Drill to Detail Ep.47 'Business Analytics 2018 Predictive and Best-Practice Christmas & New Year Special' With Special Guest Christian Berg

Mark is joined by long-term industry veteran and friend Christian Berg to talk about surviving fifteen years as a contractor in analytics industry, changes he's seen in the market and in how project are approached, the value in getting involved in the community, and in a specially extended Christmas and New Year edition we look back at what was topical in 2017 and what are Christian's predictions for 2018 ... and appoint Christian as Head of our Best Practices Found on the Internet.

• The 100 facets of Oracle Business Intelligence
• 50 shades of #Fail - Oracle BI worst practices in real life

Drill to Detail Ep.46 'Market Trends and Findings from the BI Survey 17' With Special Guest Dr. Carsten Bange

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode of Drill to Detail by Dr. Carsten Bange from BARC to talk about findings from the recently completed BI Survey 17 including the continuing move to modern BI platforms and self-service desktop tools, analytics adoption trends and the increasing incorporation of BI functionality within business applications, the surprising topicality of master data management and data governance ... and whatever happened to Nigel Pendse and his legendary OLAP Report?

• The BI Survey 17: The World’s Largest Annual Survey of BI Users
• Master Data and Data Quality Management Now the #1 Trend in BI
• BI Trend Monitor 2018 Infographic: The Evolution of Trends
• The Business Intelligence Industry Continues Its Ongoing Empowerment of Business Users
• The OLAP Report: The origins of today’s OLAP products (c. 2005, from the Internet Archive)

Drill to Detail Ep.43 'Oracle Analytics, Data Visualization Desktop 4.0 and The Art of Product Management' with Special Guest Mike Durran

Mark is joined by Mike Durran from the Oracle Analytics Product Management team in this UKOUG Tech’17 special to talk about his route into product management via the Oracle Discoverer BI tool, Oracle’s latest product in this space Oracle Data Visualization Desktop 4 and its new features, and Mike’s upcoming sessions at the UK Oracle User Group’s Tech’17 event next week in Birmingham, UK.

• Oracle Data Visualization Desktop - Get Started
• UKOUG Tech'17 Conference Site

Drill to Detail Ep.42 'Evaluex, ML and Optimizing BigQuery & Athena' With Special Guest Avi Zloof

Mark is joined in this episode by Avi Zloof from Evaluex to talk about the new world of elastically-provisioned cloud-hosted analytic databases such as Google BigQuery and Amazon Athena, how their pricing model and vendor strategy differs from the traditional database vendors, and how machine learning can be used to automate performance tuning and optimize workloads in this new world of large-scale distributed query and storage. 

• SuperQuery - Free visualization tool for Google BigQuery
• SuperQuery Chrome Plugin
• Drill to Detail Ep.12 'Gluent and the New World of Hybrid Data' with Special Guest Tanel Poder
• BQQuery Mate Chrome Plugin

Drill to Detail Ep.41 'Developing with Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Platform' With Special Guest Felipe Hoffa

Mark is joined in this episode by Google Cloud Platform Developer Advocate Felipe Hoffa, talking about getting started as a developer using Google BigQuery along with Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Dataprep and Google Cloud Platform's machine learning APIs.

• Reddit BigQuery Forum
• Felipe Hoffa on Stack Overflow
• Felipe Hoffa on Medium
• Google Cloud Dataprep
• "How to aggregate data for BigQuery using Apache Airflow"
• Google Cloud Platform Github Repo

Drill to Detail Ep.40 'Fivetran's Middleware for SaaS Data' With Special Guest Taylor Brown

Mark Rittman is joined in this episode by Taylor Brown from Fivetran to talk about middleware for SaaS data, their focus on integrations with SaaS vendors and how this differentiates their offering, his thoughts on packaged analytic applications announced at the recent Looker Join conference ... and where the name "Fivetran" came from.

• Fivetran website
• Fivetran Source and Target Integrations
• Looker 5 Release with new Analytic and Data Blocks
• "Comparison of Two Great ETL Tools: Fivetran vs. Stitch Data"

Drill to Detail Ep.39 'Gluent Update and Offloading to the Cloud' with Special Guest Michael Rainey

In this episode Mark is joined by ex-colleague and now Technical Advisor to Gluent, Michael Rainey, to talk about hybrid platforms and Gluent's new cloud offload capability, the Hadoop market in-general and his thoughts on data engineering and the recently-released AWS Glue data integration service.

• Gluent Cloud Sync – Sharing Data to Enable Analytics in the Cloud
• Gluent Case Studies
• Gluent Data Platform Overview
• Amazon Glue
• The Rise of the Data Engineer and The Downfall of the Data Engineer by Maxime Beauchemin
• Drill to Detail Ep.26 'Airflow, Superset & The Rise of the Data Engineer' with Special Guest Maxime Beauchemin
• Drill to Detail Ep.12 'Gluent and the New World of Hybrid Data' with Special Guest Tanel Poder

Drill to Detail Ep.38 'Oracle's Big Data Strategy Before OOW' with Special Guest Jean-Pierre Dijcks

Drill to Detail returns for a new season with special guest Jean-Pierre Dijcks, to talk about Oracle's Big Data Strategy now and in the past, thoughts on distributed query and storage in the cloud, and previewing themes and announcements to look forward to at the upcoming Oracle Open World 2017 event running in San Francisco next month