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

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

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

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

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

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

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."