"Why do so many BI projects fail? For years we ve heard about the potential value of BI, so why are the results often so disappointing in the eyes of key BI project sponsors and stakeholders? A BI project can go quite smoothly from a technical perspective and still

Ever wondered what the difference is between the SORT MERGE [http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96533/optimops.htm#49759] s and HASH JOIN [http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96533/optimops.htm#76074] s found in Explain Plans [http://download-west.oracle.

I've been trying to get TOra 1.2.4 [http://www.globecom.se/tora/] to connect to an Oracle Database 10g installation, with both client and server on the same Red Hat 9.0 machine. Unfortunately, although TOra starts up, as soon as I try and connect I

I had an interesting question put to me at work yesterday, where a colleague was having problems with an outer join in an SQL statement. My collegue was putting together as system that recorded bids for contracts, storing the userid of the system operator, the details of the prospective client,

Mark Van De Wiel has advised [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jsp?forum=57&thread=229043&tstart=15&trange=15] that the 9.2.0.4 patchset for Oracle Warehouse Builder 9.2 is now available on metalink [http://metalink.oracle.com/], using patch ID 3443542.

All of the Oracle 10g infrastructure components are now available for download on OTN, for Linux, HP-UX and Sun Solaris. * Oracle Database 10g (10.1.0.2) [http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/database/oracle10g/] * Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (10.1.0.2) [http://otn.oracle.com/software/

Just popped into an internet cafe in the KOMTAR [http://www.cuti.com.my/Sub/Penang/guide_komtar.htm], Penang, so it's a good opportunity to update the blog with a couple of news items... Chuck Phillips, who along with Safra Catz is one of the new Co-presidents

Ever since an old colleague of mine mentioned [http://www.rittman.net/archives/000622.html] that his Oracle development team were using Scrum [http://www.controlchaos.com/], an agile development methodology, to run and plan their projects, I've been looking out for an opportunity to use agile methods

One of the books I've been reading whilst on holiday is "Softwar : An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle" [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074322504X/qid=1076818203//ref=pd_ka_1/104-6007348-3903142?v=glance&s=books&n=507846] by

Well, I have to say, the weather and food in Penang [http://www.geographia.com/malaysia/penang.html] is wonderful. I'm staying at the Bay View Beach Resort [http://www.bayviewbeach.com/] in Batu Ferengghi [http://www.malaysiasite.nl/batuferringhi.htm] and apart from the occaisional check of

There's a new technical white paper available on OTN about the support for SQL 2003 in Oracle Database 10g [http://otn.oracle.com/products/database/application_development/pdf/SQL_2003_TWP.pdf] . "As the latest version of SQL standards, SQL 2003 is making major improvements in a

A recent posting [http://www.rittman.net/archives/000731.html] on Oracle Warehouse Builder prompted some questions from readers on the process of integrating Oracle Workflow with Oracle Warehouse Builder; this integration has also been a 'hot topic' on the OTN OWB Forum [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/

Slashdot [http://www.slashdot.org/] reports asquabble between Sun and Eclipse [http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/30/2140201&mode=nested&tid=102&tid=108&tid=126&tid=156&tid=187] : > "CNET news is reporting on apotential spat [http:

Yesterday, I looked at collections [http://www.rittman.net/archives/000755.html], an evolution of PL/SQL tables that allows us to manipulate many variables at once, as a unit. Collections, coupled with two new features introduced with Oracle 8i, BULK_COLLECT and FORALL, can dramatically increase the performance of

"While much has been talked and written about regarding the return on investment of business intelligence initiatives, little has been discussed concerning the barrier to entry that many small and medium-size businesses (SMB) face when staring straight in the eyes of a business problem that requires a BI solution.

Yesterday I looked at some code [http://www.rittman.net/archives/000753.html] written in Oracle 7-style PL/SQL, and compared it with what is considered best practice with Oracle 8i and 9i. The more up-to-date code generally runs around 3-5 times faster than the old style code, and, as

A couple of people recently asked the question [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jsp?forum=56&thread=224051&tstart=0&trange=15] on the OTN Discoverer Forum: > "I am new to Discoverer tool as such. Therefore I have this question, pl pardon me if

"As data warehouse designers, you know how important a business executive sponsor is to your initiative. After focusing on data warehousing for the past two decades, I'm convinced that strong business sponsorship is the leading make-or-break indicator of data warehouse success. Having the so-called right sponsor can

Once in a while, I read something about Oracle that stops me in my tracks and makes me really think about how I approach my job. Recent examples include starting to work with 9iAS, and slowly becoming aware of how much I'm going to have to get my

I recently came across a couple of articles onadtmag.com [http://www.adtmag.com/] that are probably worth taking a look at. First up is an article by Jack Vaughan entitled"Dash on real-time, BI and the road ahead" [http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=8021]. Mainly

"Oracle Corp. is redesigning its E-Business Suite of enterprise applications to certify them for use with the company's forthcoming Oracle 10g database and application server, which will be optimized for grid computing. In the process, sources said, Oracle will enable its E-Business applications for the first time

There's agood article [http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=6947&t=y] at the DW Institute about the impactEclipse [http://www.eclipse.org/] (the open-source Java IDE) and theJava Tools Community [http://www.javatools.org/] will have on the custom BI applications market.According to

> "I am in the process of implementing oid and security in datawarehosuing environemnt very similar to whatever i have read in ur fantastic paper. i have asked and queried a few oracle gururs who come up with answers that everything is possible with oid w/o really understanding

Towards the end of last year, I came across an article on OTN about table compression, a new feature in Oracle 9i.As the article explains [http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2003/techarticles/poess_tablecomp.html] , table compression in Oracle9i can significantly accelerate query performance, especially in star schemas.

There's an interesting thread going on at comp.databases.oracle.misc that compares Oracle Forms to Microsoft's .Net [http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=1074646616.183187@yasure&prev=/groups?q=comp.databases.