Mark Rittman

So if you're administering OBIEE and you're looking out for connectivity issues, what's the sort of thing that can go wrong? From where I'm standing, the major things to look out for include: * The Presentation Server going down * The Presentation Server being

I'm over in Singapore at the moment, and the client I'm working with is looking for some help with troubleshooting Oracle BI EE installations. This is an interesting area because as developers, we generally focus on building new applications rather than supporting existing ones, but if

Well I've just arrived in Singapore, the view below is the view from my hotel room across the Singapore Marina. Flying in, down from the tip of Malaysia and across Singapore, you certainly get a feeling for where all the world's industry, shipping and so on

Just a short note to mention that the UKOUG are running a BI and Hyperion conference [http://www.oug.org/hyperion] at Twickenham Stadium on the 24th and 25th June. Part of the UKOUG Conference Series, this event brings together the worlds of BI and Hyperion and is in addition

Well it's now the Sunday after the BI Forum, and it's time to take a look back at how the first ever expert-level BI Forum in Brighton went. We had fifty attendees from around the world, all of whom were at advanced level in Oracle BI

I'm sitting in the BI Forum on day two of the event, Antony Heljula is delivering a very good session on Oracle BI EE and Web Services. This is a particular area of interest for me as I worked on an article for OTN on this area; in

I'm sitting in the back row of the BI Forum in Brighton [http://www.rittmanmead.com/rittman-mead-bi-forum-brighton-may-14th-15th-2009/], the coming-together of Oracle BI, Essbase and ODI experts that we've organized in Brighton. The event started last night with a drinks reception in the hotel, after downing a

Well, it's the night before the start of the BI Forum in Brighton [http://www.rittmanmead.com/rittman-mead-bi-forum-brighton-may-14th-15th-2009/], tomorrow the delegates start arriving and we begin with a drinks reception at 6pm. All the presentations are in, the speakers are ready for their sessions and the people who

My second session for Collaborate'09 [http://www.collaborate09.com] was entitled "Optimizing the Performance of the Oracle BI Applications Data Warehouse", and focused on applying Oracle data warehouse optimizations to the platform-independent data warehouse data model that ships with the BI Applications. This data warehouse features

I'm currently sitting in the coffee area at my hotel, just back from the Orange County Conference Center after giving one of my presentations at Collaborate'09 [http://www.collaborate09.com]. Collaborate is a joint user group conference run by IOUG, OAUG and Quest, and this year

So you've probably heard the news now, that Oracle have agreed to buy Sun [http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html], the makers of Solaris, SPARC chips, lots of application servers, servers and storage units and of course Java. IBM were originally in the running but backed-off due

Materialized Views and Partitioning are two key Oracle features when working with data warehouses. Using them together though can sometimes cause unexpected problems when you need to refresh them, as we found on a recent project. Here's what happened, reproduced using the SH Sample Schema. Our initial requirement

Earlier in the week I posted an introduction to Hyperion Planning [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/04/13/so-just-what-is-hyperion-planning/], and then went through the process of setting up the Planning sample application [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/04/16/hyperion-planning-installing-the-sample-planning-application-in-epm-111/] . Today I've been working through creating

The other day I posted an introductory article to Hyperion Planning [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/04/13/so-just-what-is-hyperion-planning/], and I mentioned at the time that I'd go through how to set up the standard demo. The version of Planning I'm working with is Hyperion

Borkur and I are off to Collaborate'09 [http://www.collaborate09.com] in a few weeks time, with myself doing a session on Oracle BI Apps DW Optimization and Borkur doing one on Oracle BI EE High Availability and Clustering, both of which are on the OAUG track. The

If you work in the Oracle BI industry, the tools we work with tend to break down into two types; those that require largely technical knowledge, and those that require you to know a bit about the business. Discoverer for example is just a query tool and you can learn

I'm very pleased to announce that as of 6th April 2009, Rittman Mead and Majendi are joining forces. You'll probably know Majendi [http://www.majendi.com] best through Adrian Ward [http://www.majendi.blogspot.com/], one of the original Siebel Analytics and Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

We were planning to run a free customer half-day seminar [http://www.opnlaunchpad.com/pages/campaigns/index.php/194/] on April 1st 2009, at Oracle's offices in Central London, however we had to postpone it in the end due to the G20 demonstrations. Everyone registered for the original

One of the events we're helping to organize later in the year, is the Kimball University "Data Warehouse Lifecycle In-Depth" [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/02/12/rittman-mead-and-kimball-university-event/] event running in May, in London. This is an excellent chance to learn the fundamentals of the

I was working with a customer today who had brought in a new Oracle source into their OBIEE physical layer. The source had several tables with date columns that used the DATE datatype, and these tables were then used to create a simple dimensional model, like the one below. Everything