Peter Scott - Rittman Mead (Page 8)

My data warehouse is bigger than yours!

Sadly, it seems ingrained into Western culture that having more of something than someone else is "good". This idea that "my dad's tougher / bigger / richer / cleverer (insert your choice here) than yours" has been the stuff of school yard taunts down the ages. But

Moving on

There comes a stage in the life of a data warehouse when it just needs to move on. Sometimes it just outgrows its space, sometimes the underlying technology is in need of a refresh and just sometimes a rethink of the use of resources leads to a consolidation of systems.

Getting to the bottom of things

One of my customers uses a web-based user query tool to interrogate their data warehouse. For some while the Tomcat component of the system has been, let's say, fragile; it often disappears in a puff of metaphorical smoke with a error log message about running out of memory.

Are data warehouses dinosaurs?

Two statements 1. Modern query tools allow multiple data sources to be interrogated in a single query => there is no need to consolidate information in a monolithic data warehouse 2. The size of databases are increasing. Last year's Wintercorp [http://www.wintercorp.com]survey illustrated it very

Technical

Mid-week, ETL and i-nodes

Nice to see that the first day outside of 'summer time' was one of the warmest, sunniest for some while. But other than that Monday was one of those depressing days when my choice of IT as career was remarkably suspect. People that had private emails from me

Technical

Partitioned tables and statistics

Elsewhere [http://www.dizwell.com/prod/node/322] a question popped up relating to binds on partition keys. David Aldridge ran some tests (also posted here [http://oraclesponge.wordpress.com/2006/10/28/partition-pruning-and-bind-variables/] ) that indicated that binds would use global table stats rather than partition stats. Of course this

Keeping on top of news

With a lot of the Oracle focused Blogdom away at OOW, and various pictures of people [http://flickr.com/photos/markrittman/277028156/in/set-72157594340309513/] that should know better than be seen with empty glasses in hand it seems to be a minority of us stick-at-home types keeping up what'

Quick reporting wins

One of the risks of presenting a reporting tool to IT professionals is that they go for the geek-factor; the sort of "wow, that's clever" type of reporting that in reality business users would never use because: * It does not contain information the business can react

Technical

Marketing, spin and substance?

One of the functions of marketing is to promote a company's services or products. Traditionally this is achieved by talking up the good points of the promoted item, ignoring the bad points and maybe talking down the opposition. What marketing departments are bad about is emphasising the positives

DW Appliances

David Aldridge is writing [http://oraclesponge.wordpress.com/2006/10/02/linux-26-kernel-io-schedulers-for-oracle-data-warehousing-part-ii] on Disk IO schedulers and table read performance under Linux. In passing he mentioned DW Appliances, which in itself is an interesting topic, to avoid moving the dialogue on his blog well off-topic (or at least his topic)

Technical

Dimensions are not just for data warehouses

Conventional wisdom has OLTP people thinking in the third-normal form with master - detail relationships and the like popping up all over the place, and us DWers (does the expression data warehomemaker exist?) working with long tables of fact linked to many denormalised tables representing the dimensions. These dimension tables

Revisiting old code

One of our customers has an internal IT department with a section that deals with their data warehouse and BI tool. The spend most of their day writing the reports that are beyond the casual user or creating data extracts to move information to other systems. These guys have been

Data Warehousing

4% very satisfied with data integration and analysis

Recently the Economist Intelligence Unit published a paper (jointly sponsored by Intel and SAP) entitled "Business Intelligence: Putting information to work [http://www.eiu.com/Business_intelligence]" The key findings here echo those my company has found in it its own research and vendor views given in partner

Query Tools

To my mind there are three types of BI query tool - those from database vendors, the traditional vendor agnostic suites such as Business Objects, Cognos and Microstrategy and the high-end specialist tools used by data analysts with PhDs in the subject. For a long while the database vendors achieved

Generic DW

Many years ago I worked for a company (in some ways, through the vagaries of mergers and divestments, I still work there) that had a commodity view of BI. The big plan was to implement a generic database on a Tandem Non-Stop machine and offer a ‘blackbox’ service to host

Data Warehousing

Customer Dimensions

The children our growing up fast. The elder wanted to go to a concert by a popular beat combo. Sorry, a "Rise Against" gig at the Academy in Birmingham. She had originally arranged to go with friends, however as she was the only one with foresight to get

Data Warehousing

Embedding Intelligence

In a way, this is the second part of a piece on non-reporting [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/09/05/moving-from-tradition/] tool BI. Consider a customer contact centre - historically the realm of CRM applications. Customers interact with agents by voice telephony, text messaging, email, web portals, in writing,

Moving from tradition

The proportion of BI users that slice and dice masses of data to work out the top selling BBQ sauce in El Paso or whether umbrella sales are influenced by rain is reducing. Instead two new dominant classes of users are emerging: * those that are fed a constant feed of

How small can a data warehouse be?

Elsewhere [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/06/27/di-wisdom-4/], I assert that there is a trend towards a strategic, holistic view of a company’s data. This trend is endorsed by major vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft and especially through recent whitepapers and product announcements around reporting and

Data Warehousing

YTD Alternatives part 2

Yesterday [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/08/16/year-to-date-alternatives/], I wrote about the use of a table function as an alternative to a date transformation table in the calculation of YTD. Mischievously, I used filter conditions to restrict my selection to a single product and store over an April

Data Warehousing

Year-to-date alternatives

David Aldridge [http://oraclesponge.wordpress.com/] challenged me to write about functions that return lists of dates [http://oraclesponge.wordpress.com/2006/08/15/year-to-date-query-improvement-through-transformation-tables/#comment-1499] . So here goes In blogs past I wrote about the joys of calculating year-to-date [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2006/06/14/time-series-revisited/], YTD,

Technical

Killing users

No mater what data warehouse designers do, data warehouses are manifestly slower than transactional systems or at least they seem so to users. Queries that can be quickly expressed in words such "How many bottles of ketchup did I sell in Seattle last week?" or "Which oil

Too much of a good thing

There is a saying that you can't have too much of a good thing. I have my doubts; you can have too much chocolate, cream, beer, sun, or whatever. Perhaps a surfeit of something is a bad thing and as 'no longer good' the saying still

Technical

Is "Data Warehouse" a future-proof term?

A while back it was quite feasible to draw circles around discrete databases in an organisation's IT structure and say 'this is the data warehouse, here is the billing system and that is the blinkity-boo system. But now those circles are pretty defuse. It is harder to

Content Management

Justin Kestelyn writes about Electronic Content Management [http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2006/08/09#a213] and IBM buy Filenet - amazing how the world synchronises