Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

In part two, I mentioned that large files could take tens of seconds to process and the processing of a file is wrapped into a single transaction that either fails or succeeds. I also said this problem seemed to occur with outlets that typically polled larger files. I did not mention though that stock transactions […]

I never like finding why a deadlock happens, all too often the solution is embedded in the application code where some error in logic has caused multiple sessions to do things in different orders. The text of the error message provided by Oracle implies “heap all blame at the developers’ door, they are the guilty […]

Occasionally, just occasionally, I am asked to leave my sane, safe data warehouse world (OK, not many DBAs out there would agree with that) and take a look at some other systems. For the past couple of days I have been looking at ‘deadlock’ problems on a legacy application and to suggest solutions that did […]

I don’t know if anyone else has come across it yet, but
Jonathan Lewis has recorded a
podcast for DBAZine.
It talks about Jonathan’s new book, the type of work he does as a consultant,
how he got into the industry and how he got to the position he is now -
basically making sure he wrote down techniques he […]

Keith Laker from the Oracle
Business Intelligence product team dropped me a line this evening, to tell me
about a survey the Data Warehouse Development team at Oracle are carrying out.
It sounds like a useful and interesting survey and I’ll certainly be taking
part. Here’s Keith’s message:
"At the start of most data warehouse projects, or even during a […]

And relax…
Just finished the second of my two
Desktop Conference 2006
presentations, this time on Oracle OLAP Best Practices. There were more
technical problems as the start again, just as I was about to start I was asked
to move to a different conference ID (i.e. virtual "room") and only about half
of the attendees on the old room managed […]

Well I’ve just finished my first presentation for the Desktop Virtual
Conference 2006, on XML Publisher. It was a bit strange presenting it actually,
there’s no feedback during the session from the audience and no visual clues as
to whether you’re doing OK or not. At the start of the talk I told the organiser
to open up the […]

"Faster
Batch Processing" : "When you need to load millions of rows of data into
a table, the most efficient way is usually to use an INSERT, UPDATE, or MERGE
statement to process your data in bulk. Similarly, if you want to delete
thousands of rows, using a DELETE statement is usually faster than using
procedural code. But what if […]

I’ve finished the presentations now for the
Desktop Conference 2006
next week; the one on XML Publisher is the one that I gave the other week at the
UKOUG BIRT SIG (with the addition of a XML Publisher Desktop demo), whilst the
OLAP Best Practices one is a development of the two articles I did last year for
DBAZine.
If you’re […]

Yesterday I had a small rant about the use of case statements in where clauses. In a reply to this parkerpg suggested this was perhaps generated by the use of query environment such as Cognos. In this case we are not using Cognos but I think the principle holds good and we are seeing inappropriate […]