For anyone interested in the "Experts-Level" Oracle BI Forum [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/12/10/calling-all-oracle-bi-experts-an-oracle-bi-forum-in-2009/] that we are planning to run later this year, we now have a venue and a date: The Rittman Mead Oracle BI Forum Hilton Metropole Hotel, Brighton, United Kingdom 14th

Our good friend Michael Armstrong-Smith has just started a new initiative on his website, with a new series of free "Ask Michael" Webinars [http://www.ascbi.com/question.htm] starting January 14th 2009. Michael is well known in the Discoverer world as the author of the Oracle Press

It was the first day back at work today, and I got some early good news in the form of an email from the UKOUG telling me that I'd been elected Editor of Oracle Scene [http://www.ukoug.org/membership/index.jsp?parent=61&id=64], the

Just before I went out on New Year's Eve I noticed that Robert Scoble posted an article and video on business intelligence (part 1 [http://scobleizer.com/2008/12/31/the-story-of-2009-enterprise-disruption/], part 2 [http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118-scobleizer/302179-part-ii-of-changing-business-inte] ), specifically the new BI components [http://www.panorama.

Although like most Oracle data warehousing developers, I'm aware of what a star transformation [http://www.dbazine.com/oracle/or-articles/jlewis6] is, and I can usually spot one in an execution plan. Earlier in December though I was on a customer engagement and one of the client'

At the beginning of the month, the majority of the Rittman Mead Consulting team was at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/12/06/ukoug-conference-2008-roundup/]. Jon Mead and myself presented a paper called "OBIEE High Availability". What we discussed was the different components

One of the developers at a client's site came to ask me a simple question today: How do you set up an Outer Join in OBIEE? I was fairly certain that I had done so in the past, and when I looked at his physical model I saw,

And now for something a bit different. Some of you in the Oracle data warehousing world might remember Lilian Hobbs [http://www.lilianhobbs.com/], who used to work in the Server Tech part of Oracle and worked on areas such as materialized views, partitioning and information lifecycle management, and who

Oracle University are running a few of my "masterclasses" early next year, with the Data Warehousing one that I first ran in Denmark now running in London, and an updated version of the BI Masterclass running in Norway, Croatia and Estonia. Here's the dates and agenda

So here's an idea. We're thinking about organizing a mini-conference next year, modeled on events like the Hotsos Symposium [http://www.hotsos.com/sym_speakers.html] or the Miracle Database Forum [http://www.miracleas.dk/events/DBF2004/invitation.html], but focusing on Oracle Business Intelligence, potentially

I'm writing this sitting on the train coming back from the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition 2008, and whilst in previous years I've tried to do a daily update, this year has been so busy for us I'm only just catching up now. This morning

The second day has just ended, and now I am back in the hotel thinking of grabbing a bite to eat before the fun tasks of finishing a report for a customer and packing... just hope my stuff still fits my suitcase. Conferences seem to start early here - and

Today was the first of the BIWA Summit at Redwood Shores, California. It was also the day of my presentation on Cube Organized Materialized Views in summary management. The conference packs a lot in over two days; 66 sessions running across 6 streams, 4 keynotes, and two streams of hands-on

I am sitting in my room at a Heathrow Airport hotel on my way from Athens (Greece) to San Francisco.  My body is still working on Eastern European time and I am beginning to dread the change to the Californian time zone. Still having two days of 'rest'

One of the sessions that I'm giving at next week's UKOUG Conference [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/11/15/rittman-mead-at-the-ukoug-conference-2008/] is Optimizing Oracle BI EE Performance. Now I've given talks along these lines before but I've always ended up listing out

Just a quick note to point to Greg Rahn's posting on External Table Preprocessors in Oracle 11g 11.1.07 [http://structureddata.org/2008/11/19/preprocessor-for-external-tables/]. Prior to 11.1.0.7, if a file that you were going to use via an external table needed uncompressing,

Dan Vlamis broke the news yesterday [http://www.vlamis.com/blog.php/?p=76] that Simba Technologies will be showing off their "Native Microsoft Excel 2007 Connectivity for Oracle OLAP" solution at the upcoming BIWA SIG in December. From looking at Dan's blog posting and the