Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

The latest copy of Oracle Magazine dropped through the door yesterday, and as I was looking through it last night I noticed an article on the new Interactive Reporting feature in ApEx 3.1. Ever on the lookout for new BI and reporting technologies, I downloaded the Apex 3.1 installer from OTN, copied it onto my […]

One of the presentations I’m giving over the next couple of months is one for the UKOUG BI & Performance Management event on future Oracle BI architectures. The driver for this for me is around all the different options that are now available for building Oracle BI systems, now that we’ve got products from Siebel, […]

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 […]

Doug Burns writes, amongst other things, about a straw poll at a user group meeting on the number up to date on Oracle CPU patching. One of Doug’s earlier questions was about the numbers that had all of their Oracle databases on 9.2.0.8 or 10.2. It would seem that two-thirds or so did not.
So what […]

In addition to moving my responsibilities to other managers, I have been tying up the odd technical loose end.
During the recent upgrade to 10gR2 for one of our DW customers we noticed a frequent query that queried for raw sales for a named customer over a rolling 12 week period. The problem here was that […]

A few days I was talking to a customer who has a legacy data warehouse, designed back in Oracle 7.3 days which relies extensively on partition views as a way of handling the volume of data involved (basket level sales from a national high-street chain). Over the years the underlying platform has changed and the […]

I overheard one of my team requesting a DBA to restore a table from backup following an overzealous data deletion incident. I thought the chances of him getting them to take on a single table restore on that database was slim given their current workload and the fact that that the table in question was […]

Sometimes, when things are not working as they should the human brain goes into straw clutching mode. In extreme cases this includes guilt-by-association scenario where a benign event that occurred at around the same time is blamed for something happening or if not blamed causes a large amount of lost time working out what is […]

Well the detailed planning for a customer’s data warehouse upgrade paid off. We kept mainly to plan until the customer tried using their query tool. We then spent what seemed an age, late at night, tracking down a problem which almost had the customer deciding to revert to the pre-upgrade backup. Eventually this was tracked […]

As I mentioned yesterday I was in London (in fact in the shadows of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament) today for the UK OUG BIRT SIG meeting. The venue was also shared by a UK OUG directors meeting so I got the opportunity to chat to Peter Robson over lunch. Oddly, we ended […]