Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

One of the things I sometimes come across when looking at legacy ETL code for data loading is the misuse of query hints to “improve” data load performance. Sometimes DBAs or developers do not remember that “tuning the select” may not be the same thing as “tuning the insert”; Jonathan Lewis wrote about an example […]

One of my pet hates is the inappropriate use of dynamic SQL within ETL processes, for example building a command as VARCHAR2 string then using it in an “execute immediate” statement. Putting commands into strings whether hard-coded ones within the package or procedure, retrieved from some ‘code’ table in the database or even built on-the-fly […]

Recently Stewart posted his first blog post here on the Rittman Mead Blog, it drew quite a bit of comment about using external techniques to the ETL to provide mechanisms to do things more efficiently or to do things that could not otherwise be done.
Notwithstanding the claims of some DW appliance vendors that you just […]

Occasionally I lurk over at the OTN Discussion Forums, and the Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition one in particular.
Today I saw a question on passing a dashboard prompt value between dashboards and not knowing the answer I decided to spend an while (I have a day off to day) on coming up with a solution […]

I have long liked the Oracle merge statement - so much more elegant (and efficient) than the “try insert and if it fails have a go at update” or “try update and if there is nothing to update add the row” strategies that used to be used. But did you know that you can (from […]