Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I just saw a very concise post on the AMIS technology blog about virtual columns being created on tables. Given how well it is put forward there, I don’t see the need to regurgitate their post, so take a quick peek and learn how cool and easy this feature is. I have a few times […]

Well, I have been out here in Qatar for a week now. The work has been quite interesting and the days have been rather busy. Jon and I haven’t really had any time to take in any sights, until last night when we went to an outdoor market. It was very nice and relaxed, loads […]

So, I just settled in to my first-ever trip to Qatar. I took an SN-Brussels flight earlier this evening out to Manchester and now I am sitting in the Qatar Airways A320-300 getting ready to take off. Qatar Airways has a fantastic reputation so I must say I am quite excited to experience their in-flight […]

Well, not that summer actually ever arrived here in Belgium. It’s been quite the opposite of last summer, which was very hot and sunny. So I guess in average my two first summers here were OK., right?
But the summer did bring me some changes. For the last 5 weeks I have been working as an […]

This year holiday activities have been low key. My elder daughter had various school examination results to receive (for those who know about the English system, GCSEs and AS levels) which basically meant that we needed to be home two Thursdays in August. Coupled with the need to work on the garden, meet the mayor […]

This one doesn’t quite relate to BI, but here is a function I hadn’t seen before: new_time . This function accepts three arguments: A date, the timezone this date should be considered in, and the timezone you want the return value to be in. This can come in handy in some situations, but there […]

Seems that the Oracle Forums have finally come to their senses and allowed changing the watch/notification email address. Hurray for them! I have had the same email addy stuck in there since I signed up back in 2000. I haven’t had access to the mailbox in 4 years by now.
So, now I can at least […]

One of our customers has asked us to review the performance of one of their legacy data warehouses. The daily data load takes far too long. There seems to be a lot we can suggest here to improve things - for a start, we need move to an incremental load and not the complete reload […]

An anonymous poster to Tom Kyte’s Blog shared a tale of woe about data warehouse performance. Well, I felt for that poster – how can a developer put their hand on their heart (or wallet, if they are an external consultant) and say in effect “design does not matter, the database will be able […]