Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’m back in the UK now after a rather eventful flight back from the States; our flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco was delayed by around an hour, which meant we arrived at SFO at 4.00pm for a 4.30 flight back to Heathrow. After a 20-minute dash through SFO from Terminal 1 to Terminal […]

Just a quick posting as I’m about to get my flight back to the UK (via San Francisco, unfortunately, so it’ll be a long journey). Yesterday I went to talks on SOA and RAC, and went along to Cary Millsap’s talk on why you often end up tuning the wrong thing when trying to optimize […]

I’ve been telling everyone who I got talking to this week at Collaborate, that the future of BI is in it’s integration with business processes. The problem with BI at the moment is that it’s a minority interest; tools such as Discoverer, Business Objects, Cognos and so on are far too complicated for the average […]

I’ve just got out of the Oracle’s BI Roadmap session by Matt Elumba, here’s some notes on what Matt had to say. I was sort of expecting more or less a rerun of the same talk we had at Open World and ODTUG Kaleidoscope, but there was actually quite a lot of new material on […]

Today was the first day proper of Collaborate’07, and started off with the keynote from Ari Kaplan (IOUG President), Ken Jacobs and Andy Mendelsohn, on thirty years of the Oracle database and what’s coming in the 11g release. There wasn’t really anything new on 11g since the announcements at Open World; the main topics they […]

I’m over in Las Vegas now for the Collaborate’07 event, a joint user-group conference by the IOUG, OAUG and Quest. The event’s being held at the Mandalay Bay hotel, one of the “mega-casino hotels” on the Las Vegas strip, and I’m staying up on the 31st floor. In the end, the journey wasn’t too bad […]

Constraints do just that; when enforced they constrain data such that rules are obeyed. But even when not enforced the existence of an Oracle RELY constraint does something really useful, it tells the CBO, and especially the query rewrite engine, that certain facts about the data can be presumed to be true. Of course, if […]

I’ve not been blogging much recently because I’ve been working flat out on something that’s turned out equally as interesting - bootstrapping a consulting business with an old colleague of mine, Jon Mead. When I used to bump in to people such as Mogens Norgaard and Jonathan Lewis at user group events, one of the […]

Jonathan Lewis posts a nice example (with a subsequent comment from Jeremy expanding it to work well with RAC) of an use of the analytic LEAD function.
Which reminds me of a gotcha with LAG or LEAD with sparse data. Sparse data is commonly found in business intelligence databases at low levels of aggregation. Suppose we […]

It’s only a week to go now until Collaborate’07 in Las Vegas, so I was thinking it’s about time I sorted my agenda out. Here’s what I’m planning to attend over the main four days:
Monday

8:15 AM-9:00 AM : 30 Years of Database Innovation, Ken Jacobs, Open 10
9:15 AM-10:15 AM : Oracle Identity Management - The Total […]