Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Faking it - a UK reality (real??) TV show where people are given a crash course in some skill completely alien to their normal life (such a classical musician to dance DJ, or librarian to bodyguard) and then sent to compete against real exponents of the trade for a panel of experts to spot the […]

Jon Mead and I have been running Rittman Mead Consulting for just under six months now, and we’ve worked on projects and training assignments with clients in the UK, Europe, Middle-East and North America. We’re at the point now where the amount of new working coming in is steadily increasing, and we’re therefore starting to […]

A while back I was trying recruit a DBA to look after a customer’s Oracle E-Business Suite implementation; that is the patching, cloning and kicking the workflow-into-life side of things. It turned out to be a hard search, or perhaps I was a little too demanding in wanting both skill and experience. On occasion I […]

I’ve been doing some work this week with a client in London, who wants to put together a reporting data mart based on Oracle Database 10gR1. Although they and I were fairly sure a dimensional database design using bitmap indexes and star transformations would give them the query performance they required, there were a […]

I’ve finally got a few days back in the country after my recent travels, and I though it’d be worthwhile to jot down a few notes on what I’ve been up to and where I’m going to be later on this year.
I’ve done a fair bit of traveling over the past few weeks, culminating in […]

A recent post on Howard Rogers’ blog around the hype and enthusiasm around the launch of Oracle 11g, together with some feedback I got during the review process for my OU seminar slides, got me thinking about how we sometimes rush in to adopt just-released versions of software, and how we can sometimes over-emphasise new […]

No, not the size-zero (or below) fashion-sticks that pogo across the catwalks of the world enticing the somewhat-larger to buy, but the modeling of all of the information within an organisation in a single unified form. Said like that, it’s simple, but in reality there are lots of complexity buried away that need to be […]

I guess I am going to come across as a BI heretic here, but is there a place for BI at the heart of all business life? In part this piece springs from a few points made by Jerry Brown of Bloor Research in a recent article. The whole Jerry’s piece really encapsulates the need […]

Those that have met me know that beneath that benign, placid exterior lurks a data-geek of great passion. Show me the work of others where they reinvent the wheel by writing their own procedural methods (in PL/SQL or T-SQL or whatever) to replicate a native function of the database or store numbers as characters, or […]

Doug Burns once said to me (and I am sure I am making up his words here, but the sentiment is probably right) that data warehouse folks are always using the latest features on the latest releases of databases. It is true that we do use less common, newer features, we are early adopters but to […]