OLAP BI IM stuff

Rittman Mead Consulting � Blog Archive � Drilling Down in the Oracle Next-Generation Reference DW Architecture

2009-07-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

Rittman Mead Consulting � Blog Archive � Drilling Down in the Oracle Next-Generation Reference DW Architecture

It Must be Crap on Relational Dabases Week | High Scalability

2009-07-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

It Must be Crap on Relational Dabases Week | High Scalability: "It's hard to be a relational database lately. After years of faithful service everywhere you look the world is turning against you:"

Where Oracle's Applications Stack Sees Red Ink, Its Customers See Opportunity - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

2009-03-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

Where Oracle's Applications Stack Sees Red Ink, Its Customers See Opportunity - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership: "The timing of all this is beneficial for Oracle customers: The end of Oracle's fiscal year arrives soon (May 31), and buyers may now have more leverage to sign very favorable end-of-year deals.

'Oracle provides the sweetest discounts and deals as it approaches its fiscal fourth quarter,' notes a March 2009 Forrester Research report (subscription required). 'Forrester has seen indications that Oracle is displaying a growing willingness to provide incentives for new licenses, creative implementation proposals by Oracle Consulting, free training and vendor-led financing.'"

MySQL Admin and Development Tools Round Up | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

2009-03-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

MySQL Admin and Development Tools Round Up | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules | InfoWorld | Review | 2009-03-24 | By Peter Wayner

2009-03-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules | InfoWorld | Review | 2009-03-24 | By Peter Wayner: "Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine, and Persevere, offering far greater simplicity than SQL, may have a better way of storing data for your Web app"

Coding Errors that Affect Security: Sort by Language, Phyla, or Kingdom - ReadWriteWeb

2009-03-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

Support all the usual suspects, but also PLSQL/TSQL. Interesting! (And needed)

Coding Errors that Affect Security: Sort by Language, Phyla, or Kingdom - ReadWriteWeb: "Enter Fortify, a software security company that has organized security issues by both vulnerability category and by language so developers can easily ascertain the types of errors that have an impact on security."

eWEEK Labs on IBM-Sun: Databases Would Feed Off Each Other

2009-03-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

eWEEK Labs on IBM-Sun: Databases Would Feed Off Each Other: "So, one might assume that IBM would do the same thing with MySQL, continuing it as a separate product. MySQL, in turn, could inherit some technology from DB2 and even Informix.

However, according to a report in late 2007, six years after the acquisition of Informix, the number of Informix installations dropped drastically, to 20,000, with no information from IBM about where these users went. (Did they migrate to IBM’s own DB2 product? Did they switch to a competing product from Oracle or Microsoft?)

Should MySQL customers worry that they might find themselves forced to choose another product?"

Yahoo! News - Microsoft to accelerate relational capabilities for the cloud by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech

2009-03-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News - Microsoft to accelerate relational capabilities for the cloud by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech: "Microsoft will expose the network protocol from its SQL Server database as the service protocol in SDS (SQL Data Services), the cloud-based version of the database, thus enabling customers to use a full relational model in the cloud."

Is the Relational Database Doomed? - ReadWriteWeb

2009-02-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

Is the Relational Database Doomed? - ReadWriteWeb: "Today, we are in a slightly different situation. For an increasing number of applications, one of these benefits is becoming more and more critical; and while still considered a niche, it is rapidly becoming mainstream, so much so that for an increasing number of database users this requirement is beginning to eclipse others in importance. That benefit is scalability. As more and more applications are launched in environments that have massive workloads, such as web services, their scalability requirements can, first of all, change very quickly and, secondly, grow very large. The first scenario can be difficult to manage if you have a relational database sitting on a single in-house server. For example, if your load triples overnight, how quickly can you upgrade your hardware? The second scenario can be too difficult to manage with a relational database in general."

Rittman Mead Consulting » Blog Archive » Rittman Mead are Recruiting for a Senior Consultant

2008-07-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

Rittman Mead Consulting » Blog Archive » Rittman Mead are Recruiting for a Senior Consultant: "Our aim at Rittman Mead is to build the company that the best Oracle BI & DW consultants and trainers would want to work at, and as such our models are companies such as Fog Creek Software, Miracle, Pythian and Kimball University. We’ve all got young families so we try to make allowances for family commitments, however expect the hours to be long and your commitment to be big. In return, we offer a competitive salary, a share in the company, an opportunity to work with the best people in the industry, a rapid acceleration of your Oracle BI knowledge and sponsorship to present at events such as Oracle Open World, ODTUG, Collaborate and the UKOUG Conference."

Implementing Upgrade of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

2008-06-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

Implementing Upgrade of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition: "In the previous installment of our series dedicated to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, we presented a variety of reasons that might influence your decision to upgrade to one of the full-fledged members of the SQL Server 2005 family (Workgroup, Standard, or Enterprise). In this article, we will discuss the actual implementation of this process, pointing out additional factors (such as conversion of User Instance databases or altering some of its restrictive default settings) that might affect its complexity."

Kimball University: Microsoft SQL Server Comes of Age for Data Warehousing > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-06-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Lots of people consider 2005 up to the task...

Kimball University: Microsoft SQL Server Comes of Age for Data Warehousing > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "Microsoft's upcoming SQL Server 2008 release includes several new features and enhancements that are extremely valuable in data warehousing and business intelligence systems — as those already leveraging these capabilities on other database platforms will attest. The key performance enhancements include database compression, partitioning, and star schema optimization. In this article I briefly describe the benefits of these three features in any DW/BI deployment."

IBM DB2's 25th Anniversary: Birth Of An Accidental Empire > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-06-13T05:39:00.000-07:00

IBM DB2's 25th Anniversary: Birth Of An Accidental Empire > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "At first, relational database was a highly mocked product, halting in its performance compared to the programmed-path systems. Now it represents an $18.6 billion a year market."

Does your company still use VSAM? Most companies with mainframes do... learn the context of why those dinosaurs won't give it up here. A good read.

Biggest Under Reported Story: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB | High Scalability

2008-06-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

Biggest Under Reported Story: Google's BigTable Costs 10 Times Less than Amazon's SimpleDB High Scalability: "On SimpleDB a 1TB database costs $1,500/month and BigTable costs in the $180/month range. As you grow into ever larger data sets the difference becomes even more compelling."

This is important... game changing.. etc etc. For professional DBAs - figure out how to educate your management on these options, and take the initiative to suggest times when it might be practical to do so.

Believe it or not, but "security" alone is not a good enough reason to keep your data store in house. Security measures are a challenge to truly "get," but have been proven nonetheless. All of your customers already use companies that use these services to store their data and accept it. And those companies are not suffering the sort of hysterical breaches some people resistant to change rant about. If you are hanging on this, it's only a matter of time before some high-priced, respected consultants come through the door and lay the case out to management how they can save millions, and it is safe. Right after that, Gartner and Forrester will endorse the whole game. Making sure you are ahead of the curve when the day comes will put you in a great position.

The way I see it, the number one reason for massive in house storage expenses is speed of access... and it is a big one.

Regardless, try to brainstorm, and pull in some developers if necessary, ways using these options might be possible within your Enterprise.

Q&A With Gartner's Don Feinberg on Database as a Service and Cloud DBs > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-05-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting! Amazon is behind Oracle, Sun, and IBM's offerings!

Q&A With Gartner's Don Feinberg on Database as a Service and Cloud DBs > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "You call them up and say, 'I want an instance of your database in the cloud.' They contract with Amazon EC2, set up the instance and give me a simple link. Now I have my database in the cloud. Oracle will also let you host your license on EC2. They're going to call it Oracle in a Cloud, but you'll have to put it on the EC2 virtual machine yourself. That's a little different than what Vertica and EntepriseDB are doing because they will handle everything and you pay one vendor rather than dealing with Amazon on your own."

It's Official: SEC to Propose XBRL-Based Financial Reporting > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-05-19T06:19:00.000-07:00

Have a database and analytics background, and looking to start a business? Look no further.... It's a sure winner.

It's Official: SEC to Propose XBRL-Based Financial Reporting > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "It's unanimous and not unexpected. The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has voted to propose a rule requiring all U.S. companies to report their financial results using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The XML-based reporting language, which has been used in the US since 2005 as part of a voluntary program, is expected to speed investment as well as regulatory analyses."

Hitting 300 SimbleDB Requests Per Second on a Small EC2 Instance | High Scalability

2008-05-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

Hitting 300 SimbleDB Requests Per Second on a Small EC2 Instance High Scalability: "High Performance Multithreaded Access to Amazon SimpleDB is a great follow up to the idea in How SimpleDB Differs from a RDBMS that more programming is the price paid for performance in SimpleDB. It shows how much work and infrastructure is required to batter better performance out of SimpleDB."

High Scalability | Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

2008-05-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.: "Searching around the HS website I noticed that there are no articles regarding db2, which has an express edition, free of charge and from what I know there aren't any restrictions.
Being a powerful database system I thought it could make be an alternative to MySQL, PostgreSQL databases.
Here is the IBM statement:"

Top Queries in SQL Server 2005

2008-04-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

Top Queries in SQL Server 2005

This article illustrates how to query dynamic management views to find the TOP queries based on average CPU and average I/O.

Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool? > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

2008-04-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool? > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions: "Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool?

You can still hand-code an extract, transform and load system, but in most cases the self-documentation, structured development path and extensibility of an ETL tool is well worth the cost. Here's a close look at the pros and cons of buying rather than building."

Digg - Sun buys MySQL

2008-01-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

Digg - Sun buys MySQL: "Didn't see that one coming. Blog contains details to what this could mean for both companies. May as well be one of the most important takeovers of 2008 already!"

Microsoft SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 3

2007-04-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Microsoft SQL 2005 Maintenance Wizard Part 3: "This article focuses on the SQL Server 2005 Maintenance Plan Wizard for creating Database Backup operations. The Maintenance Plan Wizard is a graphical interface for creating a variety of database housekeeping tasks. In addition to Backup operations, maintenance items such as reorganizing data and index files, updating statistics and performing consistency checks can be performed. These tasks should be done on a regular basis to insure SQL performance and data integrity are optimized. All of these tasks can be executed using TSQL commands, however the Maintenance Plan Wizard makes selecting these tasks and their options easy. In addition, the Wizard will assemble all of your selected tasks into a reusable and customizable package.

Part 1 of this series introduced the Maintenance Plan Wizard and demonstrated how to use the Wizard for creating Data Check Integrity Tasks, Shrink Database Tasks, Reorganize Index Tasks, and the Rebuild Index Tasks.

Part 2 continued with explanation of Agents XPs, then demonstrated the Update Statistics Task as well the Clean Up History Task. Lastly, the Designer was introduced. The Designer can be used for both creating maintenance tasks from scratch and for modifying packages created by the Wizard. "

BI in Healthcare: Lessons Every Industry Should Heed

2007-03-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

BI in Healthcare: Lessons Every Industry Should Heed: "This month, Jill Dyche’s colleague, Shravan Miriyala, describes why the healthcare industry has learned some lessons from the rest of us. At the same time, recent healthcare BI efforts can remind us of some tried-and-true BI best practices."

SQL Server 2005 Best Practice Analyzer

2007-03-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

SQL Server 2005 Best Practice Analyzer: "I've been testing the re-released Best Practice Analyzer for SQL2005 called SQL Server Best Practice Analyzer 2.0, available for download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=da0531e4-e94c-4991-82fa-f0e3fbd05e63&displaylang=en

I find this tool to be very handy for identifying database Security & Performance issues and making fix recommendations, even though it is CTP and not final release yet.

It does NOT have to be installed on a remote server, just on a DBA's Mgmt Studio workstation. It DOES, however, require that you have Admin priviledges on the remote SQL Server in order to access the Windows registry."

Quick MS Access (JET SQL) to SQL Server (T-SQL) Cheatsheet

2007-03-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

Quick MS Access (JET SQL) to SQL Server (T-SQL) Cheatsheet: "Lots of questions come up in the SQL Team forums about conversions between Access and T-SQL and some of the differences between the two SQL dialects. Here's a few handy things to help you out with converting your projects. Check in now and then as this short list will eventually grow as more things come up."