Mark Rittman

Well, I'm back home in my own house tonight after my week of misery and despair in my hotel in Newbury [http://departments.colgate.edu/music/Pics/hovel.gif]. I guess I've been spoilt recently working up in Soho, London, but a week of nights on

I was working today with the latest beta release of OWB "Paris" and looking in particular at the new data profiling and cleansing features. Data Profiling is one of the major new features in Paris, and what particularly caught my eye was the ability of the tool to

Thanks to all the people who had kind words to say yesterday when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps; it was my son's first day at school yesterday but instead I was working onsite with a client on a new data mart project. I'

Whilst I don't usually have much of a problem working away for a few days, today was my four year-old son's first day at school, and I wasn't there to take him down to the school and see him off. He's been

For anyone following along from yesterday [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/09/thinking_about_the_aggregation.html], here's the script to create the test environment. You'll obviously need to amend it for your own environment (file location, passwords and connect strings): spool c:\agg_test_

The first step in my Aggregation Techniques Comparison project [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/09/comparing_oracle_10g_aggregati.html] is to put together a methodology. As a recap, I'm looking to compare the rollup and query performance of regular materialized views, materialized views using grouping sets,

I've just been putting my agenda together for next month'sOracle Open World in San Francisco [http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html], and there's a lot of good content around BI Suite Enterprise Edition in this year's event. My guess is that

In this final posting in the series, I'll be looking at three more tips and techniques for Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The first one is around adding a column selector to a crosstab report. To take an example, on my dashboard there's a crosstab (or

What with all this work I've been doing the past few weeks with Oracle's BI tools, I've got a real hankering at the moment for some real, honest-to-goodness database work. Something using the command line, perhaps tinkering around with trace files, working on a

In yesterday's posting, I looked at how drop-down lists can be used to change the values displayed in a report, and to change the type of visualisation from one type of graph to another. In today's posting, I'll look at using the guided analytics

In this next series of postings, I'm going to go through some of the more advanced features of OracleBI Answers and OracleBI Interactive Dashboards, and look at: * Adding a control to a dashboard page that passes a parameter value to the reports that are embedded within it; * Creating

Well that's the first of the BI Seminars over and done with now, and I was pleasantly surprised that, firstly we had around thirty attendees, and secondly, it more or less went off without a hitch. I must admit I was expecting about a maximum of ten attendees,

Whilst in some ways it's good that you can bring data from different data sources into Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, this is only of limited value if individual fact tables and dimensions are only made up of data from a single data source. Your sales fact table

Well, that's finally finished now. After about two months of effort, mostly in the evenings and on train journeys to and from London, I've finally finished the course material for the seminar series I'm starting next week [http://www.oracle.com/global/nl/education/

Apologies to anyone who's dropped me a line, posted on the forum, is awaiting their account to be authorised or otherwise waiting for me to get back to them. I've been snowed-under with client work (not a bad thing, obviously) and all of my spare time

In this example I'll be looking at how Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition can be used to access data in Analytic Workspaces [http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/index.html]. Analytic Workspaces are potentially a more efficient way to store and summarize data used for reporting,

Like Doug [http://oracledoug.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1040-See-you-in-Birmingham-;.html] and Alex [http://blog.oracloid.com/2006/07/presenting-on-ukoug-2006/], I got my acceptance email through from the UKOUG yesterday saying that my two papers had been accepted for the conference in November [http://conference.ukoug.org]. I know most

In this posting I'll look at how pluggable mappings are used in Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2. Pluggable Mappings are a good way of creating reusable ETL components that can be dropped into a mapping. A pluggable mapping consists of in and out interfaces, and a set of OWB

Now this appeals to my sense of humour. This article in today's Independent [http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article1197261.ece] talks about a new game called Street Wars [http://www.streetwars.net/london2006.php], a three-week water pistol assassination game played out around London. When you

In this final posting in the series, I'll look at how Oracle Warehouse Builder 10.2 can be used to perform Partition Exchange Loading into a target table. Partition Exchange Loading (PEL) s a data warehousing technique that is useful when you are loading data into a large,

In this final posting in the series, I'll look at how Oracle Warehouse Builder 10.2 can be used to perform Partition Exchange Loading into a target table. Partition Exchange Loading (PEL) s a data warehousing technique that is useful when you are loading data into a large,

One of the new features in Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 is the Data Object Editor. The Data Object editor, like the Data Profiler, is a Warehouse Builder "module" that launches when you edit a database object, and works for both relational and OLAP objects. As this feature is

I'm just working through the Data Modelling part of my upcoming seminar, and I'm at the point where I'm thinking about logical and physical modelling within Warehouse Builder 10.2. Warehouse builder seems to mix up the concepts of logical and physical modeling, and

I'm going in to one of our higher education clients next week to do a healthcheck of their Oracle Application Server 9.0.4. installation, prior to them going live with a new student records system next September. One of my colleagues took a look at their Discoverer