Oracle Open World : Day 2 : Scott McNealy’s Keynote A quick picture from today's Scott McNealy keynote, with Scott's take on what's on Larry's iPod at the moment... The usual entertaining presentation, lots of talk about open source (though not GPL), computing as a utility, and the six bits of R&
Data Warehousing Know who your customers are - part 4 In follow-ups to recent [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2005/08/31/know-who-your-customers-are-%e2%80%93-part-1/] posts [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2005/09/05/know-who-your-customers-are-%e2%80%93-part-2/] some people raised a point about using basket analysis in “reverse” to segment customers. The legend that young men buy beer
Oracle to Purchase Siebel for $5.85bn Oracle Agrees to Buy Siebel for $10.66 a Share : [http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_sep/monrls.html] "REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., 12-SEP-2005 Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) announced today that it agreed to buy Siebel Systems, Inc (Nasdaq: SEBL) for $10.66 per share. The offer is valued
Know who your customers are – part 3 So you managed to go through all those hoops and have a way to tie (at least some) transactions to identifiable individuals. But can you be sure that each customer on your customer table is different person? Cleaning of customer data is notoriously difficult. True duplicates should not happen if
Odds and Ends A quick round up of a few odds and ends. I've had a few responses back now about the Open World bloggers' dinner, and it looks now like it won't be just me turning up, or indeed held in a phone box. So far the
San Francisco Oracle Open World Blogger Dinner I mentioned the other day that it might be an idea to have a bloggers dinner one night during Oracle Open World SF. A couple of people have come back and said that it might be worthwhile and therefore I'm offering to organise it. If any Oracle blogger
Data Warehousing Know who your customers are – part 2 Thanks to the readers that pointed out that some stores ask for postal code or zip code at the point of sale. Postal codes can help refine customer identification to those in living in a specific locality (or even as in the UK a cluster of houses on a street)
Open World Paper on RAC, DW and 32-bit Linux If you read my posting a couple of months ago askingwhether RAC was suitable for data warehousing [http://www.rittman.net/archives/001264.html], and the debate beforehand on the Dizwell Forum [http://www.phpbbserver.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=52&mforum=dizwellforum], you might be interested in a
New Orleans Flooding Like a lot of people, I've been following the events down in New Orleans over the last few days. It obviously puts all the usual tech stuff into perspective and it must be a pretty harrowing time over in the States. What amazes me is the degree to
Data Warehousing Know who your customers are – part 1 Consider a supermarket data warehouse – you know what was sold, where it was sold and when it was sold, we can even identify what else the customer bought in the same basket. But do we really know who the customer was? Identifying retail customers at point of sale has always
Data Warehousing Validation of dimensions If you have an Oracle data warehouse and are using materialized views for aggregations then Oracle dimension objects would have almost certainly been defined. These objects describe the hierarchical, attribute and join relationships for dimensions and together with database constraints enable the query rewrite mechanism to successfully rewrite queries that
New Book I see that Digital Press is about to publish a book on Oracle Data Warehouse Tuning for 10g [http://books.elsevier.com/us/digitalpress/us/subindex.asp?isbn=1555583350&country=United+States&community=digitalpress&ref=&] . I hope to pick up a copy of Gavin Powell'
News on the Forthcoming UKOUG BIRT SIG in September The next meeting of the UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG [http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=816] is taking place on 20th September 2005, at theInstitute of Physics, London [http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_venue.jsp?id=441]. As usual there's an
More On The Mysterious “OX” I've managed to find out a bit more about themysterious OX application [http://www.rittman.net/archives/001321.html]that appeared onOTN's OLAP homepage [http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/index.html] last week. What it looks like is that OX was developed by
Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Phase 2 Available Soon? Abhinav Argawal reports in hislatest blog posting [http://oraclebi.blogspot.com/2005/08/phase-2-doc-is-now-available.html] that Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Phase 2 should be available for download within a few days. The big new thing with Phase 2 is the inclusion of Oracle Reports Services in the BI tier, plus
Being Too Clever For Your Own Good I was with a client the other week and was asked to look at a particular SQL statement that kept failing due to lack of TEMP space. It looked something like this (names changed to protect the innocent, etc.) > CREATE TABLE lookup_table AS SELECT destn, studref, min(pi)
Data Warehousing Partition Pruning works! In a recent post, David Aldridge [http://oraclesponge.blogspot.com/2005/08/execution-plans-for-partition-not.html] discussed an approach for efficiently rebuilding a table so that partition key migrated from one column to another. This is a somewhat specialised operation and one that most people need not consider (well not unless you
Back In The Blogosphere I've somewhat disappeared off the blogosphere over the last couple of months, with updates to this site pretty few and far between. In fact I've actually been busier than ever and doing a lot of research and writing on Oracle BI&W, plus there'
Sorting A Few Things Out Apologies for the lack of updates to the blog recently. I've got quite a few things going on with work at the moment which are taking up my time, and I'm also putting the finishing touches to an Oracle OLAP performance tuning paper which will be
DW migration Our sales people have asked us to look at migrating a small (less than 3TB) DW system from another vendor’s database to Oracle. The DW database migration is conceptually not too difficult – we keep the user layer logically the same as now so they do not have to make
Data Warehousing Wrong results One of our users raised a support call with my team – a query returned the wrong results. My guys check it out and capture the explain plan… yes wrong results, and because the lower bound of a BETWEEN prediacte was being omitted. So a TAR is raised with support – the
Updates on the SQL Model Clause and XML Publisher If you read my article a couple of weeks ago about theSQL Model clause [http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/sql_model_clause.html] you'll probably be interested in a follow-up email I received yesterday from John Haydu, Product Manager within Oracle with responsibility for the Model clause. John
Data Warehousing Partition joins A few weeks ago (OK, in June; time flys when you are old!) I posted a piece of time series aggregation [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2005/06/21/time-series/] One technique I did not mention (and nobody reminded me of it ;-) ) was “partition joins”. This was a new
Computerwire : “Oracle Preps Major BI Revamp This Summer” Oracle Preps Major BI Revamp This Summer [http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=51F269D8-8E19-414F-929B-4D185AC80ED4] : "Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp, said the company is planning to roll out significant upgrades to its business intelligence (BI) and online analytic processing (OLAP) tools later this summer. In an SG Securities
IBM To Stop Reselling Essbase IBM and Hyperion Part Ways Maybe [http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/imhoff/archives/2005/07/ibm_and_hyperio.php] : "On July 21, I got a surprising email from Stephanie Clark - IBM's Analyst Relations person. In it, she states that IBM and Hyperion are ending their OEM
