Peter Scott - Rittman Mead (Page 2)

Realtime Data Warehouse Loading

Last time I wrote about the use of replication to provide a source for realtime BI. This time I am going to look at putting data in to a data warehouse in "realtime". Note the quotes, when we speak of realtime there is always some degree of latency:

Technical

Realtime BI Is Not Realtime DW

This posting is slightly edited to clarify that the majority of the post is about using transactional or transactionally structured sources for reporting. One of the points I make early on in my talk "Getting Real Data Warehouse Loading as it Happens" is that realtime business intelligence is

Technical

Collaborate 10 - The Early Days

One of the things I had expected to do this week was to write about some of my BI and DW highlights from Collaborate 10. However, that is not to be. I am currently sitting at home in the UK, a victim of a cloud of volcanic ash that has

Technical

Realtime Data Warehouses

In a little over two weeks I will be giving my Real Time Data Warehousing talk at Collaborate [http://collaborate10.ioug.org/Education/BIWATrainingDays/tabid/83/Default.aspx] 10 in Las Vegas. I will cover a variety of techniques and not just change data capture. However, in my opinion, CDC

Technical

Thoughts on Change Data Capture

In little over a month I will be in Las Vegas speaking at Collaborate 10. There is a lot of BI / DW talks this year and for the first time with BIWA Training Days branding [http://collaborate10.ioug.org/Education/BIWATrainingDays/tabid/83/Default.aspx#view] . Rittman Mead will be

Technical

Oracle 11g Pivot

One of the things that I often come across is the "up-dateable fact", that is a fact that starts life "incomplete" and changes overtime. Examples include things such as support calls that start life as "open" then progress through "responded", "resolved&

Technical

Heat Maps in OBIEE

OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1 has a host of ways to add visual impact to reported data to aid its interpretation. But some things are not so easy to achieve, or at least not by just clicking on a few format buttons on the Answers web page. One of

Collaborate 10

Mark recently mentioned that he would joining Stewart Bryson (the Managing Director of Rittman Mead America) as speakers at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010. But before that June meeting both Mark and I will be joining Stewart at Collaborate 10 [http://collaborate10.ioug.org/] in Las Vegas. This year Collaborate will have

Technical

Capturing Change (Part 2)

In the previous [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/12/08/capturing-change-part-1/] part I outlined the business need for writing our own CDC routines and started to outline some of the issues we would need to resolve. Here I shall outline the approach we took and describe how to go

Technical

Capturing Change (Part 1)

Shortly after I joined Rittman Mead I wrote a small article [http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/DataW_Getting_Real.pdf] on real-time Business Intelligence , there is also a link to it on our "Articles" tab [http://www.rittmanmead.com/articles/]. One of the techniques I mentioned in passing

Oracle 11g Release 2 Analytics

Mark and Venkat have already been blogging about OWB 11g Release 2, but that was not the only new release to slip past Oracle's doors in recent days; 11g Release 2 of the database is also out. I have long loved analytic functions in Oracle - they can

Technical

Slightly Fuzzy Lookups

Recently I had a requirement to selectively "translate" the data in one column of a table before loading into a data warehouse. In this case we had to "standardise" a list of countries. Normally, this is classic use of an outer join to a table containing

Technical

Cardinality of Rowsources

One of the things I sometimes come across when looking at legacy ETL code for data loading is the misuse of query hints to "improve" data load performance. Sometimes DBAs or developers do not remember that "tuning the select" may not be the same thing as

Technical

Dynamic SQL

One of my pet hates is the inappropriate use of dynamic SQL within ETL processes, for example building a command as VARCHAR2 string then using it in an "execute immediate" statement. Putting commands into strings whether hard-coded ones within the package or procedure, retrieved from some 'code&

Technical

Simple Steps to Sustainable ETL

Recently Stewart posted his first blog post here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/04/22/using-a-partition-by-join-to-fill-in-the-gaps/] on the Rittman Mead Blog, it drew quite a bit of comment about using external techniques to the ETL to provide mechanisms to do things more efficiently or to do things that could

Sharing Prompts Between OBIEE Dashboards

Occasionally I lurk over at the OTN Discussion Forums, and the Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=378] one in particular. Today I saw a question on passing a dashboard prompt value between dashboards and not knowing the answer I decided to spend

Oracle Merge Is Not Just For Merging

I have long liked the Oracle merge statement - so much more elegant (and efficient) than the "try insert and if it fails have a go at update" or "try update and if there is nothing to update add the row" strategies that used to be

Technical

Analytic Views as OWB Data Source

Readers of my old blog - much now ported here to the Rittman Mead blog may remember my fondness for things SQL (rather than PL/SQL) and analytic functions in particular. It is not that I can't "do" PL/SQL it is more that I think

Technical

Breaking Silence

It is February and I have just realised that I have not added anything to the Rittman Mead Blog this year. Like all of my colleagues, I have been busy working with clients - so far this year I have worked on projects on OBIEE reporting over Oracle e Business

BIWA Summit - Day 2

The second day has just ended, and now I am back in the hotel thinking of grabbing a bite to eat before the fun tasks of finishing a report for a customer and packing... just hope my stuff still fits my suitcase. Conferences seem to start early here - and

Day 1 BIWA

Today was the first of the BIWA Summit at Redwood Shores, California. It was also the day of my presentation on Cube Organized Materialized Views in summary management. The conference packs a lot in over two days; 66 sessions running across 6 streams, 4 keynotes, and two streams of hands-on

BIWA Next Week

I am sitting in my room at a Heathrow Airport hotel on my way from Athens (Greece) to San Francisco. My body is still working on Eastern European time and I am beginning to dread the change to the Californian time zone. Still having two days of 'rest'

Data Governance

Data quality is not a one-off

In my Blog post on End-to-end data quality [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/10/25/end-to-end-data-quality/] I mentioned the desirability of fixing bad data at source. This certainly attracted comment both here and on other blogs for example [http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/2008/11/continuing_the_data_quality_

Technical

End-to-end data quality

One of our customers is about to embark on a significant BI project; but being in the "public sector" they have to (by EU law) publish tender documents so that qualified suppliers throughout the EU can bid to do the work. This means they have a gap of

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 [http: