Peter Scott - Rittman Mead (Page 3)

Reminder - UKOUG BIRT SIG meeting

... is on Wednesday October 8th [http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=3349]. Mark will be speaking and I will be there with the Rittman Mead stand, so if you are at the meeting just come up and say "hello". This is the last BIRT SIG

Technical

Exa-ctly

Sitting about half-a-flying-day from San Francisco and OOW and for that matter my colleagues, gives me opportunity to mull over Larry's keynote address that has been so widely reported on-line. I would love to say my prediction for what was going to be announced was completely right; although

Technical

Oracle BI Training Days

Over the past few months the team at Rittman Mead have been busy developing new course content and seeking out suitable venues for our first ever public course, the Oracle BI Training Days [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/oracle-bi-training-days-october-22nd-24th-london-uk/] . This course is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about designing,

Technical

Oracle 11g Partitioning

Last time I mentioned [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/08/28/bitmap-index-examples/] that I have been helping Mark with some demonstrations of the Data Warehouse features of modern (notably 11g) Oracle databases. Having a few minutes spare I decided to take a look at partitioning. I have long been

Technical

Bitmap Index Examples

Between assignments (mostly, OBIEE and BI Applications work) and a family holiday in the Austrian Alps I have been helping Mark with some of the examples he will be demonstrating as part of his 11g Data Warehousing Seminar [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/07/15/oracle-11g-data-warehousing-seminar-denmark/]. I must confess

What's new in Oracle Warehouse Builder 10.2.0.4

Last week I mentioned that the Oracle Warehouse Builder 10.2.0.4 patchset was out for Linux and Windows; but what I did not mention what was in it! So to make amends here are a few of the highlights. Firstly, this is not just a bug-fix release, even

OWB 10.2.0.4 is out

I noticed on Greg Partenach's blog [http://cali97.blogspot.com/2008/07/owb-patching.html] that the 10.2.0.4 patchset had been released. Taking a quick look on Metalink I see that patch 7005587 is out for Linux and Windows - no doubt the other platforms will

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

Technical

Teaching data warehousing

One of my first tasks on joining Rittman Mead Consulting was to develop a new three-day course on data warehouse design. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to 'road test' some of the course content in a different presentation format; a tutorial-style workshop. Although I had

Technical

Dates and times comment

A few days ago, Farooq posted some comments on an old post of mine [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/06/21/status-changes-over-time/]. The final comment in our exchange concerned storing activities in our data warehouse by time (actual hour and minute). This is quite a common requirement, especially where

Cube-Organized Materialized Views

As Mark mentioned [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/04/18/collaborate08-finishing-up/] and illustrated last week, I really did have an audience to my talk on Cube-Organized Materialized Views. He also managed to choose a camera angle for one of the photos that made the conference room look completely empty,

Day 2 at Collaborate 08

I am sitting in my hotel room, bathed in beautiful sunshine as the sun dips towards the snow-capped mountains. Better make the most of it for tomorrow is forecast to be a lot (like 19ºC) colder and maybe even a touch of snow. Not that we will see much of

Day 1 at Collaborate 08

Up early, as I always am and met Mark for a 6:30AM breakfast. Was criticised for eating "Fruit Loops" as that's not the sort of thing that the sane consultant eats... Then back to the hotel room to get a little work out of the

Collaborate 08

This time next week I should be back in the UK (but probably still trying to find my baggage at the airport!) after presenting my first conference talk in the USA. I have been through the slides, made a few adjustments and cut a CD copy as a backup to

Technical

Cube Organized Materialized Views

Yesterday, Mark mentioned [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/03/25/new-white-paper-on-cube-organized-materialized-views/] a new Oracle white paper on Cube Organized Materialized Views - now that is a bit of a mouthful and shouts out to be made COMV or something equally short and saving of typing. I say that because

Technical

RSS Feeds

As Mark mentioned in a comment to a posting [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2008/03/15/a-site-makeover/], 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

Technical

My first Rittman Mead blog post

As I mentioned [http://pjsrandom.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/meetings-and-blogs/] 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

Indexing the unusual

For many years I had an interest in non-standard indexing and exotic data types, that is things that weren't NUMBER or VARCHAR2. In fact before I came in to data warehousing I was involved in indexing free text such as conversation transcripts and and narrative reports; some of

Technical

Data Warehouses are not dead, yet

One of the reasons that I left my old job to work with Rittman Mead Consulting was to get back to technology. Don't get this wrong, I really did enjoy managing people and having responsibility for a BI practice, but that was at the expense of involvement in

Technical

OLAP and summary management

So, why is someone who normally writes about data warehouses going to talk [http://www.collaborate08.com/collaborate08/] about Oracle OLAP, and in particular, cube organized materialized views? I could run out the argument that I work in a BI consultancy and none of us here at Rittman Mead [http:

Oracle OLAP, partitions and time

One of the reasons I am not writing too much on the blog at present is that I am busy working with a client just about to put a new (small) data warehouse into production. Coupled with the need to concentrate on submitting a white paper to Collaborate 08 by

Technical

Almost started OLAP 11g...

The proposal deadline for the upcoming Collaborate 08 was shortly before I was to leave my old employer - it was already known that I would be leaving them to join Mark and Jon (and possibly, it was known before Rittman Mead Consulting existed!) so it came as no real

OWB map testing

I am still overseas working on a OWB project for a client. We are now into that final phase of checking everything before we promote the first release to the production system. Each OWB map for the first release is redeployed on the development system and then test data run

Technical

Oracle Data Integration Suite

Keeping my head down building Oracle 11g OLAP cubes for research and self-education meant the I missed yesterday's product announcement from Oracle, but with the wonders of Blog aggregators (and in particular Beth's [http://feeds.feedburner.com/InfoQualityAggregator]) I spotted a mention on Vincent McBurney'

Technical

Quality thoughts as I continue to chill out

Over at another Blog, Beth [http://datageekgal.blogspot.com/2008/01/data-quality-changes-large-and-small.html] notes that she is editor of the month for the Carnival of Data Quality. When It comes out I urge you to take a look. With those strange quirks of global IT companies Beth and I once