Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I have a love hate relationship with query tuning. Part of me enjoys the challenge, the solving of a puzzle, but on the other hand there is that naked fear of failing to meet a customer’s expectations.
I prefer the type of problem where I am told the business objective of the query and then left […]

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article asking
whether dimensional
modelling was suitable for all types of reporting, even operational, and I
got the largest amount of feedback that I’d ever received for an article. The
article was in response to a project I was working on where this question had
come up, and quite a few people […]

A quick test to see if I can post again (and whether my RSS feed is updating).

One of our customers recently had an interesting database design problem.

The customer has a fact table that contains transactions at a customer
level. Each customer should only be able to see their own transactions, but
also needs to see totals at a customer category and all customers level that
includes all customers, not just this particular customer.

For […]

We are currently putting the final stages of a DW migration for one of our customers to bed – they have a small DW (just over half a terabyte) on old and unsupportable equipment – it was good stuff when it is was new, but now…
Like all conscientious developers we insist on a full recovery […]

I’ve been asked by one of our sales guys to give a presentation of data warehousing strategy to a potential customer… talk about open ended. I suspect they want to know if what they already do is still sound, if they could do it better, and whether their current supplier is giving good value. The […]

“The data source: Traditionally, this is one (or quite possibly more) remote system(s)” I wrote in a recent Blog and followed that up with a promise to expand on that statement later
Firstly, note the emphasis on the word “remote”; I am a strong believer that in order to get the best performance out of a […]

I’ve been working with Oracle Reports for the past couple of days, and whilst
the product is good the

documentation is pretty poor. The problem with Reports is that it’s a
developer tool, and the documentation is
correspondingly
technical and very, very longwinded. As I finally managed to get reports up
and running and produce some output, including (after some time) […]