I'm off to do a presales visit to Ireland tomorrow, and the bit of technology I'll be demonstrating is the new Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/05/an_guide_to_oraclebi_suite_ent.html]. I had to put a demo

“Which comes first, the physical or logical design for an Oracle data warehouse?” has always been a question that I have struggled to come up with a convincing answer. To my thinking they both develop simultaneously. True, when designing a data warehouse there will be a set of design criteria

The final part of this small series on data warehouse wisdom looks at the enterprise strands. Enterprise DW moves away from the tactical departmental “point solutions” and into something that fits with strategic aspirations of the enterprise. On the face of it having a single solution across the enterprise as

The first two parts of this discussion covered the physical aspects of conventional DW wisdom. Today I will cover some of the business drivers for data warehouses. When people found that their transactional systems were unsuited for BI reporting (perhaps because of the performance impact of running BI on a

Tim Hall mentioned the other day [http://www.oracle-base.com/blog/2006/06/19/oracle-open-world-and-famous-namesake/] that our complementary Oracle Open World full conference passes came through, courtesy of the Oracle ACE program, which was rather nice. [http://www.oracle.com/openworld] As both Tim and I are paying for ourselves

I'm back now from Washington, and the journey back wasn't nearly so bad as when I came back from Nashville, or at least the jet-lag isn't, anyway. The fact that my flight left Washington at 8.00am, and got in to Heathrow around 8.

Keep all the OLTP tables separate from the DW systems: In the olden days, the database ran on a single machine with one or (probably) more processors and direct connection to the disk. Enterprise storage and server clustering has moved things on a lot since then but there are still

Time to catch up on the second half of the week atODTUG Kaleidoscope [http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com]. Tuesday was the one day that I wasn't due to present, but due to my rather over-enthusiastic volunteering I was still down to be an ODTUG Ambassador for three presentations. This

Over the years there has been a collective set of received wisdom about Business Intelligence in general and about data warehouses in particular. Some of these ideas are lead by the technology involved: * Use as many small disks as possible – a 1TB disk would be a bad idea for a

Today started off with the main ODTUG Keynote, this year by Marko Tilli on the new world of SOA-based development and what it means for traditional Forms and Reports developers. From what I can make out, ODTUG's history is in Forms, Developer and Designer and so the move

Last week I ran my first customer facing demonstration of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition. The demonstration had several objectives * It allowed me to get hands-on experience of setting up a BI suite system * It allowed me to demonstrate how much web-based BI reporting tools had improved since our

Yesterday was the first day proper of ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 for myself, with the BI CAB just after lunch and the BI summit straight afterwards. The day started off with a 4.30am start (ouch) as I'd been in bed since 7.00pm the previous night, it actually

I'm over in Washington D.C. now, and staying in theWardman Park Hotel [http://marriott.com/property/propertypage/WASDT?ptnr=thayer_wasdt_banner] in readiness for theODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 [http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/] conference. Compared to flying over to San Francisco (11+ hours), Nashville (8 hours + another connecting

Just a short update today as I'm packing everything up forODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 [http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com] in Washington. I'm doing two regular presentations, one on XML Publisher on the Monday, and another on OWB10gR2 (a.k.a. "Paris") on the Wednesday. I'

One of the perverse things about BI is that what sounds difficult is often easy and what sounds simple is hard. If someone asked me how many bunches of flowers were sold on Mother’s day 2006 or how many people bought both ‘item A’ and ‘item B’ in Seattle

I'm on holiday at the moment at the Mark Warner Paleros Village Beach Resort [http://www.markwarner.co.uk/summer_holidays/greece/paleros], which is pretty relaxing and is a bit of a cross between a watersports activity centre, a nursery and an all-inclusive holiday resort; in fact

I was really pleased with the Oracle BI suite demo I put together this week. Although my demo was restricted to the Answers and Dashboard components there is enough going on to impress people, myself included: Drilldown, it was a simple to mark any dimension attribute as drillable. For one

As I posted earlier [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/05/31/bi-suite-first-impression/], I went for the brave approach and imported a customer’s 3NF based DW design in to the administration tool and then created a denormalized business layer within the BI tool. This was a slightly more convoluted

I've had the Mac now for about a week and I'm starting to get the hang of it. Thanks to all those people who replied to my earlier posting; I've worked out how right-clicking works now (why don't they just include a

My latest article for OTN, onOracle XML Publisher 5.6.2 Enterprise [http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/rittman-xmlpub.html], is now online. In the article I talk about the new features in the Enterprise version of XML Publisher, and walk through the process of defining a report, laying

One or two of you might be aware that I've been hosting anOracle Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Forum [http://www.rittman.net/forum/] on this site for the last six months (you can access it from the "Forum" tab at the top of each page)

Last week I downloaded and installed the Enterprise Edition BI suite from Oracle’s e-delivery website. Installation of the components that I wanted to try was a breeze and getting the admin tool up a running and pointing at a real database was straight forward. I had decided to go

The other week I went through awalkthrough of Siebel Answers and Siebel Intelligence Dashboards [http://www.rittman.net/archives/2006/05/an_oracle_answers_and_oracle_d.html], and I mentioned at the time that it was possible to use reports generated by these two tools as the basis for

Mark Rittman has been hosting a BI & DW forum [http://www.rittman.net/forum/] since the beginning of the year. But from a recent post from Mark there is a strong possibility that forum will fold; not because there is a lack of posts but because it is starting