Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Consider a supermarket data warehouse – you know what was sold, where it was sold and when it was sold, we can even identify what else the customer bought in the same basket. But do we really know who the customer was?
Identifying retail customers at point of sale has always been problematic, other business sectors […]

If you have an Oracle data warehouse and are using materialized views for aggregations then Oracle dimension objects would have almost certainly been defined. These objects describe the hierarchical, attribute and join relationships for dimensions and together with database constraints enable the query rewrite mechanism to successfully rewrite queries that navigate dimensional hierarchies. Dimensional objects […]

I see that Digital Press is about to publish a book on Oracle Data Warehouse Tuning for 10g. I hope to pick up a copy of Gavin Powell’s book soon (even though it is not out in the UK for a couple of months) and maybe review it here.
The contents list looks interesting - if […]

I’ve managed to find out a bit more about the
mysterious OX application
that appeared on
OTN’s
OLAP homepage last week.
What it looks like is that OX was developed by the EPB team within Oracle as
an alternative to the original, 9iR2 / 10.1.0.2 version of Analytic Workspace
Manager, as they had to do a lot of development work directly with […]

The next
meeting of the UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG is taking
place on 20th September 2005, at the
Institute of
Physics, London.
As usual there’s an interesting line-up of speakers and presentations,
including ones on Business Objects and Oracle, EPB version 2 and Oracle
Warehouse Builder, plus a talk by Oracle’s Pin Patel on how Oracle’s BI&W
products integrate together. […]

I was with a client the other week and was asked to look at a particular SQL
statement that kept failing due to lack of TEMP space. It looked something like
this (names changed to protect the innocent, etc.)

CREATE TABLE lookup_table
AS
SELECT
destn,
studref,
min(pi) pi
fROM (
SELECT
pct1.DES […]

Abhinav Argawal reports in his

latest blog posting that Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Phase 2 should be
available for download within a few days. The big new thing with Phase 2 is the
inclusion of Oracle Reports Services in the BI tier, plus if your a Forms user
this will now be present in the Forms & Reports installation […]

In a recent post, David Aldridge discussed an approach for efficiently rebuilding a table so that partition key migrated from one column to another. This is a somewhat specialised operation and one that most people need not consider (well not unless you do data warehousing and need to revise a partitioning scheme for performance reasons)
In […]

I’ve somewhat disappeared off the blogosphere over the last couple of months,
with updates to this site pretty few and far between. In fact I’ve actually been
busier than ever and doing a lot of research and writing on Oracle BI&W, plus
there’s been quite a few developments work-wise that I can’t really go into now
but are going […]

Apologies for the lack of updates to the blog recently. I’ve got quite a few things going on with work at the moment which are taking up my time, and I’m also putting the finishing touches to an Oracle OLAP performance tuning paper which will be published on DBAZine later in September.
Rest assured, once I’ve […]