Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

No mater what data warehouse designers do, data warehouses are manifestly slower than transactional systems or at least they seem so to users. Queries that can be quickly expressed in words such “How many bottles of ketchup did I sell in Seattle last week?” or “Which oil stocks moved more 15 points today?” can involve […]

There is a saying that you can’t have too much of a good thing. I have my doubts; you can have too much chocolate, cream, beer, sun, or whatever. Perhaps a surfeit of something is a bad thing and as ‘no longer good’ the saying still holds true.
In data warehouses, having too many summaries is […]

A while back it was quite feasible to draw circles around discrete databases in an organisation’s IT structure and say ‘this is the data warehouse, here is the billing system and that is the blinkity-boo system. But now those circles are pretty defuse. It is harder to differentiate between where document storage diverges from data […]

Justin Kestelyn writes about Electronic Content Management and IBM buy Filenet - amazing how the world synchronises

In this example I’ll be looking at how Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition can be used to access data in Analytic Workspaces. Analytic Workspaces are potentially a more efficient way to store and summarize data used for reporting, as they can take up less disk space, return results faster and handle ad-hoc queries more effectively […]

In this example I’ll be looking at how Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition can
be used to access data in Analytic Workspaces. Analytic Workspaces are
potentially a more efficient way to store and summarize data used for reporting,
as they can take up less disk space, return results faster and handle ad-hoc
queries more effectively than data in traditional […]

Apologies to anyone who’s dropped me a line, posted on the forum, is awaiting their account to be authorised or otherwise waiting for me to get back to them.
I’ve been snowed-under with client work (not a bad thing, obviously) and all of my spare time has been taken up on preparations for the seminars. If […]

One of my customers runs a chain of supermarkets. The bottom three levels of their product hierarchy are:

Saleable unit: Product as sold - could be price marked, promotion pack, “buy on get one for free” (BOGOFF) or whatever was provided by their suppliers. Each has it own bar code for the POS system
Article: product and […]

Occasionally, people ask me why I prefer to use pre-built tables for materialized views rather than use the syntax that creates the view and allocates its storage. One reason I give is that it gives me the option of changing the MV query to improve the chances of rewrite. And how likely is that they […]

One of the paragraphs in Powell’s DW tuning book was something on the lines of (and the book is not with me right now)
…features such as bitmap indexes, bitmap join indexes, index organised tables and cluster tables were introduced in previous [before 10g] versions of Oracle, they are legacy techniques and since then the query […]