Peter Scott

306 posts published

Getting The Users' Trust - Part 2

Last time I wrote about the performance aspects of a BI system and how they could affect a user’s confidence. I concluded by mentioning that incorrect data might be generated by poorly coded ETL routines causing data loss or duplication. This time I am looking more at the quality

Getting The Users' Trust - Part 1

Looking back over some of my truly ancient Rittman Mead blogs (so old in fact that they came with me when I joined the company soon after Rittman Mead was launched), I see recurrent themes on why people “do” BI and what makes for successful implementations. After all, why would

Oracle 12.1.0.2 and Data Warehouses

If you follow Blogs and Tweets from the Oracle community you won’t have missed hearing about the recent release of the first patch-set for Oracle 12c. With this release there are some significant pieces of new functionality that will be of interest to Data Warehouse DBAs and architects. The

Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Revisited

Recently I have be working with Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) combined with Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), we will tell you more about exactly what we have been doing in another blog, but for now I would like to revisit our earlier EDQ blogs. I am going to keep to

Using Oracle TimesTen With Oracle BI Applications (Part 3)

In part 2 I introduced TimesTen Columnar Compression and explained that it creates-column value look up tables so a longer data value can be replaced with a short token. If we take a traditional Fact table we have a set of (usually) integer keys and some measures (again most likely

Using Oracle TimesTen With Oracle BI Applications (Part 2)

Last time I posted an introductory blog to this series of posts on using Oracle TimesTen with Oracle BI Applications (OBIA). Today, I am going to look at some of the OBIA structures and then start to explore the ways we can use TimesTen with OIBA. As TimesTen may be

Using Oracle TimesTen With Oracle BI Applications (Part 1)

Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) is a product for delivering industry best-practice dashboards and analysis over enterprise sources such as ERP, HR, SCM and CRM systems. OBIA includes the necessary functionality to extract data from the source systems, transform and load it to the target database's standardised data model and to

You Probably Need Parallel Except When You Don't

My last post looked at some aspects of performance tuning that would make traditional DBAs blanche with horror, not once did I mention indexing, partitioning, PCTFREE or parallel. This was not because I don't consider them important, but more that the simple test of "am I doing the right thing"

Tuning Philosophy - Tuning the Right Thing

My second presentation at this year's RMOUG Training Days was on tuning "realtime data warehouses"; as usual, this paper is now on the Rittman Mead Articles page. Perhaps more accurately my talk was more about my tuning philosophy rather than a cookbook of tuning "rules" to

Big Data and the Oracle Reference Architecture.

Last week I travelled from Europe to present at the RMOUG Training Days event In Denver, Colorado. As I blogged a couple of weeks back, this is one of my favourite user group conferences and it never fails to impress me. I expect to be wowed even more next year

Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group Training Days

One of the great things about working here at Rittman Mead is our corporate ethos of sharing our knowledge and experience. Of course, much of this is "paid for" work with our customers where we train, mentor, consult, develop, implement and support all manner of things Oracle BI.

Tuning Philosophy - Hints

This week Stewart, Mark and I are at Collaborate 12 in Las Vegas - look us out if you are at the conference. Long flights (it's about 10 hours from the UK to Las Vegas) give me plenty of blogging time so I decided to write a few new blogs.

Basket Analysis in the Oracle Database

Last time I gave a taster of my forthcoming Collaborate 12 talk on techniques beyond the traditional "slice and dice" that we know so well. I wrote mainly about the ways in which we can perform statistical analysis on our data either through SQL or by using R.

Business Insights

Statistical Analysis in the Database

My first ever presentation at the UKOUG conference (long before I started working with Mark Rittman and Jon Mead) was an introduction to analytic functions. Since then analytics have remained a key part of my work as a DW developer; many of the processes that I have implemented would be

Oracle Data Integrator Designer for OWB Developers

Last time I described some of the aspects of ODI Topology. I only touched the surface of this subject and mainly kept to database sources; if you attend one of the Rittman Mead ODI bootcamps (we have public versions of the ODI course coming up in Australia, India, USA and

Oracle Data Integrator Topologies for OWB Developers

Back in October of 2011 I posted the first part of a series of blogs that aimed to describe some of the key features of Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) from the point of view of an ETL developer who already knows Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). The blog series was themed

Business Insights

More Notes on Right-Time BI

Over the past couple of years Stewart Bryson and I have been looking into things "right time" (or is that realtime?). It is great to have him around to trade ideas (and graphics for presentations!). Most of what we have been discussing has been about "traditional reporting&

Oracle Warehouse Builder and Data Integrator

Sometimes, when I am working with customers on data warehousing projects I am asked questions about Oracle Warehouse Builder and its future. I know no more on this than what I read in Oracle's reposted a statement of direction from May 2011 and recent internet postings elsewhere which states that

Business Insights

Geography Hierarchies

I have been thinking about address a lot recently, in part it was moving house and all of the 1001 people that need to be notified. In the main, though, it was thoughts inspired by a data warehouse project I am working on. For this DWH people are geo-located by

Not The Only 11.1.1.5.0 In Town

Just a short posting to mention that earlier this month Oracle released version 11.1.1.5.0 of Data Integrator Look out for more Rittman Mead postings on ODI over the coming months

Moving Data

I just looked at the Rittman Mead Blog archive and saw the last post that was written by me was back in August 2010! Where has the time gone? Some of the time has been spent preparing and giving conference and user group talks, (as I write this I am

More on Interval Partitioning

As I mentioned in the past, I am a great fan of Oracle bitmap indexes; they allow the database to do some really good optimizations and reduce the impact of typical data warehouse queries that need to filter and fetch large chunks of fact data. The flip side to their

Realtime Data Warehouse Challenges – Part 2

Last time I mentioned some of the challenges of taking realtime feeds and publishing them into a data warehouse. This time I am going propose a way to meet those challenges. But before that I will take a small detour around what Oracle refers to as their Reference Data Warehouse

Realtime Data Warehouse Challenges - Part 1

In a previous part of my notes on Realtime Data Warehousing I mentioned some of the challenges of reducing latency. The piece picked up quite a few comments - to which I say thanks to all that posted responses. One of the comments from Matt Hosking mentioned some of the