TCL.” Abbreviations.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2014. Web. 15 Jun 2014. <http://www.abbreviations.com/term/1519392>.

Total Cost of Loss is the representation of the cost for an organization when data is lost. Experience learns that this is the hardest exercise in business continuity to figure out and the most neglected threat to an organization.

Next to the two best known terms RTO & RPO and the less well known term RTDA (‘Recover Time to Data Availability’), TCL is aimed at providing the business with an extra ratio to conduct BCP.

To correctly evaluate investments that have to be done to create a sufficient RTO time frame or RPO granularity, there has to be an understanding of the magnitude of the (financial) importance of the underlaying (data)system. TCL is aimed at calculating this figure where this figure is valid per specific data system.

The following components have currently been identified as being part of TCL:

  1. Collection price per granule of data*
  2. Present value per granule of data
  3. Business value per granule of data
  4. Added value in a dataset combination

* a granule of data is the smallest possible set of variables comprising a usable piece of information.

1. Collection price per granule of data:
The amount of effort (time, computing power, etc.) which is required to assemble and record the granule of data in the data-structure.

For example: 1) the time it takes to pick up an item and scan it’s bar-code with a bar-code scanner and put the item back, or 2) the time it takes to enter somebodies name and address at admittance inclusive of possible preparation and filing.

2. Present value per granule of data:
The current amount of effort (if possible) which is required to reassemble and record the granule of data in the datastructure. This entity is taking into account that historical data could be easy to collect at the historic point in time (#1) but would take an unequal effort to collect at present.

For example: 1) establishing if the item was on stock at the given moment, what it’s bar-code would have read at that time and possibly who scanned it at what location, or 2) finding out what person came to be admitted at that specific date and retracing what the date would have been that was entered at that specific moment and possibly by whom.

3. Business value per granule of data:
The value of the single entity of data for the operational business after the moment of measurement. During data lifetime, the value of a specific granule of data can change. Most often it will become less valuable, making it possible to archive or even cumulate** the data in multi teer storage solutions, but, when called upon, it could be this specific granule of data could be of vital importance!

For example: 1) knowing how many of a specific item is in stock, or 2) having identified a specific person within the clientgroup.

4. Added value in a dataset combination:
It can very well be and most probably is, that any granule of data is of key importance to a dataset combination, where several bits of data of different datasets of data-systems combined create information which is vital to any specific action within an organization.

For example: 1) knowing how many of a specific item is in stock to support a JIT-delivery system to keep a production line uninterruptedly going, or 2) delivering the right treatment to any specific person and being able to bill them accordingly.

** Cumulation of data can destroy a recovery path for retrieving any specific granule of data.

Creating a formula to calculate any TCL will be relatively easy.

Creating a model to extract or calculate or even guesstimate the values for the different variables of the formula will be the challenge.
A challenge that needs to be met because of the ever increasing volume of data and the ever increasing importance of certain realms, like healthcare, public services, transportation, etc., within this data mass.

Please step on board and help define TCL as it could prove to be a critical factor when push comes to shove!