Peter Scott

For once I don't have a strong opinion of my own, so I am seeking your input. Over the past few years pervasive BI is the big must-have in corporate intelligence systems; that is, making the whole organisation intelligence consumers by giving users performance dashboards and embedding fixed

Like buses in London you wait ages for one to arrive and then three come along at the same time. I started writing this piece a while back and since I started Beth [http://datageekgal.blogspot.com/2007/05/defining-data-quality.html] wrote on data quality, Jon Mead touched on conformed

I see that the UK user group has extended the deadline for abstract submissions to the 1st of June. I may have mentioned here before, but the conference is one of the better ones to attend (and many of my American friends are frankly envious of the breadth and quality

> I have a medium sized data warehouse, about 4 terabytes, and have noticed that performance is not always consistent. This surprises me as it running on decent hardware (12 CPU SUN SPARC, 24GB RAM, and industrial strength SAN storage) and the system stats from our monitoring guys show “$%@! all”

A little while back I took part in a partitioning survey. You may have seen it mentioned on Ton Kyte's blog. It is certainly good to be asked these things - but I expect that the organiser of the survey already had an inkling of my views anyway.

Back in January I wrote [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/01/30/sending-test-cases-to-support/] about a bug we found in the query optimiser that caused some of our complex temporary table star_transformation query candidates to crash the plan evaluation phase of optimisation with an ORA 604 error. Well, the

Like cars and people, a data warehouse can benefit from a check-up to keep things in top condition. Unlike cars and people data warehouses don't tend to have parts that wear out but DWs do age; either technology moves on and new, more efficient, techniques can utilised or

Yet more consolidation in the BI product space. Every so often one of the major vendors disappears into a larger vendor. Proclarity has been absorbed by Microsoft and no sooner than Oracle had digested a main course of Sibel and its amazing BI tool, it was on to Hyperion for

Last time I asked this [http://pjsrandom.wordpress.com/2007/03/29/data-warehouse-interview-questions-1/] and promised to say more next time. Most data warehouses fulfill Bill Inmon's criteria of being time-variant and non-volatile (well at least for the measures being stored if not the reference data.) That is, we

The first on a occasional series of questions I might ask in an interview - or perhaps would like to be asked if someone were to interview me... How do you design a data warehouse? Now that is a vague question - am I looking for an insight to the

One snippet of news that I picked up on this week is that Netezza is going public with its IPO, this is the first of the appliance vendors to do so (someone will tell me I'm wrong on this) Elsewhere I read some research [http://www.bireview.com/

One of my team has just upgraded an OWB implementation on a customers development system. By and large most of the upgrade went well - everything was pretty much as described in the documentation. The upgraded code just needed to be called from a different shell script (we use a

If there is a geek gene I have almost certainly inherited it from both of my parents. On balance this probably a good thing to have (at my age, if not necessarily when a teenager) and I have adapted my lifestyle to cope with it. But one thing that I

One of the things that came out from the Netezza conference is the number of large databases (not just on that platform) out there. Ten terabytes plus is common, I was speaking to one person with a 100 TB system whose daily batch is the same size as some people&