Mark Rittman

And now for something a bit different. Some of you in the Oracle data warehousing world might remember Lilian Hobbs [http://www.lilianhobbs.com/], who used to work in the Server Tech part of Oracle and worked on areas such as materialized views, partitioning and information lifecycle management, and who

Oracle University are running a few of my "masterclasses" early next year, with the Data Warehousing one that I first ran in Denmark now running in London, and an updated version of the BI Masterclass running in Norway, Croatia and Estonia. Here's the dates and agenda

So here's an idea. We're thinking about organizing a mini-conference next year, modeled on events like the Hotsos Symposium [http://www.hotsos.com/sym_speakers.html] or the Miracle Database Forum [http://www.miracleas.dk/events/DBF2004/invitation.html], but focusing on Oracle Business Intelligence, potentially

I'm writing this sitting on the train coming back from the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition 2008, and whilst in previous years I've tried to do a daily update, this year has been so busy for us I'm only just catching up now. This morning

One of the sessions that I'm giving at next week's UKOUG Conference [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/11/15/rittman-mead-at-the-ukoug-conference-2008/] is Optimizing Oracle BI EE Performance. Now I've given talks along these lines before but I've always ended up listing out

Just a quick note to point to Greg Rahn's posting on External Table Preprocessors in Oracle 11g 11.1.07 [http://structureddata.org/2008/11/19/preprocessor-for-external-tables/]. Prior to 11.1.0.7, if a file that you were going to use via an external table needed uncompressing,

Dan Vlamis broke the news yesterday [http://www.vlamis.com/blog.php/?p=76] that Simba Technologies will be showing off their "Native Microsoft Excel 2007 Connectivity for Oracle OLAP" solution at the upcoming BIWA SIG in December. From looking at Dan's blog posting and the

It's just a few weeks now until the user group event of the year, the UK Oracle User Group Conference & Exhibition 2009 [http://conference.ukoug.org]. This year, as well as presenting at the conference we will have a stand in the exhibition hall [http://conference.ukoug.

I've been meaning to post this for a couple of months now, but we've recently grown our team at Rittman Mead and taken on two new Principal Consultants, Jennifer Albu and Ragnar Wessels, bringing our consulting team [http://www.rittmanmead.com/about/our-team/] up to six

One conference that I won't be going to, but I really wish I was, is the second Oracle BIWA Summit [http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/htmldb/f?p=219:25:1610458228956689::NO:::] on December 2nd and 3rd 2008 at Redwood Shores, California. The Oracle BIWA SIG [http://www.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 [http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/] is being held next June in Monterey, California, and the call for papers [http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/abstracts.html] closes on November 3rd. If you're thinking about putting an abstract in, there's just a few days left now. ODTUG

Well, I've just realized that for the first time in what must be six months, I've not got any course material, presentations, articles or blog posts to write. Today was the last day of our inaugural BI Training Days event, and now that the event has

I'm pleased to announce that, at the UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards [http://www.ukoug.org/communities/show_community.jsp?id=1401&parent=771] last week in London, Rittman Mead Consulting won the Business Intelligence Partner of the Year category. Thank you, all the UKOUG members

One of the new things that shipped with the OBIEE 10.1.3.4 release was a new set of sample data, and a set of reports and dashboards that show off the more advanced features of OBIEE. If you download and install OBIEE now, this is the sample set

I'm traveling over to Philadelphia later this week to speak at the Philadelphia Oracle Users Group evening on October 16th, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004 [http://www.ioug.org/events/calendar/Display_Day.cfm?date=10/16/2008]. My presentation is entitled "A Future Oracle BI&DW

The other day I posted about the query log file generated by the Oracle BI Server [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/10/02/digging-into-the-oracle-bi-server-query-log-file/], and how you could use it to add diagnostics to your query environment. Scott Powell added a comment to the posting suggesting that I take

As a follow-up to the posting I did last week on Oracle BI Enterprise Edition performance tuning, I thought I'd take a closer look a the query log file generated by the Oracle BI Server, the "virtual database engine" that ships with Oracle BI EE. For

Something that we've been working on in the background recently, and are now able to announce, are the first of our Oracle BI Training Days running in London from October 22nd to the 24th, 2008 [http://www.rittmanmead.com/oracle-bi-training-days-october-22nd-24th-london-uk/] . If you're a developer using Oracle&

Open World ended yesterday, and today I took a trip down the peninsula to Oracle's headquarters at Redwood Shores. I actually got the train [http://www.caltrain.com/] down rather than hire a car, as I thought it'd be more interesting to get public transport rather

Today was the final day at Open World, with a number of sessions on the new Exadata Storage Server and the Oracle Database Machine data warehouse appliance, together with the Oracle ACE Directors' Birds of a Feather Panel Session kindly organized by Lewis Cunningham. In the end we had

I'm just catching up now on my Open World notes, as I'm staying for an extra day to go to Redwood Shores tomorrow for a meeting with the OWB product development team. Wednesday (Day 4) was my first day without any presentations, and with Larry'