Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

If you followed the recent colourful debates on

comp.databases.oracle.server on

tuning using ratios vs. tuning using extended trace,

sizing the buffer cache,

calibrating the cost-based optimizer, and

rebuilding indexes, read Cary Millsap’s book on

Optimising Oracle Performance, Niall Litchfield’s
Five Great
Oracle Myths presentation, or read Richard Foote’s
paper on
Index Internals, you’ll be interested to know that Don Burleson has just
published an interesting article […]

The other week I was working for a client who was putting together a type 2
slowly changing dimension (a.k.a. ‘SCD2′) to hold details of their customers. A
customer could (for example) move over time, and the type 2 dimension tracked
all changes to their postcode over time. When a transaction was recorded in the
fact table, the fact […]

GMAILFS - GMail Filesystem: "GmailFS provides a mountable Linux
filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a
Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help
provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail. GmailFS supports
most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link,
unlink, truncate and rename. […]

Analytic Functions In Oracle Warehouse Builder: "Analytic Functions are
an important feature of the Oracle database that allows the users to enhance
SQL’s analytical processing capabilities. These functions enable the user to
calculate rankings and percentiles, moving window calculations, lag/lead
analysis, top-bottom analysis, linear regression analytics and other similar
calculation-intense data processing. This whitepaper describes how to use some
of these […]

"BI
on the Linux platform picked up even more traction last week as a trio of BI
vendors announced product support for the open source operating system."
writes
Stephen Swoyer for Enterprise Systems. "Cognos Inc., Actuate Corp., and
Siebel Systems Inc. all trumpeted Linux-related announcements in conjunction
with the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, which took place last week in San
Francisco."

I’ve had to block all new comments on this site, because of a huge increase in comment spam over the last few days. I’ve got the MT Blacklist plugin installed, but it only stops comment spam that’s been previously reported, not the new ones that were coming through. I had over 500 posted today, and […]

DatabaseJournal.com: "For most DBAs, not only is there Oracle database
administration to deal with, but there are Oracle administration issues as well.
What do I mean by "Oracle administration?" Depending on your role within your
company, "administration" can encompass several areas related to the use and
licensing of Oracle’s software. Some of these areas include MetaLink (and its
site administration), […]

Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control for Windows is now

available for download from OTN.

Enterprise Manager Grid Control is a browser-based version of
Oracle Enterprise Manager, with administrators logging into a management
repository and then going on to manage multiple databases and application
servers. The web-based version of Enterprise Manager that comes as part of the
normal 10g install only manages […]

In my latest article for DBAZine.com, entitled
"A Look Into The Future Of
Microsoft And Oracle OLAP", I take a look forward to some of the features
planned for Oracle 10g OLAP and Microsoft Analysis Services 2005.
For Microsoft, the emphasis on Analysis Services 2005 is around making it
easier to get data into analysis services cubes, with a […]

Sergio Leunissen
lets us know
that the

HTML DB Installation FAQ has just been updated on OTN.