Rittman Mead Blog - BI, Oracle and Related Technologies

Work-Life Balance at Rittman Mead

Rittman Mead has always had a long standing commitment to giving back, not only to the technology industry, but to local and global communities as well. Recently, Rittman Mead employees have been encouraged to take up to 40 paid hours to participate in community service opportunities. This year,

Technical

ChitChat: The Importance of BI Integrations

A user's workflow shouldn't change to accommodate a new tool. A new tool should fill a gap in the current workflow and help streamline the user's process. An application without a clearly defined scope eventually overlaps with existing solutions, creating confusion and distress among users. It takes both time and

Technical

The Importance of BI Commentary

Why Is Commentary Important? We communicate every day. Communication through text is especially abundant with the proliferation of new on-demand technologies. Have you gone through your emails today? Have you read the news, weather, or blogs (like this one)? Communication is the backbone to every interpersonal interaction. Without it, we

Technical

ChitChat - Commentary Made Simple

Rittman Mead is excited to announce ChitChat, an innovative new communication tool for OBIEE. Rittman Mead’s clients already receive the best Oracle Business Analytics and Data Integration consulting and training. Now, in a major expansion of our business capabilities, our clients can enjoy the benefits of our engineering team’

Technical

Implementing OBIEE Commentary

My Application Development Experience with Rittman Mead Greetings, readers! My name is Nick Padgett, and this is my first blog post with Rittman Mead. I started with Rittman Mead as an intern over a year ago while I was attending Kennesaw State, a local university, but I’ve graduated from

Technical

Rittman Mead America’s New Office

Rittman Mead America has a new home, and it’s looking good. At the end of 2015, we moved into a new office space in Alpharetta, Georgia, in a new development named Avalon. We’ve just begun to settle into our new office space, but we are already feeling at

Big Data

Using Python to ‘Wrangle’ Your Messy Data

or How to Organize Your Comic Book Collection Based on Issue Popularity In addition to being a product manager at Rittman Mead, I consider myself to be a nerd of the highest order. My love of comic books, fantasy, sci-fi and general geekery began long before the word ‘Stark’ had

Technical

Corporate Social Responsibility (Where Can We Serve?)

At Rittman Mead, we believe that people are more important than profit. This manifests itself in two ways. First, we want to impact the world beyond data and analytics, and secondly, we want our employees to be able to contribute to organizations they believe are doing impactful work. This year,

Technical

Mike Hibbert - A Celebration

It’s been a long while since I graced the blog with my presence and I had always hoped that when I did return, it would be with something new, or exciting to say. Instead, I find myself writing something much more personal and subdued: a celebration of one of

Technical

Driving OBIEE User Engagement with Enhanced Usage Tracking for OBIEE

Measuring and monitoring user interactions and behaviour with OBIEE is a key part of Rittman Mead’s User Engagement Service. By understanding and proving how users are engaging the system we can improve the experience for the user, driving up usage and ensuring maximum value for your OBIEE investment. To

Technical

Three Easy Ways to Stream Twitter Data into ElasticSearch

For the past few months a friend has been driving me crazy with all his praise for Splunk. He was going on about how easy it is to install, integrate different sources and build reports. I eventually started playing around to see if it could be used for a personal

Technical

Rittman Mead's Bar Optimizer

At Rittman Mead R&D, we have the privilege of solving some of our clients’ most challenging data problems. We recently built a set of customized data products that leverage the power of Oracle and Cloudera platforms and wanted to share some of the fun we’ve had in

Technical

Six Months an ACE…”Boy, that escalated quickly"

Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, my path to becoming an Oracle ACE since joining Rittman Mead! When I began with Rittman Mead back in March 2012, I wasn't planning on joining the ACE program. In fact, I really wasn't sure what an Oracle ACE even was. If you're not

Technical

First-timer tips for Oracle Open World

Last week I had the great pleasure to attend Oracle Open World (OOW) for the first time, presenting No Silver Bullets - OBIEE Performance in the Real World at one of the ODTUG user group sessions on the Sunday. It was a blast, as the saying goes, but the week

Technical

Creating a Custom Analytics Dashboard from Scratch the "Blue Peter" way

This year, Rittman Mead were the Analytics Sponsor for the UKOUG Tech13 conference in Manchester, and for those that visited the UKOUG stand during their time there will have noticed the Rittman Mead-sponsored Analytics Dashboard on display. In this blog post I will cover how it was put together, the

Technical

Introduction to Hadoop HDFS (and writing to it with node.js)

The core Hadoop project solves two problems with big data - fast, reliable storage and batch processing. For this first post on Hadoop we are going to focus on the default storage engine and how to integrate with it using its REST API. Hadoop is actually quite easy to install

Business Insights

Exalytics Test Drive - April 18th 2012 in London

Some people may have seen that Rittman Mead became the first partner in the UK to buy an Exalytics box in the Oracle newsletter, and as a result we can uniquely offer our customers and community the chance to get hands on with Exalytics to see how it really can

Technical

News on The BI Verdict, and an Interview with Nigel Pendse

Those of you who keep an eye on this blog, or have been in the BI and OLAP industry for many years, will of course know of Nigel Pendse. Nigel was behind the original "OLAP Report" that offered a vendor-neutral view of the OLAP market and had run

Technical

A Quik Look at QlikView

Outside the world of Oracle, one of the rising stars of the BI world has been Qliktech, the Swedish software company behind QlikView. QlikView is one of a new breed of desktop, in-memory BI tools (see also the forthcoming Gemini tool from Microsoft, an in-memory, column-store BI tool that'll be

Technical

Being Flexible

One of the things I really love about working with the team here at Rittman Mead is how we can offer our clients a flexible service, I guess this flexibility must be appreciated by our customers as we have just won the UKOUG Business Intelligence Partner of the Year award.

Technical

Advert - Short-term consultancy

As I mentioned before, Rittman Mead Consulting really does consulting, it's in the company name!! Although a lot of the posts on the company blog are based on our presentations, our work is not all speaking at conferences and delivering training. My colleagues and I are often working with customers

Technical

Finally I managed to write a post

A time for a post Well, it has now been close to 5 months since I joined Rittman Mead Consulting. Right after I joined up, all my previous blog posts were migrated to the RMC blog. The ensuing blog silence on my behalf did cause some people to wonder and

Technical

RSS Feeds

As Mark mentioned in a comment to a posting, we run the Rittman Mead blog on Wordpress. The recent blog revamp may have upset some feed readers that used feed URLs that we no longer maintain. Using Wordpress gives us many more potential feeds than we had before. In addition

Technical

My first Rittman Mead blog post

As I mentioned on my personal blog I will be moving the more technical posts over to this site and keeping the old site as more of a personal weblog. Of course, there will be some posts that are both personal and technical... I hope to start moving things over

Technical

Stopover at Schiphol

I'm just holed up in the lounge at Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands, waiting for a plane back to Heathrow. Today was a very pleasurable day doing some training for Centennium, an Oracle BI & data warehousing specialist consultancy based down in The Hague, the team were really welcoming and keen to