Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

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 […]

Curiously I am working on two very similar data architecture projects at the moment, both small scale data warehouses, and both in similar subject domains. Most of the data warehouses I get involved in the are effectively a series of snapshots of a set of measures for discrete time slices be it average stock holding […]

The other day a colleague invited me to sit in on workshop session with a customer to discuss changes to an attribute of product. On the face of it it sounds a bit of overkill to spend two hours discussing the meaning of just one attribute, but when that attribute is cost and the impact […]

If you’re wondering who the “Mead” in Rittman Mead Consulting is, now’s probably a good time to introduce myself. I’m Jon Mead, I’ve worked with Mark for a number of years on projects around the UK, and together we started up Rittman Mead Consulting earlier this year to try and help Oracle customers around […]

Well as I wrote that I was going off to think up some new W words I knew it was a bad idea!
Traditional dimensions in retail data warehousing have exciting names such as TIME, PRODUCT, CUSTOMER, STORE; see not a W in sight. Other data warehouse subject domains may have other dimensions in the core […]

It is quite a while since I blogged the mini-series on data warehouse design (it started here) and was proceeded by a series with the grand title of DW Wisdom - where I strayed into talking about parallel queries, RAID5 and massive disks. But I did not really write much about dimensions. So to make […]

Conventional wisdom has OLTP people thinking in the third-normal form with master - detail relationships and the like popping up all over the place, and us DWers (does the expression data warehomemaker exist?) working with long tables of fact linked to many denormalised tables representing the dimensions. These dimension tables represent hierarchical knowledge about an […]

The children our growing up fast. The elder wanted to go to a concert by a popular beat combo. Sorry, a “Rise Against” gig at the Academy in Birmingham. She had originally arranged to go with friends, however as she was the only one with foresight to get a parent to buy a ticket before […]

Some dimensions in a data warehouse are easy to understand… for a retail DW, stock might be composed of three dimensions: when, where and what; sales on the other hand, might also have a customer dimension (if customers are known, say, in a loyalty scheme or by delivery address) It would seem hard to come […]

Keen eyed readers would have observed that the original two “part ones” of this article merged and slightly downsized, as part of this process the name ‘1b’ was deleted from history. This posting is dedicated to the words and memory of that fallen ‘b-ing’
Attributes and Hierarchies

Attributes :- ‘A quality or characteristic inherent in or ascribed […]