Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

One of our clients that I worked at recently had a rather tricky report that
they wanted me to help with. At present, the report was put together using
Excel, and looked something like this:

The report consisted of two sections, the top section being the actual,
budget and variance figures for a department, and the bottom section being […]

Ingredients:
1 data source
1 database to store the data warehouse
1 reporting layer (optional)

Method:
Add data source to database, mix well. Decorate with optional reporting layer.
Sounds simple, and not a Kimball or Inmon in sight! But as with all great recipes it’s the quality of the ingredients that counts.
The database: I only “cook” with Oracle. Not because it […]

I’m still alive, but away from home most of the time at the moment so unable
to update the site or reply to emails. My rittman.net mail account is *still*
playing up, so if you need to get in contact (please, no technical questions for
the time being) you can contact me at mark.rittman at gmail.com. If you
followed […]

Of all dimensions, time is perhaps the most common. In fact I would be hard pressed to think of a data warehouse that did not encompass time. Inventory, sales, phone calls, web click-throughs, energy usage or whatever, they all hold measures (quantities) along a time line. So you’d think that time series aggregates (such as […]

I’m having a few issues with my email server at the moment. If you need to get in contact with me over the next few days, or you’ve mailed me recently and not heard back, drop me a line at mark.rittman at gmail.com and I’ll pick it up from there.

I’m off to Ireland tomorrow to work with one of our public sector clients.
They’re putting in a data warehouse and I’m helping out with the initial
requirements definition and data model. It’s nice once in a while to do some
"business analysis"-type work, nice to step away from coding and debugging and
think instead about some of the […]

Duncan Mills’ recently posted about the

questions he sometimes receives from readers, and it got me thinking about
the type of questions I often get sent through to me. Like Duncan, I put my
email address on the front page of my blog (in case someone wants to write to me
and offer me a job with a million […]

June 17 - I was not too happy about the way this post was written - I will be revising parts of this - I will use italics to highlight changes.
I must admit my view on surrogate keys in a data warehouse is far from the orthodox. For me a surrogate key on a dimension […]

Next week I’m off to see a client in Ireland, who’s using us to help put
together the design for their data warehouse. They’re looking to use tools such
as Business Objects, Discoverer and so forth, there’s a certain element of OLAP-style
decision support reporting required, but the vast bulk of the reporting they’re
going to need to do […]

If you read Tom Kyte’s blog the other day you’d have seen the entry where he
asks you to
guess where he’s currently staying, using a photo taken out of his hotel
bedroom window. Well in the same spirit,
here’s one out of the
office window where I’ve been working the last few days - can you guess
where it is? […]