Breaking Silence

It is February and I have just realised that I have not added anything to the Rittman Mead Blog this year. Like all of my colleagues, I have been busy working with clients - so far this year I have worked on projects on OBIEE reporting over Oracle e Business Suite in London, and delivering BI Apps customisation training in Finland; now, I have returned to Greece to join my colleague, Ragnar, on a project to reengineer an older data warehouse. This is  great project with many technical challenges and some very creative solutions.

In the evenings I have been developing two new talks for User Group meetings that I hope to give later in the year - the first is for DBAs that have just been given the challenge of looking after a data warehouse for the first time; this is my first talk that is aimed at an audience outside the BI / DW community. The other talk is on bad ETL practices. As someone with many years of experience of reviewing ETL processes I have seen so many "wrong ways" to go about things, sometimes this is a result of an ETL tool not doing things in the way a developer expects, or perhaps some database quirk makes what appears to be sensible in principle perform badly.  I have not got any firm dates for the talks yet but when I know, I will post a comment here.

Over the next few months I will be writing mainly about data quality and ETL; for me this is the cornerstone of a BI implementation, it really does not  matter if the query tool is the best if the information it reports is neither accurate or timely. Most of the ETL posts will be about either Oracle Data Integrator or Warehouse Builder - but there is a strong possibility that hand-crafted SQL and BI Apps ETL will also get a mention.