Mark Rittman

I've managed to find out a bit more about themysterious OX application [http://www.rittman.net/archives/001321.html]that appeared onOTN's OLAP homepage [http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/index.html] last week. What it looks like is that OX was developed by

Abhinav Argawal reports in hislatest blog posting [http://oraclebi.blogspot.com/2005/08/phase-2-doc-is-now-available.html] that Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Phase 2 should be available for download within a few days. The big new thing with Phase 2 is the inclusion of Oracle Reports Services in the BI tier, plus

I was with a client the other week and was asked to look at a particular SQL statement that kept failing due to lack of TEMP space. It looked something like this (names changed to protect the innocent, etc.) > CREATE TABLE lookup_table AS SELECT destn, studref, min(pi)

I've somewhat disappeared off the blogosphere over the last couple of months, with updates to this site pretty few and far between. In fact I've actually been busier than ever and doing a lot of research and writing on Oracle BI&W, plus there'

Apologies for the lack of updates to the blog recently. I've got quite a few things going on with work at the moment which are taking up my time, and I'm also putting the finishing touches to an Oracle OLAP performance tuning paper which will be

If you read my article a couple of weeks ago about theSQL Model clause [http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/sql_model_clause.html] you'll probably be interested in a follow-up email I received yesterday from John Haydu, Product Manager within Oracle with responsibility for the Model clause. John

Oracle Preps Major BI Revamp This Summer [http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=51F269D8-8E19-414F-929B-4D185AC80ED4] : "Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp, said the company is planning to roll out significant upgrades to its business intelligence (BI) and online analytic processing (OLAP) tools later this summer. In an SG Securities

IBM and Hyperion Part Ways Maybe [http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/imhoff/archives/2005/07/ibm_and_hyperio.php] : "On July 21, I got a surprising email from Stephanie Clark - IBM's Analyst Relations person. In it, she states that IBM and Hyperion are ending their OEM

Joel On Software [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html] : "Does it even make sense to talk about having the "best programmers?" Is there so much variation between programmers that this even matters? Maybe it's obvious to us, but to many, the assertion still needs

Top 20 Tips for OLAP Success [http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1031668] : "Here are 20 quick tips, some obvious, but others counterintuitive, which are all based on real-world experience and research data." I've got a lot of time for Nigel Pendse, the industry

If you read my posting the other weekabout getting over to Open World [http://www.rittman.net/archives/001269.html], you'll be interested to know that I managed to get hold of a complementary pass courtesy of the OTN team. All of the Oracle ACEs have been given

[http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1590595009.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg]It's been a while since I ordered a job lot of books through Amazon, but I finally got around to putting an order through last week and a couple of Amazon boxes were waiting for me when I

CNET News.com [http://news.com.com/Longhorns+new+name+Windows+Vista/2100-1016_3-5799734.html?tag=nefd.top] : "The next version of Windows finally has an official name: Windows Vista. The advertising tagline for Vista is "Clear, Confident, Connected: Bringing clarity to your world," according to a

I expect many of you think that the lifestyle of the travelling Oracle consultant is a constant whirl of five star hotels, glamorous locations and business class travel back and forth across the Atlantic. In fact it's mostly budget hotels, travel on the train in the evenings and

Just a short note to anyone who's tried to post a comment recently. Unfortunately the engine behind this site (Moveable Type 3.17) is falling apart somewhat, due to some ongoing problems with mySQL drivers and a recent upgrade from 2.64 that I think went wrong somewhere.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article askingwhether dimensional modelling was suitable for all types of reporting, even operational [http://www.rittman.net/archives/001275.html], and I got the largest amount of feedback that I'd ever received for an article. The article was in response

A quick test to see if I can post again (and whether my RSS feed is updating).

One of our customers recently had an interesting database design problem. The customer has a fact table that contains transactions at a customer level. Each customer should only be able to see their own transactions, but also needs to see totals at a customer category and all customers level that

I've been working with Oracle Reports for the past couple of days, and whilst the product is good thedocumentation [http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/reports.html] is pretty poor. The problem with Reports is that it's a developer tool, and the documentation iscorrespondingly technical [http:

One of our clients that I worked at recently had a rather tricky report that they wanted me to help with. At present, the report was put together using Excel, and looked something like this: The report consisted of two sections, the top section being the actual, budget and variance

I'm still alive, but away from home most of the time at the moment so unable to update the site or reply to emails. My rittman.net mail account is *still* playing up, so if you need to get in contact (please, no technical questions for the time

I'm having a few issues with my email server at the moment. If you need to get in contact with me over the next few days, or you've mailed me recently and not heard back, drop me a line at mark.rittman at gmail.com and

I'm off to Ireland tomorrow to work with one of our public sector clients. They're putting in a data warehouse and I'm helping out with the initial requirements definition and data model. It's nice once in a while to do some "

Duncan Mills' recently posted about thequestions he sometimes receives from readers [http://www.groundside.com/blog/content/DuncanMills/2005/06/16/Questions_Questions.html] , and it got me thinking about the type of questions I often get sent through to me. Like Duncan, I put my email address on

If you read Tom Kyte's blog the other day you'd have seen the entry where he asks you to guess where he's currently staying [http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/06/where-in-world.html], using a photo taken out of his hotel bedroom window. Well in