Technical So what do you call large databases? I have written recently about the trend towards ever larger databases. But what should we call these VLDB systems? A few years back a set of terms seem to fit well, DSS, MIS, data warehouse, datamart; sometimes the distinction between them was very blurred. But by and large we were
Introducing “Rittman Mead Consulting” Back at the start of February I mentioned that I was leaving my consulting job and moving in to the world of independent consultancy [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/02/01/an-independent-consultant-from-march-1st-2007/]; now that the move is complete and I've started the new business up, I can
Technical Writing it large and reading it big Yesterday I ungraciously forgot to mention Nuno Souto's blog piece [http://dbasrus.blogspot.com/2007/01/no-moore-part-2.html] from January where he was talking about just the same sort of issues with access to massive databases. Please go and read Noons' work, it is well worth it.
Blog Migration If you're reading this, it means the migration of my blog to the new company site has been successful. I'll post more news on what this means over the next few days, but for now, welcome to Rittman Mead Consulting, the name of our new consulting
Using OWB10gR2 in a Production Environment … Revisited A couple of weeks ago I posted an article on using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 in a production environment [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/02/14/running-owb10gr2-in-a-production-environment/]. Since then, I've had the opportunity to spend some time with customers doing just this, and I've come
Ever bigger One of the things that came out from the Netezza conference is the number of large databases (not just on that platform) out there. Ten terabytes plus is common, I was speaking to one person with a 100 TB system whose daily batch is the same size as some people&
Technical Where to buy your data warehouse in 2010 As we have all seen there has been significant consolidation with in the BI tool space in the past 18 months or so. Some of the bigger players have been (or soon will be) assimilated into the other vendors’ product portfolios. In the main it has been the database vendors
Technical Dimensions 2 Well as I wrote [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/03/06/dimensions-on-the-side/] that I was going off to think up some new W words I knew it was a bad idea! Traditional dimensions in retail data warehousing have exciting names such as TIME, PRODUCT, CUSTOMER, STORE; see not a
Technical Dimensions on the side It is quite a while since I blogged the mini-series on data warehouse design (it started here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/06/28/dw-design-part-1/]) and was proceeded by a series with the grand title of DW Wisdom [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/06/22/dw-wisdom/] - where
Technical Upgrading Warehouse Builder I have mentioned here before that one of our customers has a BI system based on an Oracle 9.2 Data warehouse and uses OWB 9.2.0.8 for the majority (but not all) of the ETL processes. For various reason linked with vendor certifications the system was frozen
More on fraud and money laundering Yesterday I mentioned a small analytic project we are doing for a retail customer around money laundering. Joel Gary commented [http://pjsrandom.wordpress.com/2007/02/23/end-of-week-catch-up/#comment-5381] and linked to an article in his local press about the rise of anti-fraud analytic companies in his neck of California.
Technical End of week catch up A somewhat slow week blogwise; loads of events that are not blog worthy, or just unusable for confidentiality reasons. Some may be written about later, but others will be locked away for ever. At long last one of my customers is going to upgrade the Oracle version of there multi-terabyte
Technical Running OWB10gR2 in a Production Environment I've been giving some thought recently to how Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 is configured and used when working in a production environment. Most people who "kick the tires" with OWB10gR2 do so on their own laptop, or on their own pc, with a local database on
A Couple of New Blogs A quick nod to a few new blogs that I've recently spotted. Simon Ellis [http://fabricoftechnology.blogspot.com/] is someone I've worked with on a couple of projects before, and is a pretty capable technologist and project lead working in the Oracle middleware and architecture space.
Tales of woe: Query performance The nuts and bolts of putting together a decent data warehouse are not that hard. You just need to get the I/O right ;-) OK, in reality there is a little more to it: you need to make sure you store the correct granularity of data, you have all
Technical Materialized Views - 2 The other day I was asked [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/02/07/working-with-materialized-view-summaries/#comment-5140] about the approach I took to refreshing materialized views. To be honest I use my own techniques - others [http://oraclesponge.wordpress.com/2006/04/12/a-quick-materialized-view-performance-note/] do similar things. In a data warehouse
Technical Looking Closer at BI Suite EE 10gR3 I've been spending all my spare time recently on the book I'm working on, and so deliberately stayed away from the new Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition so that I didn't get distracted. I've got a couple of days free now, and
Technical Working with materialized view summaries Materialized views (mviews) have been part of Oracle for along time, before Oracle 8 they went under the name snapshots and indeed some of the current dictionary tables refer to the old name. Common uses of mviews are to replicate data and to summarise data. It's this second
Summary table design Most data warehouses used for reporting and built on conventional database technology such as SQL Server, Oracle and DB2 use some form of summarisation to boost query performance. In principle we doing once in the batch load and refresh process what would need to be done for each query at
An Independent Consultant from March 1st 2007 Well, this is something I’ve thought about for a while now and now I can mention officially: from March 1st 2007, I’ll be setting up my own company and working as an Independent Consultant, specializing in Oracle Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing solutions. My objective going forward is
Oracle BI Suite EE 10.1.3.2 On General Release I got back from Sweden yesterday evening, and saw from Abhinav's blog [http://oraclebi.blogspot.com/] that Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2 (known as the "Maui" release) is now available for download on OTN [http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/htdocs/devlic.
Sending test cases to support My heart sinks when someone in support asks us to send over the datafiles involved in some SR or other we have running with support. People seem to forget that there are some large systems out there. In our case our problem was with a 9 way join in a
Technical Flying Visit, and Managing OWB10gR2 Configurations It's currently Sunday lunchtime over in the UK, and I'm here on a flying visit in between visits to Austria and Slovenia last week, and Sweden next. I ran the BI Masterclass last week in Vienna and Ljubljana (photos here [http://www.flickr.com/photos/markrittman/
Technical Not such good ideas One of our consultants dropped by my desk to ask me some Oracle questions around data life cycle management. One of his customers is moving a store based system to a central system and like a lot of systems in the UK needs to keep 7 years of transactional data
Just to reinforce the idea... ... that the hot topic in BI is "intelligence to the masses". Cognos have just acquired [http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2007/0117.html] a dashboard and operational reporting vendor, Celequest [http://celequest.com]. Interestingly, Celequest also market a BI appliance product, a bit of a departure from
