Mark Rittman

It's been a busy couple of days at Collaborate, hence the lack of updates since Monday. We've been giving presentations over the last couple of days, and coupled with trying to attend a few of the sessions, there's been little time for blogging. Most

If you're at Collaborate'06 and were looking to come along to my Best Practices for the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g talk on Wednesday, it's been moved now to Tuesday, 4.45pm in Cheekwood C. It should be in the agenda changes leaflet

First of all, just to repeat : If you were looking to come along to my Best Practices for the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g talk on Wednesday, it's been moved now to Tuesday, 4.45pm in Cheekwood C. It should be in the agenda changes leaflet in

Yesterday was the first day proper for Collaborate'06 with some all-day education sessions going on over at the main conference venue. I was hoping to pop into Don Burleson's Predictive Modelling session but I couldn't get in in the end, so I took the

I've arrived at the Collaborate'06 [http://www.collaborate06.com/]hotel now and it's about a quarter to seven in the morning. I flew in to Nashville around 4 o'clock yesterday and got down to the venue, about an hour later. You can

I'm going to be presenting next week at theCollaborate'06 [http://www.collaborate06.com/] event in Nashville, Tennessee. Collaborate'06 is a joint conference between the IOUG, OAUG and Quest Direct and is being held at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, Nashville, from April 23rd through to

"Oracle considers venturing into Linux", Financial Times [http://news.ft.com/cms/s/7354696c-cd86-11da-afcd-0000779e2340.html] : "Oracle is studying whether to launch its own version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two companies currently dominating the Linux world, according to Larry

Oracle have just made available aStatement of Direction for Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer [http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/discoverer/pdf/discoverer-sod.pdf], which makes interesting reading if you're wondering what's going to happen now that Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition is out. The statement

A couple of days ago I looked at using theTransportable Modules feature in OWB "Paris" [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/04/using_data_pump_and_transporta.html]so that I could quickly replicate source data into a data warehouse. Transportable Modules use either transportable tablespaces, or data

One of the new features in Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 "Paris" is "Transportable Modules". Transportable Modules are source modules that get their data from remote databases, with the data being brought into your warehouse environment using either transportable tablespaces [http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_

Oracle have released for public download theMicrosoft Excel-based OLAP Calculation Builder [http://download.oracle.com/otn/java/olap/SpreadsheetCalcs_10201.zip], that I'd mentioned earlier in the year [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/02/birt_sig_oracle_olap_excelbase.html]. Using this piece of shareware, you can

Imentioned yesterday [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/04/using_partitioning_to_improve.html] that I was looking to update the partitioning and sparsity handling sections of my Oracle OLAP Best Practices paper, prior to running it again at Collaborate'06. Yesterday I covered off partitioning in a lot

When you work with the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g, the three things that have the biggest impact on the time it takes to rollup your cube are: 1. The order in which you list your dimensions 2. How you handle sparsity, and 3. How you partition the cube

I've just been having a play around with theInternet Archive Wayback Machine [http://www.archive.org/web/web.php], which holds "copies of the internet" going all the way back to 1996. Using the site, it's possible to have a look at how sites

I was just doing a bit of random web surfing when I came across two interesting articles on the state of the tech publishing market. "The Eventual Death of Developer Magazines" [http://software.ericsink.com/entries/Magazines_Dying.html] by Eric Sink looks at how developer magazines are

It's been a week or so since my last blog posting, so I thought I'd better do an update. I've been busy working away on the presentations and papers I'm doing for Collaborate'06 in Nashville, and when I finally get

Well, Oracle have finally announced what their future BI strategy is going to be, and it looks pretty exciting. It's been a fairly open secret that Siebel Analytics was going to be the centrepiece of Oracle's Fusion BI Strategy going forward, but there's been

I worked for a client the other week that asked me to come up with some tips and best practices for Oracle Warehouse Builder. Without giving the game away (otherwise you'd never pay to hire me) here's ten tips for working with Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g.

Most people who read this blog, or know me through work or through the user groups, probably place me as your stereotypical techy. I'm the one who takes a Tom Kyte book on holiday, whips out the laptop on train journeys to try out his new linux VMWare

I said the other week, when I wrote the firsttwo [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/03/taking_a_sneak_peek_at_xml_pub.html] articles [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/03/xml_publisher_56_enterprise_pr.html] about XML Publisher 5.6 Enterprise, that'd I'

I mentioned a month or so ago that I was due to present at theCollaborate'06 [http://www.collaborate06.com/] event over inNashville [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville], Tennessee next month, and last week I finally got a confirmation through (of sorts) from the event organisers that my

"Improving on Optimisers" [http://www.it-analysis.com/technology/data_mgmt/content.php?cid=8409], Philip Howard, Bloor Research : "After all these years you would assume, wouldn’t you, that database optimisers were pretty good? Companies like IBM and Oracle have been costing query plans and re-writing SQL

Inyesterday's article [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/03/taking_a_sneak_peek_at_xml_pub.html] I took a look at the new XML Publisher 5.6 release candidate, and worked my way through the demo reports that it ships with. In today's article I&

If you read my postings on XML Publisher 5.5 towards the end of last year (here [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2005/12/more_on_xml_publisher.html],here [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2005/12/wrapping_up_on_xml_publisher.html]), or sat through the "XML Publisher

I know I saidI wouldn't answer any more questions send directly [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/02/question_time.html] as opposed to via theforum [http://www.rittman.net/forum], but this one was too good to pass on. > "Hello, Mark. I am searching for