Mark Rittman

I don't know if anyone else has come across it yet, butJonathan Lewis [http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/] has recorded apodcast for DBAZine [http://www.dbazine.com/podcasts/podcast-lewis]. It talks about Jonathan's new book, the type of work he does as a consultant,

Keith Laker [http://oraclebi.blogspot.com/] from the Oracle Business Intelligence product team dropped me a line this evening, to tell me about a survey the Data Warehouse Development team at Oracle are carrying out. It sounds like a useful and interesting survey and I'll certainly be taking

And relax... Just finished the second of my twoDesktop Conference 2006 [http://www.desktopconference2006.org/]presentations, this time on Oracle OLAP Best Practices. There were more technical problems as the start again, just as I was about to start I was asked to move to a different conference ID (i.

Well I've just finished my first presentation for the Desktop Virtual Conference 2006 [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/02/looking_forward_to_the_desktop.html], on XML Publisher. It was a bit strange presenting it actually, there's no feedback during the session from the audience

"Faster Batch Processing" [http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-mar/o26performance.html] : " When you need to load millions of rows of data into a table, the most efficient way is usually to use an INSERT, UPDATE, or MERGE statement to process your data in bulk.

I've finished the presentations now for theDesktop Conference 2006 [http://desktopconference2006.org/node/36]next week; the one on XML Publisher is the one that I gave the other week at the UKOUG BIRT SIG (with the addition of a XML Publisher Desktop demo), whilst the OLAP Best

I've had a few questions through recently, and rather than answer them directly via email, I thought I'd publish them here. Going into the future, I'll only be answering questions that get posted to the forum (http://www.rittman.net/forum), as it makes

Just a couple of updates. If you found the article last week on Oracle OLAP memory management useful, Chris Chiappa sent an email through to me this evening with some clarifications and corrections. I've annotated the article with Chris' comments and you canread the updated version here

I went to see a new customer last week who was looking to put together a company MIS system. The system needed to load and transform some data prior to analyzing it using OracleBI Discoverer, and to do the transformation they were looking at using OracleBI Warehouse Builder, and a

When you work with the OLAP functionality in Oracle Database 10g, you need to be aware of how it handles memory. Just like a relational data warehouse, data held in multidimensional datatypes makes use of memory structures such as the System Global Area [http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/

Just a quick one. If you came to theUKOUG BIRT SIG last week [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/01/ukoug_business_intelligence_re.html], and want to get hold of the Excel-based tool/sample Kevin showed us that creates calculated measures en-masse, it's now available

I've just had two of my presentations accepted for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 [http://www.odtug.com/2006_Conference/2006_conference_HOME.htm] conference in Washington D.C. next June. The first presentation I'll be doing is the "Oracle XML Publisher - What's It

I've just had two of my presentations accepted for theODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 [http://www.odtug.com/2006_Conference/2006_conference_HOME.htm] conference in Washington D.C. next June. The first presentation I'll be doing is the"Oracle XML Publisher - What's It All

Today was the day for theUKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG [http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=1644] meeting, held up at the Institute of Physics, London [http://static.flickr.com/15/93715395_fdd9770b9d_d.jpg]. Most of you probably know that I chair the SIG

I just got in an hour or so ago after a week spent over in Ireland. As I mentioned the other day, I was due to do a bit of presales work with a public sector client, and I took the opportunity tospend the weekend in Belfast [http://static.flickr.

As the proposed Oracle purchase of Siebel draws closer [http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/dec/1236475.htm], and Oracle announce that they're half way there to producing the first Fusion applications [http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177102014], it's worth taking a look

I mentioned yesterday that I'm off to Ireland tomorrow, and the work I'm going to be doing for most of the week is a presales engagement for a public-sector organisation. It's probably true to say that presales is probably the sort of work

A quick update as I'm off to Ireland on Sunday. I've had a couple of papers accepted forCollaborate'06 [http://www.ioug.org/collaborate06/conference/about.cfm], the joint event being run by the IOUG, OAUG and Quest International. The event is being held over

Time to catch up on a few articles and bits of news. "Closer ties between the two firms will benefit their users, but only rivals would gain from a merger" argues Martin Banks in "Why Oracle would be mad to buy Sun" [http://www.vnunet.com/

I've got an interesting dilemma with a piece of consulting I'm doing this week. We're working with charity up in London who wants to add some Discoverer reporting to their OLTP application. They'd got licences for Discoverer but never got around to

Are you a bit of an expert in Oracle Discoverer, Reports and possibly Portal, perhaps work for a company but looking to move in to consultancy? If so, I'm looking for someone like this to work with me on my team atSolStonePlus [http://www.solstoneplus.com]. We'

Anthony Waite [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=353549&tstart=0], on the OTN OLAP Forum: > "The Oracle OLAP Application Developer's Guide 10.2 uses a specific version of the GLOBAL schema for some of its examples. This version, global_doc.zip, has

Not Your Father's ODS : [http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/infomanagement/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=03GDKROEOH5MYQSNDBOCKH0CJUMEKJVN?articleID=175002426] "In this article, I'll propose a solution that builds on a key investment already in place at many organizations: the operational data store (ODS). Experience with ODS implementations is

Spotted viaDuncan Lamb [http://duncanlamb.blogspot.com/2005/12/virtual-machine-center-download-free.html] 's site: the"Community Virtual Machines" [http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/community.html] page on the VMWare website, where you can download prebuilt virtual machines for use with VMWare and the

The Blog Forum is up and running now over athttp://www.rittman.net/forum. I set this up for two reasons. First is that I get a number of technical questions through directly, and I often don't have the time (or the answer to hand) to be able