Rittman Mead Blog - Technical Insights

OBIEE & SOA, and a Parrot in the Fireplace

This week Jon and I took a few days out from client work, and went down to Oracle's offices in Bristol to work on some OBIEE and SOA prototypes. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm particularly excited about the convergence of BI and

Technical

Smoke Testing with OWB

I have been putting together some thoughts on Agile Development techniques for a paper for the BIWA event later in the year. I have seen a couple of articles on Agile development notably on the Amis blog, here [http://technology.amis.nl/blog/?p=1971], in the Oracle space, so

Technical

Status changes over time

Curiously I am working on two very similar data architecture projects at the moment, both small scale data warehouses, and both in similar subject domains. Most of the data warehouses I get involved in the are effectively a series of snapshots of a set of measures for discrete time slices

Technical

Thoughs on ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007

I'm currently sitting in the deli cafe at the Hilton Daytona Beach hotel, about to leave and get my connecting flight through to Atlanta. I've been so busy during the past few days that I've not really had a chance to write about the

Technical

OWB Training, and Posting from Athens

I'm currently sitting outside in sunny Athens, putting the finishing touches to some exercises I'm going to be using in a training session tomorrow. Jon Mead mentioned in a blog posting the other week that a major part of what we've been up to

Technical

Product dimensions

The other day a colleague invited me to sit in on workshop session with a customer to discuss changes to an attribute of product. On the face of it it sounds a bit of overkill to spend two hours discussing the meaning of just one attribute, but when that attribute

Technical

Brighton Werewolves

Data miners at Sussex police [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/6723911.stm] have noticed a correlation between violent incidents and a full moon and based on this fact deploy more police on the streets of Brighton at times of peak lunar brightness. Well it makes a

Technical

Data Warehouse Healthchecks and OWB training

Rather strangely as Mark jets off to Greece for a weeks holiday, I am also off there for a few days work (he's here next week working as well). Looking back over the first few months of the company a lot of the work we have been doing

Technical

Group By Rollup and other exotica

One of the topics I have wanted to research, but have never managed to find time to, is a performance comparison of Oracle OLAP technology and the SQL grouping extensions such as GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY CUBE and GROUP BY GROUPING SETS. I suppose for that mater I should

Technical

Second Day of the Miracle DB Forum, Edinburgh

Today was Day Two of the Miracle DBF up at Edinburgh Castle, and for those of us that got a reasonably early night it was a Nine O'Clock start with Mogens Norgaard on "You Probably Need RAC". Following on from Mogens was Dan Fink with "

Technical

Posting from the Miracle DBF, Edinburgh

I'm currently sitting in a pub just down from Edinburgh Castle, in a break between the morning and afternoon sessions. Just across the table from me is Doug Burns, and behind is Thomas Presslie and Carel-Jan Engel, who are working on the Miracle musical for tonight's

Technical

Oracle Data Integrator Article on OTN

My article on real-time data integration with Oracle Data Integrator [http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/rittman-odi.html] has just been published on OTN. This was quite an interesting article to write; apart from establishing how ODI related to OWB, I also put an example together that takes data,

Technical

Thoughts on the Hyperion Conference, Lyon

It's just after 3.30 in the afternoon in Lyon, and I'm just about to finish up at the Hyperion conference [http://www.solutions2007.com/solutions2007/international/index.cfm]. I've deliberately held back from posting to the blog until today, as I wanted to

Technical

Off To The Hyperion Conference

It's Sunday lunchtime and I'm currently on the train going up to London, to catch a flight to the Hyperion conference in Lyon [http://www.solutions2007.com/solutions2007/international/index.cfm]. I'm going over as an official representative of the UKOUG [http://www.ukoug.

Technical

Time series in BI revisited

But before that: > Why are recruitment companies so unnecessarily secretive ?I have just seen an ad for a senior role at a leading Global BI vendor that goes out of its way to hide the name of the company recruiting - it's a bit sad though that

Technical

Flying Back from Johannesburg, and Thoughts on BI and the SOA Suite Demo

I’m currently sitting on the flight back from Johannesburg to London Heathrow, after running an Oracle BI Enterprise Edition workshop on behalf of Oracle South Africa. On the way back from the conference centre, I did smile to myself as I saw a road sign for Pretoria out of

Technical

Odds and Ends

Just a quick catch up post, as I sit here watching Spurs draw 1-1 with Blackburn. Brian Duff posted a link earlier this week [http://blogs.oracle.com/duffblog/2007/05/07#a413] to the new Oracle Blogs Semantic Web [http://otnsemanticweb.oracle.com/blogs.jsp] site, that aggregates a

Technical

Installing OBIEE 10.1.3.2.1 on Ubuntu Part II

Ok, so I tried running the OBIEE installer again, this time choosing only BI Server option. When I read through the install.log I noticed that it was complaining about that the UnixChk.sh didn't exist. The reason for that was simple, I had renamed it when I

Technical

Installing OBIEE 10.1.3.2.1 on Ubuntu 7.04 … not so fast

Well, this was a productive 2 hour stint. I just managed to hack my way past the OBIEE installer to get ahead to the actual installation. After downloading the cpio (I chose the RedHat file, since I knew that I could at least install the Oracle Linux because I have

Technical

Thoughts on OBI EE for Discoverer Users

I mentioned the other days that one of the papers I’m delivering for ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 is on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) for Discoverer users. The aim of this paper is to introduce OBI EE to those Oracle customers who currently use Discoverer, perhaps have requirements

Technical

Time Series in OBIEE compared with Discoverer

I just finished reading through Mark Rittman's post titled OBI EE, Time Dimensions and Time-Series Calculations [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2007/04/30/obi-ee-time-dimensions-and-time-series-calculations/] Here, Mark goes on a wee journey to look at how time-series queries in OBIEE (as the title suggests :)) can be set up.

Technical

OWB11g and other ODTUG Kaleidoscope Papers, plus News on Hyperion

I was taking a look through the BI&DW presentation extracts [http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/2007conference_papers.htm#BIDW] for the upcoming ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 [www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/] event next June, and I noticed quite a few that I'm keen to attend. The event is in Daytona

Technical

Query tuning

Yesterday I mentioned a query that would not eliminate unused partitions and resulted in a somewhat large nested loop join plan that would take hours to return. A kind of "find all the rows that match predicate B and then filter the result set on a range of 7

Technical

Some Thoughts on Dimensional Modeling

If you're wondering who the "Mead" in Rittman Mead Consulting is, now's probably a good time to introduce myself. I'm Jon Mead, I've worked with Mark for a number of years on projects around the UK, and together we started

Technical

Final Day at Collaborate

Just a quick posting as I'm about to get my flight back to the UK (via San Francisco, unfortunately, so it'll be a long journey). Yesterday I went to talks on SOA and RAC, and went along to Cary Millsap's talk on why you