Mark Rittman

"While much has been talked and written about regarding the return on investment of business intelligence initiatives, little has been discussed concerning the barrier to entry that many small and medium-size businesses (SMB) face when staring straight in the eyes of a business problem that requires a BI solution.

Yesterday I looked at some code [http://www.rittman.net/archives/000753.html] written in Oracle 7-style PL/SQL, and compared it with what is considered best practice with Oracle 8i and 9i. The more up-to-date code generally runs around 3-5 times faster than the old style code, and, as

A couple of people recently asked the question [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jsp?forum=56&thread=224051&tstart=0&trange=15] on the OTN Discoverer Forum: > "I am new to Discoverer tool as such. Therefore I have this question, pl pardon me if

"As data warehouse designers, you know how important a business executive sponsor is to your initiative. After focusing on data warehousing for the past two decades, I'm convinced that strong business sponsorship is the leading make-or-break indicator of data warehouse success. Having the so-called right sponsor can

Once in a while, I read something about Oracle that stops me in my tracks and makes me really think about how I approach my job. Recent examples include starting to work with 9iAS, and slowly becoming aware of how much I'm going to have to get my

I recently came across a couple of articles onadtmag.com [http://www.adtmag.com/] that are probably worth taking a look at. First up is an article by Jack Vaughan entitled"Dash on real-time, BI and the road ahead" [http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=8021]. Mainly

"Oracle Corp. is redesigning its E-Business Suite of enterprise applications to certify them for use with the company's forthcoming Oracle 10g database and application server, which will be optimized for grid computing. In the process, sources said, Oracle will enable its E-Business applications for the first time

There's agood article [http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=6947&t=y] at the DW Institute about the impactEclipse [http://www.eclipse.org/] (the open-source Java IDE) and theJava Tools Community [http://www.javatools.org/] will have on the custom BI applications market.According to

> "I am in the process of implementing oid and security in datawarehosuing environemnt very similar to whatever i have read in ur fantastic paper. i have asked and queried a few oracle gururs who come up with answers that everything is possible with oid w/o really understanding

Towards the end of last year, I came across an article on OTN about table compression, a new feature in Oracle 9i.As the article explains [http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2003/techarticles/poess_tablecomp.html] , table compression in Oracle9i can significantly accelerate query performance, especially in star schemas.

There's an interesting thread going on at comp.databases.oracle.misc that compares Oracle Forms to Microsoft's .Net [http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=1074646616.183187@yasure&prev=/groups?q=comp.databases.

There's a good article currently featured on OTN about using Extended Trace to diagnose performance problems. Written by Cary Millsap and entitled "Diagnosing Performance Problems" [http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-jan/o14tech_perf.html], it's worth taking a look at if you'

"Stick to Web services for now: That's the new party line for BI software buyers. Recent reviews of the Java online analytic processing (JOLAP) API and XML for Analysis (XMLA) version 1.1 left many industry analysts shepherding BI tool developers away from these two standards until

eWeek [http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1440219,00.asp] viaSlashdot [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/17/1347204&mode=nested&tid=126&tid=154&tid=163&tid=95] reports that Oracle are about support Mozilla on Linux as a client for

Interesting article from Hyperion [http://dev.hyperion.com/resource_library/articles/jolap_xmla.cfm] on JOLAP and XMLA. Hyperion of course have a foot in both camps (see this article by Seth Grimes [http://www.intelligententerprise.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?file=../030301/604decision1_1.shtml] , and my previous summary [http:

"A pattern pops out when you examine the big news items from 2003: It's mostly about putting things together. Mergers. Application integration. Grid computing. These and other trends inherently have to do with finding affinities and creating a whole that's worth more than the sum

From the Oracle Universal Installer 2.3 and upwards, it is possible to install Oracle software using HTTP, opening up the possibility of carrying out installations over a firewall. ThisOTN technical note [http://otn.oracle.com/pub/notes/install_0104.html]explains how it's all done.

More from Tom Kyte, this time on Parallel Query [http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:1657271217898] . Tom also quotes an interesting line from Jonathan Lewis' Practical Oracle 8i book regarding the scalability of Parallel Query: "You might want to get Jonathan

Just before Christmas, I was working on a project that required STATSPACK, and I couldn't for the life of me remember how to change the STATSPACK statistics level. Anyway, as a reminder to myself, here's how it's done. From Oracle Magazine's "

Jon Mead [http://[email protected]] just contacted me to let me know he'd successfully installed Oracle Application Server 10g (9.0.4) on United Linux [http://www.unitedlinux.com/en/developers/developersregistration.html]. Over to Jon; "I have successfully installed 10g AS on Linux (United

Someone recently asked me to recommend a good book for Oracle Reports, and I thought it worth jotting down my thoughts in this area, as it's something I've been asked about a few times in the past. Oracle Reports has traditionally 'fallen between the cracks&

"You're writing a query that returns computed column values. As input to your calculations, you need values from multiple rows. What do you do? This is actually a fairly common problem. Solutions to it often involve inscrutable combinations of self-joins and subqueries. Oracle Database 10g enables a

Jonathan Lewis [http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk] recently posted a guide [http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=bsmagt%245gh%241%248300dec7%40news.demon.co.uk&rnum=12] on comp.databases.oracle.server to the best

You've probably noticed that the site has gone through a makeover in time for the New Year. It's largely been driven by the move to Moveable Type [http://www.moveabletype.org] as the engine behind the site, but I've taken the opportunity to add

Well that's it for 2003. I'm going to spend the next week or so eating too many mince pies, helping my son open his presents, and watching too much television. Have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and see you all in January!