Rittman Mead Blog - Technical Insights

Fixing* Baseline Validation Tool** Using Network Sniffer

Learn how to use Wireshark network sniffer to debug Oracle BI and BVT

Unify - bringing together the best of both worlds

Since I started teaching OBIEE in 2011, I had the pleasure of meeting many fascinating people who work with Business Intelligence. In talking to my students, I would generally notice three different situations: 1. Folks were heavy users of OBIEE and just ready to take their skills to the next

data science

Common Questions and Misconceptions in The Data Science Field

There are many types of scenarios in which data science could help your business. For example, customer retention, process automation, improving operational efficiency or user experience. It is not however always initially clear which questions to concentrate on, or how to achieve your aims. This post presents information about the

Cloud

OAC: Essbase – Incremental Loads / Automation

I recently detailed data load possibilities with the tools provided with Essbase under OAC here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2017/06/oac-essbase-loading-data/]. Whilst all very usable, my thoughts turned to systems that I have worked on and how the loads currently work, which led to how you might perform

Cloud

OAC: Essbase – Loading Data

After my initial quick pass through Essbase under OAC here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2017/06/oac-essbase-and-dvcs/], this post looks at the data loading options available in more detail. I used the provided sample database ASOSamp.Basic, which first had to be created, as a working example. Creating ASOSamp

Technical

Exploring the Rittman Mead Insights Lab

What is our Insights Lab? The Insights Lab offers on-demand access to an experienced data science team, using a mature methodology to deliver one-off analyses and production-ready predictive models. Our Data Science team includes physicists, mathematicians, industry veterans and data engineers ready to help you take analytics to the next

Technical

OBIEE Component Status Notifications

At Rittman Mead, we often hear requests for features or solutions generally not provided by Oracle. These requests range from commentary functionality to custom javascript visualizations. There are many ways to implement these functionalities, but organizations often lack the in-house resources to engineer an acceptable solution. Rittman Mead has the

Technical

Real World OBIEE: Demystification of Variables Pt. 1

OBIEE has some very powerful features and capabilities when it comes to how we visualize and present our data. There are some features which almost everyone uses (filters, prompts, rename columns ect.) and then some that are less common. In part, I think there is a lot of "noise&

Performance

New Performance Analytics Release

Poor performance is one of the most common complaints we hear upon arrival to customer sites, and often for good reason. When users have time to “make the rounds” before the system returns a result (if it returns a result at all), they have the right to be frustrated. Unfortunately,

training

Introducing Advanced Analytics Training from Rittman Mead!

Rittman Mead is proud to release our new training course: Advanced Analytics with Oracle's R Technologies [https://www.rittmanmead.com/advanced-analytics-oracle-r/]. Oracle has made significant investments in the R language with Oracle R, ROracle and Oracle R Enterprise. Using these tools, data scientists and business intelligence practitioners can

ODVD

Oracle Data Visualization Desktop: Star Schemas and Multiple Fact Sources

Once added to a project, columns I specified with my custom SQL query now shows up as one source. Now that I have a custom data source with only the data I want to explore, I can easily create an analysis without having to sift through multiple data sources. ** A

OBIEE12c

Performing a 12c Upgrade with a New Install

Software updates often include new features, and while useful, these new features are often the only driving factors in upgrading software. There's no harm in wanting to play around with the shiny new toy but many software updates also include much more significant changes, such as resolving bugs

OBIA

Becky's BI Apps Corner: OBIA 11.1.1.10.2 New Features Part 1 - Health Check & ETL Diagnostics

I have been working with BI Applications since OBIA switched to ODI in version 11.1.1.7.0. I have installed and worked with all of the 11.x versions using several different sources. This most recent version of OBIA may only be a Patch-Set release, but it has

Technical

Becky's BI Apps Corner: OBIA Back-to-Beginnings - Naming Conventions and Jargon

It's easy to talk about a technology using only jargon. It's much harder to talk about a technology without using jargon. I have seen many meetings between business and IT break down because of this communication barrier. I find it more discouraging when I see this

odbc

How To Poke Around OBIEE on Linux with strace (Working with Unsupported ODBC Sources in OBIEE 12c)

OBIEE 12c (and 11g and 10g before it) supports three primary ways [https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/biee/BIEMG/deploy_rpd.htm#BIEMG1465] of connecting to data sources: 1. Native Gateway [https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/biee/BIEMG/deploy_rpd.htm#BIEMG1179] , such as OCI for Oracle. This

open source

Analysing Social Media Data for the Lightyear Foundation - Part 1

Outside of my job at Rittman Mead, I'm fortunate enough to be involved with a project called the Lightyear Foundation [http://www.lightyearfoundation.org/]. We are a charitable organisation which aims [http://www.lightyearfoundation.org/what-we-do/] to promote the techniques and philosophies of science, working with children and

apache drill

Using Apache Drill with OBIEE 12c

Apache Drill [https://drill.apache.org/] enables querying with SQL against a multitude of datasources [https://drill.apache.org/docs/connect-a-data-source/] including things like JSON files, Parquet and Avro, Hive tables, RDBMS and more. MapR have released an ODBC driver [https://drill.apache.org/docs/installing-the-driver-on-linux/#step-1:-download-the-mapr-drill-odbc-driver] for it,

hdfs

An Introduction to Apache Drill

Apache Drill [https://drill.apache.org/] is an engine that can connect to many different data sources, and provide a SQL interface to them. It's not just a wanna-be SQL interface that trips over at anything complex - it's a hugely functional one [https://drill.apache.

Technical

OBIEE 12.2.1.1.0 - New Feature Guide

Oracle has recently released version 12.2.1.1.0 [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-enterprise-edition/downloads/business-intelligence-3046226.html] for OBIEE 12c, which has a variety of exciting new features for Data Visualization, BI Publisher, Dashboards in OBIEE, and ODBC connections. It can be performed as an in-place upgrade

Technical

Stream Analytics and Processing with Kafka and Oracle Stream Analytics

In my previous post [http://www.rittmanmead.com/2016/07/introduction-oracle-stream-analytics/] I looked the latest release of Oracle Stream Analytics (OSA), and saw how it provided a graphical interface to "Fast Data". Users can analyse streaming data as it arrives based on conditions and rules. They can also

Technical

An Introduction to Oracle Stream Analytics

Oracle Stream Analytics (OSA) is a graphical tool that provides “Business Insight into Fast Data”. In layman terms, that translates into an intuitive web-based interface for exploring, analysing, and manipulating streaming data sources in realtime. These sources can include REST, JMS queues, as well as Kafka. The inclusion of Kafka

Technical

System Metrics Collectors

The need to monitor and control the system performances is not new. What is new is the trend of clever, lightweight, easy to setup, open source metric collectors in the market, along with timeseries databases to store these metrics, and user friendly front ends through which to display and analyse

Technical

Connecting Oracle Data Visualization Desktop to OBIEE

Recently at Rittman Mead we have been asked a lot of questions surrounding Oracle’s new Data Visualization Desktop tool and how it integrates with OBIEE. Rather than referring people to the Oracle docs on DVD, I decided to share with you my experience connecting to an OBIEE 12c instance

Big Data

Using R with Jupyter Notebooks and Oracle Big Data Discovery

Oracle's Big Data Discovery [https://www.oracle.com/big-data/big-data-discovery/index.html] encompasses a good amount of exploration, transformation, and visualisation capabilities for datasets residing in your organisation’s data reservoir. Even with this though, there may come a time when your data scientists want to unleash their

Big Data

Using SparkSQL and Pandas to Import Data into Hive and Big Data Discovery

Big Data Discovery [https://www.oracle.com/big-data/big-data-discovery/index.html] (BDD) is a great tool for exploring, transforming, and visualising data stored in your organisation’s Data Reservoir. I presented a workshop on it at a recent conference [https://speakerdeck.com/rmoff/unlock-the-value-in-your-big-data-reservoir-using-oracle-big-data-discovery-and-oracle-big-data-spatial-and-graph] , and got an interesting question from