Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Yesterday I mentioned a small analytic project we are doing for a retail customer around money laundering. Joel Gary commented and linked to an article in his local press about the rise of anti-fraud analytic companies in his neck of California.
Money laundering is a big issue in the UK, not necessarily because it is a […]

A somewhat slow week blogwise; loads of events that are not blog worthy, or just unusable for confidentiality reasons. Some may be written about later, but others will be locked away for ever.
At long last one of my customers is going to upgrade the Oracle version of there multi-terabyte DW. When I designed it I […]

I’ve been giving some thought recently to how Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 is configured and used when working in a production environment. Most people who “kick the tires” with OWB10gR2 do so on their own laptop, or on their own pc, with a local database on which the repository, source tables and target environment are […]

A quick nod to a few new blogs that I’ve recently spotted.
Simon Ellis is someone I’ve worked with on a couple of projects before, and is a pretty capable technologist and project lead working in the Oracle middleware and architecture space. Simon’s posted a couple of good articles recently on Oracle’s move into the […]

The nuts and bolts of putting together a decent data warehouse are not that hard. You just need to get the I/O right
OK, in reality there is a little more to it: you need to make sure you store the correct granularity of data, you have all of the right constraints in place (plus […]

The other day I was asked about the approach I took to refreshing materialized views. To be honest I use my own techniques - others do similar things.
In a data warehouse summary table very little actually changes; there is perhaps a small window were new data is added, but even allowing for late arriving data […]

I’ve been spending all my spare time recently on the book I’m working on, and so deliberately stayed away from the new Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition so that I didn’t get distracted. I’ve got a couple of days free now, and as the new versions of all these bits of software - BI Enterprise […]

Materialized views (mviews) have been part of Oracle for along time, before Oracle 8 they went under the name snapshots and indeed some of the current dictionary tables refer to the old name. Common uses of mviews are to replicate data and to summarise data. It’s this second use I’ll write about here.
Firstly a […]

Most data warehouses used for reporting and built on conventional database technology such as SQL Server, Oracle and DB2 use some form of summarisation to boost query performance. In principle we doing once in the batch load and refresh process what would need to be done for each query at run time if that […]

Well, this is something I’ve thought about for a while now and now I can mention officially: from March 1st 2007, I’ll be setting up my own company and working as an Independent Consultant, specializing in Oracle Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing solutions. My objective going forward is to provide expert-level consultancy, training, mentoring and […]