Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Ask a group of IT specialists (especially BI specialists) what is meant by Business Intelligence and you will probably get a different answer from each person. Some will take a very narrow view and focus on, perhaps, the backend database technology, a single reporting application, or even a specific way to analyse data. Others take […]

Investment in Business Intelligence, as for all other IT endeavours, is driven by one of three factors:
“Does knowing this information (at the right time) allow me to sell more?”
“Does knowing this information allow me to reduce my business costs (e.g. buy cheaper, reduce headcount)?” and
“Do I need to report this information to comply with regulation?”
Of […]

A while back I blogged about a data warehouse review we are doing for a customer. At the time I was less than impressed by the consistency of the approach to DW design and the lack of knowledge of how Oracle works and what is ‘built-in’ as functionality. I have now moved on to another […]

You may have read in a previous Blog that I am a great believer in the use of constraints (not null, primary key and, of course, foreign key) in a data warehouse. In an Oracle data warehouse these constraints inform the query optimiser about relationships between dimension and fact data. Without this information features such […]

Well
that’s probably it from me for 2005, as I’ve just got a couple of days on-site
with a customer and then I’m off until after the break (although Nick Goodman and I are talking about doing a “Review of 2005″ Podcast. so watch this space…)
Until then, have a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year, here’s […]

Well
that’s probably it from me for 2005, as I’ve just got a couple of days on-site
with a customer and then I’m off until after the break (although Nick Goodman and I are talking about doing a “Review of 2005″ Podcast. so watch this space…)
Until then, have a Merry Christmas and a safe New Year, here’s […]

We’ve just finalised the agenda for the

January 31st UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG and if I say
so myself, I think it’s about the best one we’ve ever put together. We’ve
managed to get Oracle’s Kevin "Mr. OLAP" Lancaster to do two presentations on
OLAP tips and techniques, together with "from the trenches" presentations by
Jeff Moss, […]

I came across a couple of interesting articles over the weekend that some of
you might be interested in.
If you got the chance to listen to Chris Webb and Nigel Pendse’s podcast last
week, on

the effect that SQL Server 2005 will have on the BI market, you’ll probably
be interested in an article Nigel has just published on […]

In a recent Oraclesponge posting David Aldridge writes about a way to get around the “ORA-12034: materialized view log younger than last refresh” error. Of course his method relies on you knowing what it is about the MV that needs to be fixed to get it back into to sync with its source tables (or […]

For this last posting on XML Publisher I thought I’d take a look at how
reports are deployed into production. The approach I’ve used so far - build a
report template using the XML Publisher Desktop product, then preview it as a
PDF - is obviously the way that you’d develop and test reports, rather than roll
them out, […]