The Importance of Naming Standards

Originally posted 5/2/2007

Ah, Naming Standards.  IT loves to talk about naming standards, particularly when they’re talking about databases or code modules.  In such a world, naming standards allow other developers to more quickly pick up on a piece of code or a database design and be productive understanding it more quickly.  They can also help yourself out, after you revisit a piece of old code or database that you worked on 3 years ago. 

Modeling Header & Details

Originally posted 3/16/2007

A common question I hear is about how to model & configure a Header-Detail scenario.  By saying header-details, we are referring to a transaction that is split over more than one granularity.  This is common modeling scenario such as Order & Order Line Item, Invoice & Invoice Detail, Agreement & Agreement Line Item, etc.

OBI EE and Oracle Data Mining

Originally posted 2/19/2007.

Having recently attended one of Oracle’s coming out parties for its new Data Mining software, I thought I’d take the opportunity while its still fresh in my head to talk about how the two work together in Oracle’s vision of BI.

OBIEE Subject Area Planning (Part 2)

Originally posted 1/15/2007

In the previous blog entry, I discussed ideas about which Subject Areas you may want to have in your system. This follow up post will discuss some thoughts on what the insides of a Subject Area might look like.

OBIEE Subject Area Planning (Part 1)

Originally posted 1/8/2007

As the stating point for any content creation with Oracle’s BI platform, Subject Areas, also called Presentation Catalogs, require a good deal of thought and planning to properly match what each user community’s needs with underlying capability.  Although there is no one right way to organize and structure your collection of subject areas, I will discuss some concepts and theories that you should consider for your system.  In this first of a 2 part entry, I’ll go over what your Subject Areas should contain and how many you have, and the next part will discuss how to lay out the insides of the area.

Achieving Good Performance With OBIEE

Originally posted 1/30/2007

How do you extract good performance from Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE)?  Are there any tool specific features that can be used to achieve better performance, or is it all about the backend?  This post will discuss some things to consider to make a page or report perform well; scalability is not included here.

Over Reliance on the RPD

Originally posted 12/15/2006

This is one of my more popular old posts from IT Toolbox, and it still holds perfectly true today.  I even added a few more sections on it to freshen it up a bit

One of the more common causes of problems with projects I see as a consultant is the over reliance on OBIEE instead of the Data Model ETL  Over the years I’ve been brought into a few red accounts when I was at Siebel and Metricsphere where the RPD configuration was way too complicated.  We must remember that Analytics is a tool, and all tools have limitations.  Push too hard on the tool, and it will break, or almost as bad, it will become an unmanageable, unmaintainable mess that will break eventually.

I’ve Moved!

Hi all – I’ve decided to move my blog off of IT Toolbox and on to WordPress.  IT Toolbox is a great technical forum, but their blogging capabilities are severely limited – namely now I can do screenshots!

I’m going to begin by moving my old posts over, and perhaps even enhance them a little bit.  The topic’s I’ve written about in the past weren’t how-to guides and I feel most of them are precisely as relevant now as they were when I wrote them.