Drill to Detail Ep.37 'How Essbase Won the OLAP Wars' With Special Guest Cameron Lackpour

Mark Rittman is joined in this Summer Special episode by none other than Cameron Lackpour, Essbase expert and Oracle ACE Director, to talk about why and how Essbase won the OLAP wars, how Essbase Server works and the role it now plays in Oracle Analytics Cloud and his involvement with user groups over the years. In this specially extended edition he also gives us his reading recommendations for while you're at the pool or, as he will be, out camping, and he also shares his predictions for what we'll hear from Oracle and the analytics industry when he, and Drill to Detail, returns in the autumn after a well-deserved summer break. 

Drill to Detail Ep.36 'Marketing Analytics, AI and the Rise of the Omni-channel Consumer' With Special Guest Mark Madsen

Mark Rittman is joined by Industry Analyst Mark Madsen to talk about marketing analytics and the rise of the omni-channel consumer, the use of AI in analytics and personalization and what this all means for brands, for advertisers and for marketers.

• Third Nature, Inc.
• "A Pragmatic Approach to Analyzing Customers"
• "Salesforce Einstein Keynote: AI For Everyone"
• "What is SAP Leonardo? Everything you need to know about SAP’s Leonardo platform"

Drill to Detail Ep.35 'Stitch Data, Singer and ETL for Data Engineers' With Special Guest Jake Stein

In this episode Mark is joined by Jake Stein to talk about Stitch Data and their ETL tool for data engineers, the new open-source project Singer and his experiences building a software startup that both partners and competes with the big cloud platform vendors.

• Stitch Data
• Singer: Simple, Composable Open-Source ETL
• Setting the Data Strategy for Your Growing Organization
• The State of Data Engineering
• The State of Data Science
• Why our ETL Tool Doesn't Do Transformations
• Airflow: a workflow management platform
• Goodbye RJMetrics, Hello Fishtown Analytics
• Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department

Drill to Detail Ep.34 'Qlik, MSAS and the Strategy of Data Analytics' with Special Guest Donald Farmer

Mark Rittman is joined by Donald Farmer to talk about his work at Microsoft on SQL Server Analysis Services and Integration Services, why he moved to Qlik and the challenges of evolving a BI product strategy from focusing on desktops to focusing on the enterprise, and some advice for customers, software vendors and partners working with data and analytics tools.

Drill to Detail Ep.33 'Building Out Analytics Functions in Startups' With Special Guest Tristan Handy

In this episode Mark is joined by Tristan Handy from Fishtown Analytics to talk about building-out analytics functions in high-growth startups, and three related blog posts he wrote on this topic.

• Fishtown Analytics
• dbt (data build tool) and Fishtown Analytics Github repos
• “The Startup Founder’s Guide to Analytics”
• “What are the steps / tools in setting up a modern, SaaS-based BI infrastructure?”
• “Building a Mature Analytics Workflow: The Analyst Collective Viewpoint”

Drill to Detail Ep.32 'What Really Works in eCommerce' With Special Guest Will Browne

Mark is joined by Qubit colleague Will Browne to talk about a recent academic paper co-authored with Mike Swarbrick Jones on conversion optimisation techniques in the eCommerce industry. Using analytics and statistical analysis On 20 billion "user journeys" recorded in Qubit's Google Cloud Platform-hosted Customer Data Store this paper compares techniques using data and machine learning to those based on traditional sales techniques to see whether data trumps emotion ... or both have their place.

• Analysis of 2 billion user stories explains how to compete with Amazon
• The meta-analysis of 6,700 ecommerce experiments
• The Journey to Personalization at Scale

Drill to Detail Ep.31 'Dremel, Druid and Data Modeling on Google BigQuery' With Special Guest Dan McClary

Mark is joined by returning special guest Dan McClary to talk about data modeling and database design on distributed query engines such as Google BigQuery, the underlying Dremel technology and columnar storage format that enables this cloud distributed data warehouse-as-a-service platform to scale to petabyte-size tables spanning tens of thousands of servers, and techniques to optimize BigQuery table joins using nested fields, table partitioning and denormalization.

• Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
• BigQuery under the hood
• Inside Capacitor, BigQuery’s next-generation columnar storage format
• Drill To Detail Ep.2. 'Future Of SQL On Hadoop', With Special Guest Dan McClary
• Google BigQuery, Large Table Joins and How Nested, Repeated Values and the Capacitor Storage Format (and Looker) Saves the Day

Drill to Detail Ep.30 "AI, ML & Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence Applications" with Special Guest Jack Berkowitz

Oracle's Jack Berkowitz joins Mark Rittman to talk about a new category of continuously adapting, self-learning applications being built-out by Oracle that use machine learning together with enterprise and third-party data to create a new generation of intelligent HR, CX, SCM and ERP SaaS apps.

• "Adaptive Intelligence: What You Need to Know"
• Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence Apps product homepage

Drill to Detail Ep.29 'New-World BI Development using BigQuery, Looker, Kakfa and Streamsets' With Special Guest Stewart Bryson

Stewart Bryson returns to the show to join Mark Rittman to discuss new-world BI and data warehousing development using Google BigQuery and Amazon Athena, Apache Kafka and StreamSets, and talks about his experiences with Looker, the cloud-native BI tool that brings semantic modeling and modern development practices to the world of business intelligence.

Drill to Detail Ep.28 'Oracle Analytics, 12c and Data Visualization' with Special Guest Adrian Ward

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Independent Consultant Adrian Ward to talk about Oracle Business Analytics, Data Visualization, the BI Applications and his new book on Oracle Business Intelligence 12c.