Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Today was the day for the
UKOUG Business
Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG meeting, held up at the
Institute of
Physics, London. Most of you probably know that I chair the SIG which
involves doing the welcome bit at the start, introducing (along with Andy and
Jagdev) the various speakers and getting feedback from the attendees on what to
include in future […]

Today was the day for the
UKOUG Business
Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG meeting, held up at the
Institute of
Physics, London. Most of you probably know that I chair the SIG which
involves doing the welcome bit at the start, introducing (along with Andy and
Jagdev) the various speakers and getting feedback from the attendees on what to
include in future […]

I just got in an hour or so ago after a week spent over in Ireland. As I
mentioned the other day, I was due to do a bit of presales work with a public
sector client, and I took the opportunity to
spend the
weekend in Belfast with Janet and the kids and the rest of her family […]

As an organisation, my employers firmly believe in working to standards; we are ISO certified, all of the technical staff in our outsourcing group have a minimum of ITIL foundation level certification. Lots of our guys also have vendor certifications in the products they use in their day-to-day working lives (OK, we also make sure […]

Recently we implemented some changes on a customer’s DW to improve query performance. As usual, all changes were fully tested before implementation on the production system, but because of the nature of the changes and the fact that it is difficult to adequately emulate user workload we also adopted a period of intensive review […]

As the proposed
Oracle purchase of Siebel draws closer, and Oracle announce that they’re

half way there to producing the first Fusion applications, it’s worth taking
a look at what could perhaps be the jewel in the set of technology that Oracle
has purchased, the business intelligence element of Siebel’s product line known
as
"Siebel Analytics".
Siebel Analytics is a business […]

I mentioned yesterday that I’m off to Ireland tomorrow, and the work I’m
going to be doing for most of the week is a presales engagement for a
public-sector organisation.
It’s probably true to say that presales is probably the sort of work that I
get the most enjoyment out of; you typically have to go in at the […]

A quick update as I’m off to Ireland on Sunday.
I’ve had a couple of papers accepted for
Collaborate’06,
the joint event being run by the IOUG, OAUG and Quest International. The event
is being held over in Nashville, Tennessee during April this year and I’m doing
a couple of presentations that are being sponsored by Oracle. The first one […]

Time to catch up on a few articles and bits of news.
"Closer ties between the two firms will benefit their users, but only rivals would gain from a merger" argues Martin Banks in "Why Oracle
would be mad to buy Sun". "The speculation follows a recent bout of serious "cuddling up" between Oracle chief Larry Ellison […]

I’ve got an interesting dilemma with a piece of consulting I’m doing this
week. We’re working with charity up in London who wants to add some Discoverer
reporting to their OLTP application. They’d got licences for Discoverer but
never got around to deploying it, and so our task was to do a few days of EUL
and report development, […]