Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

My heart sinks when someone in support asks us to send over the datafiles involved in some SR or other we have running with support. People seem to forget that there are some large systems out there. In our case our problem was with a 9 way join in a starflake (a hybrid between star […]

It’s currently Sunday lunchtime over in the UK, and I’m here on a flying visit in between visits to Austria and Slovenia last week, and Sweden next. I ran the BI Masterclass last week in Vienna and Ljubljana (photos here, here, here, here and here) and spent the evenings working on the OWB ETL and […]

One of our consultants dropped by my desk to ask me some Oracle questions around data life cycle management. One of his customers is moving a store based system to a central system and like a lot of systems in the UK needs to keep 7 years of transactional data available. I explained all of […]

… that the hot topic in BI is “intelligence to the masses”. Cognos have just acquired a dashboard and operational reporting vendor, Celequest. Interestingly, Celequest also market a BI appliance product, a bit of a departure from the traditional Cognos world
I somehow doubt this will be the only vendor purchase this year. What were the […]

One of our customers is on Oracle 9.2, we would dearly love to move them to 10g but for certification reasons with their chosen query tool we can’t upgrade them until the tool is also upgraded which in turn is linked to the version of JVM associated with their terminal server environment. We upgraded the […]

I’ve been away for a few days, but when I got back tonight I noticed that Oracle Data Integrator, formerly known as Sunopsis Data Conductor and the subject of a number of my blog postings late last year, is now available for download on OTN. Data Integrator differs from Warehouse Builder in that it sits […]

Drag and drop ETL tools sometimes encourage the use of a generic approach. Load a flat file to stage, validate the data, apply some transforms and publish to a data warehouse is after all standard fare within a data warehouse. But what when there is some subtle difference in the process that does not get […]

Nuno Souto posts an interesting set of thoughts on Extremely Large Databases. As usual, it is a well thought through post from someone who is probably scarred for life from actually working with large databases. In a data warehouse (or even a very large transactional system) context the reader is lead to an inevitability of […]

Sometimes people write to me or post questions on the blog along the lines of “I’m new to data warehouses, which xxxx is best?” where xxxx could be tool, database, hardware platform, design methodology, in fact, xxxx could be almost anything.
Well, nothing is clear-cut, the fact that choices are available and people continue to make […]

I’ve been a bit remiss recently in keeping the blog up to date; what with planning for the forthcoming company seminar later in January, and writing a new article on XML Publisher in my spare time, I’ve not really had much time to keep the blog up to date; also, compared to things such as […]