Peter Scott

Last week I mentioned [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/09/12/reasons-to-review-data-warehouse-health/] one of the reasons why DW performance drops, users start to use different queries. One of my customers had a design principle that 'raw data' should look like it's source. So where we

Business Objects, which may seem a bit of odd choice from someone who writes mainly about data warehouse design and often Oracle. True I can, and do do the whole BI piece, but again, my preferences are heavily Oracle infused. Business Objects has hit the press a few times in

A few weeks ago I was chatting to someone about 'health checks' for data warehouses and the sort of reason that data warehouse owners might have for commissioning them. We came up with three fundamental reasons: * doubts about the current system * fitness for future enhancement * an as check

This year holiday activities have been low key. My elder daughter had various school examination results to receive (for those who know about the English system, GCSEs and AS levels) which basically meant that we needed to be home two Thursdays in August. Coupled with the need to work on

Arrived in the office this morning and glanced towards the window; it was that sort of heavy grey light, the sort you see just before a heavy winter's snowstorm. Then I realised that the warehouse being constructed next to my office building had been clad over the weekend

Faking it - a UK reality (real??) TV show where people are given a crash course in some skill completely alien to their normal life (such a classical musician to dance DJ, or librarian to bodyguard) and then sent to compete against real exponents of the trade for a panel

A while back I was trying recruit a DBA to look after a customer's Oracle E-Business Suite implementation; that is the patching, cloning and kicking the workflow-into-life side of things. It turned out to be a hard search, or perhaps I was a little too demanding in wanting

No, not the size-zero (or below) fashion-sticks that pogo across the catwalks of the world enticing the somewhat-larger to buy, but the modeling of all of the information within an organisation in a single unified form. Said like that, it's simple, but in reality there are lots of

I guess I am going to come across as a BI heretic here, but is there a place for BI at the heart of all business life? In part this piece springs from a few points made by Jerry Brown of Bloor Research in a recent article. The whole Jerry&

Those that have met me know that beneath that benign, placid exterior lurks a data-geek of great passion. Show me the work of others where they reinvent the wheel by writing their own procedural methods (in PL/SQL or T-SQL or whatever) to replicate a native function of the database

Doug Burns once said to me (and I am sure I am making up his words here, but the sentiment is probably right) that data warehouse folks are always using the latest features on the latest releases of databases. It is true that we do use less common, newer features,

Dominic Brooks [http://orastory.wordpress.com/] posts a link to a completely fabricated tale [http://biznik.com/biztalk/digg_this.html] that must be true or at least it rings true for those of use who design applications (of any kind) I have been looking at how we can interface

A while back David Aldridge [http://oraclesponge.wordpress.com/2006/08/15/year-to-date-query-improvement-through-transformation-tables/] and I both blogged about the joys of time series analysis on sparse data; that is, the sort of data where maintaining and storing moving totals within the data does not make sense in terms of space

You'd almost think that Beth and I were the same person - we both seem to post about the same topics at around the same time. Today she posts on the joys [http://datageekgal.blogspot.com/2007/05/data-quality-standardizing-product.html] of establishing standards in product descriptions, I had