Using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Friday, March 31st, 2006 by Mark Rittman

I’ve just been having a play around with the
Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
which holds "copies of the internet" going all the way back to 1996. Using the
site, it’s possible to have a look at how sites looked several years ago, and so
I thought I’d take a trip down memory lane and
see how my site
looked over the […]

UKOUG Business Intelligence & Analytics Special Event, London, May 16th

Thursday, March 30th, 2006 by Mark Rittman

It’s been a week or so since my last blog posting, so I thought I’d better do
an update. I’ve been busy working away on the presentations and papers I’m doing
for Collaborate’06 in Nashville, and when I finally get down to some writing I
tend to enter "the zone", where I just ignore any emails or other […]

UKOUG Business Intelligence & Analytics Special Event, London, May 16th

Thursday, March 30th, 2006 by Mark Rittman

It’s been a week or so since my last blog posting, so I thought I’d better do
an update. I’ve been busy working away on the presentations and papers I’m doing
for Collaborate’06 in Nashville, and when I finally get down to some writing I
tend to enter "the zone", where I just ignore any emails or other […]

The State of the Technical Publishing Market

Thursday, March 30th, 2006 by Mark Rittman

I was just doing a bit of random web surfing when I came across two
interesting articles on the state of the tech publishing market.
"The
Eventual Death of Developer Magazines" by Eric Sink looks at how developer
magazines are becoming increasingly redundant now that we get all our technical
information from the internet. According to Eric,

"Two days ago I […]

ROW_NUMBER() rules!

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 by Peter Scott

Despite working with DW systems for some while, the use of Oracle Analytic functions on a production system seems to have passed me by. Not because they don’t work or are slow – far from it, but because the business questions I usually get asked to look at typically can be solved with ‘more traditional’ […]

Oracle Announce Future Fusion BI Strategy

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 by Mark Rittman

Well, Oracle have finally announced what their future BI strategy is going to
be, and it looks pretty exciting. It’s been a fairly open secret that Siebel
Analytics was going to be the centrepiece of Oracle’s Fusion BI Strategy going
forward, but there’s been various rumours going around about exactly how that
might happen, going from OracleBI Discoverer being […]

Should I, shouldn’t I

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 by Peter Scott

Browsing the UKOUG website I see that the deadline for paper abstracts for the November conference is 1st May. As I had thoughts of pitching up with a DW presentation of some sort I better get my thinking cap on. I have a few ideas which I might run past people here in the UK.
Although […]

Rewrite problems

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 by Peter Scott

One of the Oracle 9.2 data warehouses my team manages uses nested materialized views for the aggregation strategy. Nesting of aggregates can reduce the workload on the batch as ‘expensive’ roll-ups only need happen once. The downside to nesting is that in order to make query re-write work for the higher-level nested tables we must […]

Ten Tips for a Successful Oracle Warehouse Builder Project

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 by Mark Rittman

I worked for a client the other week that asked me to come up with some tips
and best practices for Oracle Warehouse Builder. Without giving the game away
(otherwise you’d never pay to hire me) here’s ten tips for working with Oracle
Warehouse Builder 10g.

Don’t skimp on the design and analysis phase. Just because Oracle
Warehouse Builder is […]

XML Publisher 5.6 Conclusions

Monday, March 20th, 2006 by Mark Rittman

I said the other week, when I wrote the first two articles about 5.6 Enterprise, that’d I’d come back in a few days to report on how straightforward it was to put together more complicated reports. I’ve been delayed since then by putting together the OTN article on XML Publisher […]