Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

We are often told that one of the benefit of OBI EE is the speed and ease of development. Data sources can easily be added into the system, users can then quickly build queries and the results are easy to distribute. While I completely support this, to me this leaves a few questions when you […]

A few days ago, Farooq posted some comments on an old post of mine. The final comment in our exchange concerned storing activities in our data warehouse by time (actual hour and minute). This is quite a common requirement, especially where the performance of customer service agents is being measured (as in Farooq’s question)
I would […]

Yesterday, Mark mentioned a new Oracle white paper on Cube Organized Materialized Views - now that is a bit of a mouthful and shouts out to be made COMV or something equally short and saving of typing. I say that because I have recently submitted the final version (in time so as to be included […]

One of the reasons that I left my old job to work with Rittman Mead Consulting was to get back to technology. Don’t get this wrong, I really did enjoy managing people and having responsibility for a BI practice, but that was at the expense of involvement in a lot of the delivery of systems; […]

So, why is someone who normally writes about data warehouses going to talk about Oracle OLAP, and in particular, cube organized materialized views?
I could run out the argument that I work in a BI consultancy and none of us here at Rittman Mead are 100% aligned to a specific expertise area; for example I do […]

The proposal deadline for the upcoming Collaborate 08 was shortly before I was to leave my old employer - it was already known that I would be leaving them to join Mark and Jon (and possibly, it was known before Rittman Mead Consulting existed!) so it came as no real surprise for Mark to ask […]

Over at another Blog, Beth notes that she is editor of the month for the Carnival of Data Quality. When It comes out I urge you to take a look. With those strange quirks of global IT companies Beth and I once worked for the same employer, but we have never met - I did […]

One of my old customers had a data warehouse with a three-area design model: a staging area for data load/cleanse, a third normal form (or more 3-NF-like than dimensional) raw data layer and a denormalised dimensional layer containing aggregated data for reporting. They ran a retail business and one of the key “fact” feeds was […]

A lot of data warehouses get some (if not all) of their data feeds through data files; in fact I can’t recall a recent project where at least one feed from an external system did not arrive as some form of flat file. I have had customers whose corporate data movement strategy is to go […]

These days there are a wealth of restrictions or regulations (SOX, UK Data Protection Act to name but two) on data access and coupled with the simple commercial need to hide sensitive information that means unfettered access to data warehouse data is a thing of the past. Fortunately products such as OBI EE (and SE-One) […]