Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Shortly after I joined Rittman Mead I wrote a small article on real-time Business Intelligence , there is also a link to it on our “Articles” tab. One of the techniques I mentioned in passing was change data capture, CDC.
Although many people believe that change capture is a technique for real-time or near real-time data [...]

Mark and Venkat have already been blogging about OWB 11g Release 2, but that was not the only new release to slip past Oracle’s doors in recent days; 11g Release 2 of the database is also out.
I have long loved analytic functions in Oracle – they can give a simple way to avoid sub-queries and [...]

Recently I had a requirement to selectively “translate” the data in one column of a table before loading into a data warehouse. In this case we had to “standardise” a list of countries. Normally, this is classic use of an outer join to a table containing the incorrect expression and its translation and where a [...]

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 [...]