Oracle Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics - BIWA SIG

It's a lot of HADOOPapla these Days!

2011-11-25T15:06:00.001-08:00

Hadoop is a fault-tolerant distributed system for data storage. It is highly scalable and useful for data (often unstructured data) beyond that are best stored in RDBMS . The scalability is the result of a Self-Healing High Bandwith Clustered Storage , known by the acronym of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and a specific fault-tolerant Distributed Processing, known as MapReduce.

Recently, Director of IT at JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) said, Hadoop allows them to store data that they never stored before. It can include Web logs, TX data and social media related data. While enterprise wide security concerns still prevail for Hadoop, it is slowly growing its footprint. As in case of JPMC, it is being used for fraud detection and IT risk management. Aggregated forms of such data also feeds data mining and other advanced analytics tools. eBay uses Hbase database for Hadoop.

HBase is an open source, non-relational, distributed database modeled after Google's BigTable. It is written using Java. It runs on top of HDFS and provides BigTable-like capabilities for Hadoop. Hence, it provides a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of sparse data. For eBay, it helps to build a new search engine for its auction use. They have code named this Cassini. eBay handles 2 billion site views amongst its 97 million active buyers and sellers. EBay has dedicated over 100 engineers to this project.

In light of these developments, it was no surprise that Oracle stepped in a big way in to this space with the Oracle Big Data Appliance.

It's time to do more statistical analysis with less

2011-11-25T06:59:00.000-08:00

Oracle R is an open source statistical analysis tool that is open source and runs off of Oracle DBs, you do need to have Oracle 11g.

Statistical analysis is something that all places need to do more of, and having something free to use can be a great boon. It's an easy sell, hey, we need to install this for free, and then see if it will help us manage our business better.

An example, a company that makes a great product but cannot ship product because it is so backlogged is not managing inventory correctly. They will lose customers because they haven't planned out their demand properly.

Great uses for Statistical analysis:
--Investigate and Minimize Fraud
--Inventory planning based on prior trends
--Sales and Cash flow planning

Learn about Oracle "R" Enterprise via a BIWASIG Techcast on Nov 30, 2011, noon EST by Mark Hornick. http://oraclebiwasig.blogspot.com/2011/11/biwa-sig-techcast-oracle-enterprise-r.html

BIWA SIG Techcast : Oracle Enterprise "R" Nov 30, noon EST

2011-11-22T17:42:00.001-08:00

Subject: Webinar: Using Oracle R Enterprise -- Nov 30, noon EST
Date: November 22, 2011 11:55:15 AM EST

Analytic friends: Happy Thanksgiving!!

Oracle BIWA SIG is hosting a webinar next week that I think might interest many of you. Here's the info about it.

==========================================
Webinar: Using R within Oracle -- Nov 30, noon EST
==========================================
Oracle now supports the R open source statistical programming language. Come to this webinar to learn more about using R within an Oracle environment.

-- URL for TechCast: https://stbeehive.oracle.com/bconf/confDetails?confID=334B:3BF0:owch:38893C00F42F38A1E0404498C8A6612B0004075AECF7&guest=true&confKey=608880
-- Web Conference ID: 303397
-- Web Conference Key: 608880
-- Dialup: 1-866-682-4770, ID 5548204, passcode 1234

After a steady rise in the past few years, in 2010 the open source data mining software R overtook other tools to become the tool used by more data miners (43%) than any other (http://www.rexeranalytics.com/Data-Miner-Survey-Results-2010.html).

Several analytic tool vendors have added R-integration to their software. However, Oracle is the largest company to throw their weight behind R. On October 3, Oracle unveiled their integration of R: Oracle R Enterprise (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html) as part of their Oracle Big Data Appliance announcement (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001).

Oracle R Enterprise allows users to perform statistical analysis with advanced visualization on data stored in Oracle Database. Oracle R Enterprise enables scalable R solutions, while facilitating production deployment of R scripts and Hadoop based solutions, as well as integration of R results with Oracle BI Publisher and OBIEE dashboards.

This TechCast introduces the various Oracle R Enterprise components and features, along with R script demonstrations that interface with Oracle Database.

TechCast presenter: Mark Hornick, Senior Manager, Oracle Advanced Analytics Development.
This TechCast is part of the ongoing TechCasts series coordinated by Oracle BIWA: The BI, Warehousing and Analytics SIG (http://www.oracleBIWA.org).

Summary of Oracle Openworld 2011

2011-10-15T10:24:00.000-07:00

Once I was at Oracle Openworld 2011, it became so engaging between my speaking sessions, Customer Panel, Keynote sessions, IBM (GBS) booth duty, customer meetings and all the "appreciation" events, that I could not find time to update the blog sooner. I was able to Tweet regularly as it is so much easier to do that from a Smartphone as against need for portable PC or Tablet for blogging. So I decided to summarize my impressions of OOW 2011 here.

While Oracle Exadata and Exalogic have been around for some time, it is now clear that Oracle is focusing on an appliance or "engineered" system like approach. While industry cynics say it is Oracle's approach to "lock" the customer into single vendor, really speaking the trend was started by likes of Teradata and Netezza who build machines for specific purposes be it data warehousing or something similar. Greenplum, Vertica, Aster Data, PacAccel are some of the ones to follow and their subsequent acquisitions ( IBM-Netezza, HP-Vertica etc) states that "appliance" like trend is no longer an exclusive club. It is just as fashionable as each large player acquiring a BI company (Oracle-Siebel, IBM-Cognos, SAP -Business Objects). More recently SAP launching HANA ( in-memory platform for high performance analytics), clearly set the tone for extending these boxes to more specific uses and Oracle Exalytics for in-memory BI and Big Data appliance for extending the enterprise to unstructured data with "not only SQL" or "NoSQL" approach.

If you would like to provide some of your feedback on this topic, please check this site:
http://oracleexadata.blogspot.com/2011/10/oracle-openworld-2011-announcements.html

With the announcement of so many appliances, some of the other major announcements like:

General Availability of Fusion Applications with 200 early adopter customers for parts of Fusion Apps
Oracle Public Cloud offering
Oracle Social Network
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
and few other ones that I have missed

One software front, upcoming features of OBIEE 11.1.1.6 were discussed. Another important point is that OBIEE and Essbase software versions that will run on Exalytics will be same as on non-Exalytics platform. Only the config switches will be different for options like "visualization at speed of thought."

Oracle Openworld 2011 - Sunday

2011-10-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

The OOW 11 has 45,000 attendees from 117 countries as per Judy Sims at the 5:30 PM keynote. It has 380,000 customers. The Sunday is marked by User Group and SIG event from 9am to 5 PM. The BIWA SIG had 6 sessions in Moscone West 2003 all day long.

The key announcement expected in the keynote from Larry is Exalytics or the BI appliance on the lines of Exadata family. This "appliance" is likely to empower OBIEE for "visualization at speed of thought." Oracle set the stage for this when OBIEE 11.1.1.5 had support for Times Ten the in-memory engine. Besides, SAP with HANA has set the tome for the need of dedicated hardware for BI at the speeds users "desire."

Chairmen of the Board Jeff Henley is now awarding the Oracle Excellence Awards for 2011. The winners are on the stage now. Deloitte got the middleware partner of the year CapGemini got the applications partner and Accenture the Industry partner. These are the Specialized Partners of the Year 2011.

The stage is now under the influence of the "Giants" the local baseball team. Larry Baer of Giants is Welcoming Larry Ellison. Is seems that Larry Ellison is getting a "ring."

Larry is setting the stage with Exadata and Exalogic for Exalytics - the "engineered" system. Exadata and Exalogic use the Parallel architecture to get 10X speedup for data movement. Seems like this year Larry will continue to talk about IBM in his keynote!

If you move the data from the database in compressed form closer to the processor, then you reduce data access time by 1/10... this is the stage for any in-memory type of appliance ...aka Exalytics.

Pol, BNP Parribas, P&G, Merck and Turkcell are the reference customers for Exadata, in Larry's talk. He says that performance speedup 10X is no longer a "unbelievable" truth! Interesting Ferhat from Turkcell was in my Exadata Customer Panel today. They are the 3rd largest Teclco provider in Europe. AFG, China obile, Sogeti (CapGemini) and Commonwealth Bank are the OLTP references for Exadata. This is interesting as many people asked in the Customer Panel if Exadata is the right fit for OLTP only environment vs for DW and mixed load environments.

Exadata is Database tier, Exalogic is Middleware tier so the customers who are adopting it are Deutsche Post, Square Two, BNP Paribas, Northern Trust and TravelSky are the early Exalogic customers. Larry says Exalogic adoption is increasing now and customers are able to deploy it in 1 week, and customers are getting 10-50 X performance. Other customers for packaged applications are Banco de Chile, NII holdings, Suncorp (EBS), PHH Corporation (PeopleSoft and EBS) and Haier are the other Exalogic customers. In general customers for Oracle EBS and Siebel Application are seeing 3-4X performance improvements for essentially non-Java applications.

Now Larry is talking about SPARC SuperCluster powered by SPARC and Solaris (as against x86 and Linux). It is a general purpose computer with Solaris 10 and 11 versions. It has Exadata and Exalogic power. I had tounted the idea of Half Exadata and Half Exalogic boxes, it seems this box is on those lines but with SPARC footprint. Larry says Oracle is committed to Solaris support.as it has a large install base.
Larry calls is parallel everything architecture. SPARC SuperCluster uses T4 microprocessor an is 5X faster than T3 processor. Larry claims that it is faster than P7 (PowerPC 7 series) processors. Larry says P7 is faster for integer arithmetic but T4 is faster for Java - which is what most businesses run. IBM uses P7 for Watson the computer than can think like humans (Jeopardy!). It uses ZFS Storage appliance which now support HCC. It supports 1.2M IOPS with Exadata Storage cells.

The SUN sets and then SUN rises again! Larry is proud of the SUN engineering team. Larry implies SUN and SPARC are here to stay.

Now Larry announces Exalytics, the box has 1 TB DRAM, but supports compression. It has 40 CPU cores Intel Xeon. It has H/W scan rates of 200 Gigabytes per second. It has 40 GBPS Infiniband.

Exalytics comes with BI Foundation Suite, In-memory Analytics and Essbase & Times Ten. This allows parallel versions of OBIEE, Essbase etc... This allows Essbase to complete with OLAP on Exadata on performance. Larry mentions that Exalytics box can analyze relational, multi-dimensional as wells as unstructured data in compressed form, from the memory. Exalytics can work with Exadata to get better query performance and then do the parallel memory scans for speed-of-though interactive analysis. EXALYTICS has heuristic adaptive in-memory cache that decides what gets stored in-memory. It adapts to change in analytic workload. Similar queries run again and again can benefit from the adaptive cache. It is self-tuning with human override. Background process with decide what data to keep in the cache based on analysis of the queries. Hence, an optimal "datamart" is kept in the memory. In ideal case, there may be almost no disk / DB access after sufficient data is cached.

The performance of this BI Appliance, was around 1 sec for most queries. Average performance boost is 18X, based on some long running analytic queries.

BIWA SIG at Oracle Openworld 2011

2011-09-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

BIWA SIG at Oracle Openworld 2011
Oct 2, Sunday at Moscone Center West:

Session ID: 27800, by Dan Vlamis
Fast Complex BI Analysis with Oracle OLAP

Session ID: 27201 by Mark Rittman
Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Architecture and Internals

Session ID: 27380 by Shyam Varan Nath / Florian Schouten
OBIEE and Oracle BI Apps New Directions and Case Studies

Session ID: 31480 by Carl Dudley
Analytic Functions Revisited

Session ID: 27241 by Richard Solari/Ryan Hoffmeister
OBIEE 11G, 7.9.6.3: Case studies and Lessons on OBIEE 10G / 7.9.6 Customers

Session ID: 27180 by Ian Abramson
Big Data: Are you Ready?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Speakers for "BIWA Summit " at COLLABORATE 2012 closes on Oct 14!

Vlamis to Give OBIEE 11g Hands-on Session at NEOOUG

2011-08-31T03:17:00.000-07:00

Dan Vlamis will be the featured speaker in Cleveland, Ohio at the NorthEast Ohio Oracle User Group meeting on September 16, 2011.

Dan's presentations include:

How Executives Visualize Corporate Data with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g
Fast Complex Analysis with Oracle OLAP
Hands On with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

The final presentation will include a quick overview of the changes in OBIEE 11g. Bring your laptop for a unique experience as you get to experience for yourself just how easy it is to create a simple dashboard yourself in OBIEE 11g. Be sure to have a browser configured for wireless internet access so you can participate yourself!

For more details, see the NEOOUG Home page or the presentations page at vlamis.com.

Co-opetition at it's Best - IBM is Now Diamond Partner of Oracle (OPN)

2011-08-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

People are often drawn to the fierce battle between the technology giants such as Oracle and SAP for business software (ERP) and IBM, HP and Oracle (Sun) for high end servers. However, there the reality is IBM Global Business Services (GBS) is the largest Oracle System Integrator (SI). Let me quote a Tweet here:
---

abhinavagarwal Abhinav

co-opetition at its best :-) RT @shyamvaran: #IBM is now an #Oracle #Diamond partner! #bigblue #oow11 #opn

As pointed out, the fact that IBM -GBS is now a Diamond Partner (highest level) and is one of the 4 top "Elites" proves that the top technology players work very closely with each other.

shyamvaran Shyam Varan Nath

#IBM and #Oracle – They work a lot closer together than you think… Recent#Diamond Partner status of IBM is proof! goo.gl/TmaKM #OPN

Aug 30, 9:28 PM via web

What does Diamond Partner level mean? Check out this page:

http://solutions.oracle.com/partners/ibm

BIWA Techcast Aug 31, 2011 - How to Enhance Performance of OBIEE Tech Stack

2011-08-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Come join Sunil Ranka, from BIWA SIG Oracle ACE at 12:00 Noon (CT) on August 31 for the webinar
How to Enhance Performance of OBIEE Tech Stack. Ranka runs the gauntlet of issues surrounding performance enhancement, specifically in the key areas of:

-Database Tuning Techniques
-Cache Settings (not the documented)
-Dashboard Design
-Data Model Consideration
-Miscellaneous

Don't miss this opportunity to sharpen your Business Intelligence acumen from the comfort of your office. Register today: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/132190008

Title: How to Enhance Performance of OBIEE Tech Stack
Speaker: Sunil Ranka, Oracle ACE, FCS, Inc.
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 31st at 12noon CT
Registration Link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/132190008

Audio will be streamed, recording and slides will be posted later, check http://OracleBIWA.org for details

Thanks

Shyam Varan

Forecasting Tips For creating a forecating model that uses Business Intelligence Tools

2011-08-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

When creating a forecasting model for Business Intelligence purposes it is possible to integrate BI with data analysis. One key way to do this is to:

Restart the model when a new trend emerges and the old trend data is no longer relevant.

In BI terms it is critical to stay on top of the data, making sense of it from a business perspective.

From a technical perspective, you can create alerts that let the end-user/forecasters know when the data has standard deviations that are outside of a predefined boundary.

OBIEE has great capabilities for creating alerts, and letting users know when it is time to take a closer look at the data and make forecasting model adjustments.

Book Review - Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g R2: Getting Started 2011

2011-07-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

I have been reading the book Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g R2: Getting Started 2011 and post my feedback here over next few days. The author is Bob Griesemer and publisher is Packt Publisher. This edition is similar to the first version on OWB with the addition of a whole new Chapter 10 on code templates (knowledge modules - KM's from Oracle Data Intergrator - ODI) and a complete redoing of all the screen shots due to changes of the interface of the product.

More to come...

KScope 2011 (ODTUG Annual event) Summary

2011-07-08T17:50:00.001-07:00

I will post the KScope summary here....

KScope 2011 (ODTUG) Starts on June 25

2011-06-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

KScope (earlier called Kaleidoscope) started today. It is organized by Oracle Development Tools User Group. This time it is in Long Beach, CA, just South of Los Angeles. The first day (Sat June 25) is the Community service day. It was great to see many familiar faces who helped to paint and clean up the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach. We gathered near the conference venue at 8 AM, got our lemon green T-shirts and headed to the place in two buses. I helped paint the basket ball court and its lines.

The day started with us gathering for breakfast, that was time for meet and greet, before taking the bus to the Boys and Girls Club. It was nice to see many conference attendees brought their local firends / relatives including kids.

Look forward to the BI / EPM Symposium tomorrow. (more to come...)

BIWA Techcast related Q&A - OBIEE 11.1.1.5

2011-05-30T07:22:00.001-07:00

Oracle BI 11.1.1.5 Released – OBIEE 11g Changes and New Features (Webinar Questions)

We had two BIWA Techcasts on May 18 and May 25, 2011 with focus on OBIEE 11.1.1.5 and BI Apps 7.9.6.3. There were many questions on OBIEE and we decided to capture the questions and answer them over time here:

Q What about android or Blackberry support?
A The Mobile BI support for iPhone and iPad were native in 11.1.1.5. The next release 11.1.1.6 is expected to have support for Andriod followed by support for Win OS. blackberry support will be in the future.

Q Does this still require database access during installation?
A The RCU part of installation requires a relational repository. This is the part common for Fusion Middleware (FMW) and not specifically the OBIEE part but is required. The OBIEE rpd will remain as a file
--------------------------------------
Are connection methods same for all OLAPs from various technologies? What approach of connection to SSAS?
Have support for multiple hierarchies been extended to include value-based hierarchies?
How easy is the SAP BW Native connectivity, same as Oracle OLAP? Any additional work to retain the hierarchal structures?
Any comments/suggestions with respect to the skill sets required for establishing the business model and mapping layer in the CEIM, and the critical nature of this step?
Has support for multiple RPDs been implemented?
Can you selectively collapse tables on the Business Diagram?
I have an issue with annoying "transactional update" been resolved in the Admin Tool?
MS Office 2010 is certified for OBIEE 11.1.1.5?
Can you show the segmentation interface and features?
Are there any enhancements to the Office Add-in. In particular, ability to use hierarchical columns in pivottables inserted into Excel, or a workaround? And ability to have attribute columns across the top of a pivottable as seen inserted in Excel?
Adding to my last question, are there any good tutorials on the Office Add-in?
Please share info on version management and MUDE in 11.1.1.5
Has Discoverer metadata support changed a bit in the newest release?
Would appreciated any comments regarding multi-user development and the configuration management of the RPD (CEIM metadata) – suggest any best practices.
For map views on dashboards, do we need to download and configure NAVTEQ maps separately? Is this a separate license?
Would you please provide details on What OOTB (Out of the box) Hierarchies available in this release? Where can I access the list of Hierarchies available? Can we still use DRM Hierarchy Manager to maintain those Hierarchies?
Request method for SSAS access from BI Admin Tool.

Question To Alan Lee: Where do we get the document that has the list of bugs fixed in .5
Anything new on SAP BW connections
I could not see link for SSAS in your demo amongst others.
Can you talk a little bit about the integration points between 11.1.1.5 and JDeveloper ADF
Question to Bob Ertl: we noticed performance issue on 11.1.1.3 in IE7. Was there any changes done to specifically address the performance in .5
Could you please elaborate more on your slide 33 "oracle BI 10g upgrade" in terms of LOE to do an upgrade to 11.1.1.5.0?
Can you show the segmentation interface and features?
Are there any improvements in OBIEE 11g with terms of managing Group Names while doing an Integration with LDAP / AD from 10g?

BI Forum at Atlanta, May 25-27, 2011 at Atlanta.

2011-05-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

I was at the BI Forum last week, which is a niche OBIEE centric event. After holding 3 of these events in UK, Rittman brought is over to Atlanta. In a nutshell was it was 1 day of OBIEE 11g masterclass followed by 10 speakers in next two days. With only 55 attendees, it was limited to be a small event allowing attendees to interactive with each other. My talk's focus was on BI Applications (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/biforum2011/Varan_OBIA.pdf) and it was on Friday. The biggest concern raised during the Q&A was a lack of systematic way to port OBIEE side customizations as you migrates from one version of BI Apps to next. One of my suggestions was to look at reimplementation approach, such as a customer on EBS R 11.5.10 with OBIA 7.9.5 planning to go to R12.1.x and 7.9.6.3 (with OBIEE 11g). When the migration is over such a large change, just like reimplementation approach to ERP, it may be worthwhile to look at OBIA for similar reimplementation approach, where you install 7.9.6.3 (with OBIEE 11g, Informatica 9.0.x) and then decide which customizations needs rebuilt or porting.

The main focus was OBIEE 11g with good coverage of the 11.1.1.5 release, that came out on May 6. I think the massive changes in the security framework was a big concern, specially by the end-users who are the prospective adopters of OBIEE 11g. Here are the two presentations on the OBIEE 11g security:
One is by Adam Bloom from the UK event (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/biforum2011/Bloom_Security.pdf)
and another by Suyog Rao in the Atlanta event
(http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/biforum2011/Rao_Security.pdf)

I found one additional security blog that looks useful:
http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/entry/security_in_obiee_11g_part_1

It was my first chance to meet Philippe Lions the Product Manager for OBIEE from France. He gave an overview of the new features and the updated sample app for 11.1.1.5 (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/biforum2011/Lions_11115_New_Features.pdf)

Mobile BI has taken a new stride with the out of box support for iPad and iPhone and Kevin McGinley did a great job in is talk. (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/biforum2011/McGinley_Mobile.pdf)
His talk was voted the top talk of the Atlanta event. His slides do not do justice to his actual presentation that he did from iPad!

Mark and Stewart did a great job overall in hosting this event as well as in their own talks. The event being in Atlanta, where I spent a good part of 2009 for my OBIEE related client project, allowed me to go and meet them as well.

BIWA Techcast: Oracle BI 11.1.1.5 Released – OBIEE 11g Changes and New Features, May 25, noon ET

2011-05-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

"Oracle BI 11.1.1.5 Released – OBIEE 11g Changes and New Features"

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g was a huge release. When OBIEE 11g was introduced, the font size had to be so small to fit all of the important new features on one PowerPoint slide, that it was unreadable. Now, in May 2011, Oracle has issued the first patch release for OBIEE 11g, version 11.1.1.5.0. Arguably, the biggest news on this release is that it is the first patch release since 11g was launched with version 11.1.1.3 in August, 2010 (11.1.1.4 was skipped). For those that were waiting for the first patch release, you no longer have that excuse for waiting to move to 11g of OBIEE.

Other notable features in version 11.1.1.5.0 include:

• Full support for the Apple iPad

• Full support for OLAP sources including Essbase and Oracle OLAP

• Support for Oracle BI Applications release 7.9.6.3

• New support for Oracle TimesTen, MS SQL Server Analytic Services, and SAP BW

• Reduced memory requirements for Weblogic and streamlined install process

• 64-bit BI Admin Tool

• New visualizations in the BI Admin tool

In this BIWA TechCast, Dan Vlamis, President of Vlamis Software Solutions, Inc. and BIWA Board member will show off several of these and other new features in a live demonstration. Dan will also briefly touch on features introduced in OBIEE 11.1.1.3, including new visualizations, Action Framework, map views, and OLAP-style interaction. Dan will be joined by Oracle product management so they can answer questions you may have on these features and other topics related to Oracle Business Intelligence.

For more information on how to connect to this free TechCast to be held May 25, from 11:00am to 12:00pm, see https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/212164985 to register. to register.

Slides are now posted at:
http://www.vlamis.com/storage/papers/biwa2011-presentation1.pdf
Presentation posted here

BIWA Techcast May 18, 2011 - Q&A

2011-05-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to 100+ attendees and Robert Davis of Oracle for the Techcast today. Slides are now posted here (http://bit.ly/iQN4fr).
We will use this blog to respond to the questions from the Q&A session.

Q 7.9.5.1 Application is supported by 11g or not? Oracle certifies OBIEE 11.1.1.5 only with 7.9.6.3. It supports 7.9.6 and higher with OBIEE 11g but you will have to do the platform upgrade yourself. I personally would not recommend using 7.9.5.1 with OBIEE 11g. You are also on older Informatica with 7.9.5.1 and will soon get out of support.

Q Would you please comment on how OBIEE 11g uses DRM to manage the Hierarchies? DRM is a product to manage dimensional hierarchies. I am not aware of a way to import hierarchies from DRM into OBIEE 11g.

Q What is the difference in Role and Group based Security? Refer slide 39 and 40 of the slides

Q What has changed in Marketing Segmentation? (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12852_01/v11113/mktgseg/mktgsegTOC.html)

Q Are all existing issues fixed? A lot of issues are in OBIEE (fixes from 11.1.1.3) e.g. BUG:12339862 - DESCRIPTOR ID ENABLED COLUMNS DOES NOT SUPPORT SEARCH ON TEXTUAL FILTER VALUES Oracle will release a list of issues fixed in 7.9.6.3

Q Is the flash issue fixed in iPad. Apple does not support Flash
Also can we see dashboards and prompts in the native app See slide 53, 54

Q Thanks a lot for the Presentation.I am interested about the quality of this new release, whether the issues/bugs from previous releases are fixed? How stable is the .5 release? See last question

Q Any updates on Hyperion Workspace Integration with 11.1.1.5 this was supported in 10G and not in 11g release 1? Scheduled for 11.1.1.6 (Yes Oracle says it will not skip to 11.1.1.7!)

Q What new subject areas have been added? No new subject areas in 7.9.6.3, same data model as 7.9.6.2

Q Are there any tools for Migrating our Discoverer Reporting System to OBIEE? For EUL to RPD but not for Workbooks to Reports/Dashboards

Q What is your assessment from a skills perspective if we want to go with 7.9.6.3 and 11g for a new install at a client? The implementation resources may be experienced in 7.9.6.2 or before.
The implementer needs skills in OBIEE 11g and WLS, not much of difference in Informatica and DAC.

Q Do you recommend moving the OBIEE platform to 11.1.1.5 using 7.9.6.3 and load the data warehouse using INFA 8.6.1? Is this a recommended approach from Oracle?
Informatica 8.6.x will be de-supported soon, so use Informatica 9.0.x

...more to come

------------------------------------
How does cascading prompt differ from 10g linked prompts?
Are both DAC patches 10052370 and 12381656 needed or the last one superseeds the former?
Does the Real-time reporting in 11g is faster and reliable
Do we have a DEMO / TRAINING Database out of the box for this version?
Is it supported IBM COGNOS TM1 as a source for OBIEE 10g or 11g?
We have been facing intermittent server crash
What Oracle db versions are supported as OBIEE 11g on Oracle 11g gives message as db version not supported?

Or only support essbasemulti-dimensionaldatabase?
It was mentioned that Informatica would be continued to be supported (7.9.7.x). How do we see future releases post 7.9x wrt support for Informatica?
Also, it is supported on Oracle Db 10g version?
BIAPPS can only run on windows machine (obiee11gr5 installed) - any future plans on pointing the bia installer to an installation of obiee 1115 on a unix machine?
What is the major advantage of informatica9.1?Compared the 8.6 version?
Are SAML tokens supported in the OBIEE suite?
Can we import cognos cubes to OBIEE?
What are the differences between informatica 9 and 8.6 version. Could you please explain?
If there are more than 6-7 reports in the dashboard, how does it display in the iPad?
What tool(s) are used by designers for multidimensional modeling to build the CEIM?
Do we need to be always connected in the iPad (or) will the dashboards work in Disconnected mode
Any performance improvements in 7.9.6.3 around better SDE queries etc, dac orchestration?
Do drillups work in 11g?
How is has the Version Control and Multiuser Development improved?

Sneak Peak to Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.3

2011-05-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

Come to my webcast on May 18, 2011, noon ET and find out what is new in the BI Apps 7.9.6.3 / OBIEE 11.1.15 - the dynamic duo!
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/821849265

Topics include new features like:

Certification for OBIEE 11.1.1.5
iPad and iPhone support for out of box BI apps content
Informatica 9.0.1 support for ETL
Teradata 13.10 support
Oracle EBS 12.1.3 support

Webcast: Oracle BI Applications and OBIEE – New Developments - May 18, 2011, noon EST

2011-05-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a BIWA SIG Webcast on May 18, noon EST
Here is the url to register https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/821849265
You can dial in to listen or use web audio
Recording posted here
Abstract:
Are you able to unlock all the information that your users are looking for, from the ERP and other operational systems? This session will look at the Oracle Business Intelligence solutions with focus on OBIEE and Oracle BI Applications. We will cover the different scenarios for BI solutions and discuss custom development using OBIEE v/s using pre-packaged BI Applications as the framework. We will cover new developments such as Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.3 and its certification with OBIEE 11g. Learn what is new in OBIEE 11.1.1.5 and how that impacts BI Application implementations. Taking a few case studies, we will look at feasible options whether you are on OBIEE 10 g or on OBIEE 11g to plan to migrate. Learn the tips and tricks from the field. Learn how mobile BI (support for iPhone and iPad from OBIEE) is adding new meaning to pervasive BI.

Shyam V. Nath, OBIEE Architect at IBM, will cover the different scenarios for BI solutions and discuss custom development using OBIEE v/s using pre-packaged BI Applications as the framework. Drawing on his deep expertise in the industry, he will also cover new developments like Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.3 and its certification with OBIEE 11g. Learn tips and tricks from the field, and how mobile BI (support for iPhone and iPad from OBIEE) is adding new meaning to pervasive BI.

Thanks
http://OracleBIWA.org

Installing 7.9.6.3 BI apps with OBIEE 11.1.1.5

2011-05-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

In BI apps 7.9.6.3, Informatica gets a face list just the the BI platform does...here are a few Informatica 9.0.1 installation screen shots...

OBIEE 11.1.1.5 and OBIA 7.9.6.3

2011-05-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

The formal announcements have started flowing in now...though the social media was active yesterday and I had downloaded parts of the software...I pasted some screenshots last evening...

oracle_biee Oracle EPM and BI

Win x86 32/64-bit, Linux x86 32/64-bit, Sun Solaris SPARC (64-bit) available for #Oracle BI 11.1.1.5.0 http://bit.ly/lE6UmS #obiee #11g

2 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

oracle_biee Oracle EPM and BI

by shyamvaran

#Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, v. 7.9.6.3 also available for download from OTN http://bit.ly/lE6UmS #obia

4 minutes ago Favorite Undo Retweet Reply

The documentation is available now here

Informatica 9.0.1 Hot fix 2 (OEM PowerCenter is listed as the ancillary supported program...nothing about the DAC 11g yet...

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications V7.9.6.3 requires Oracle BusinessIntelligence Enterprise Edition V11.1.1.5.0 (so if you have 11.1.1.3 or 10g you have to upgrade the BI platform)
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications V7.9.6.3 requires Informatica PowerCenter V9.0.1. Hotfix 2 (you cannot stay on 8.6.1 any more)
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications V7.9.6.3 requires Oracle Data Warehouse Console V10.1.3.4.1.

Due to OBIEE 11g infrastructure based on Web logic you need to be aware of the new security paradigm. Now to open the OracleBIAnalyticsApps.rpd file in Oracle BI Administration Tool, you must specify the Administrator\Admin123 credentials. The SADMIN is gone...

The DAC requires a mandatory patchset for use with 7.9.6.3:

"Oracle Business Intelligence Applications V7.9.6.3 is supported on and requires Oracle Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Administration Console (DAC) platform
Version 10.1.3.4.1. with Patch 10052370." If you feel like reading the full docs, they are here

Get your hands on OBIEE 11.1.1.5 and OBIA 7.9.6.3

2011-05-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

Finally OBIEE 11g (11.1.1.5) and BI apps 7.9.6.3 can be downloaded now!
I created an easy to remember url http://bit.ly/OBIEE11115 ...just remember bit.ly and 11 1 1 5

I noticed that this OBIEE 11g release is supported on Win 32/64, Linus 32/64 and Solaris 64... It will be supported on AIX soon. Have stopped speculating on HP's OS...

The BI Apps 7.9.6.3 is certified with OBIEE 11g and looks for OBIEE 11g installation folders....as shown above... earlier in this step the BI apps installer would look for OBIE 10g folders.

7.9.6.3 now supports EBS R12.1.3 (7962 only supported R12.1.2 even though it came out just after the R12.1.3 release. However, I have not seen any issues of 7.9.6.2 work with EBS R12.1.3. In my scenario it worked for HR, Fin, SCM and Procurement Analytics. I noted now Oracle has updated release notes to say that 7.9.6.2 supports R12.1.3 now... in other words now they have completed their certification.

It is good to see that 11.5.10 is still supported in this release and allows folks to stay on same ERP release while leveraging OBIEE 11g... some of the companies I know are awaiting to see the Fusion Apps catch on before they decide when to upgrade from EBS 11.5.10.

OBIA 7.9.6.3 supports Informatica 8.6.1 with Hot fix 11 and has Planned Certification for Informatica
PowerCenter 9.0.1 HF2.

Oracle - OBIEE 11g 11.1.1.5 and BI Apps 7.9.6.3 is announced!

2011-05-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

Oracle announced the much awaited Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.5 introduces support for the iPad and iPhone today along with the Certification of OBIEE 11g for Oracle BI apps 7.9.6.3. The BI apps was a big pain point as since 7.9.6.2 OBIEE 11g was supported but not certified. Now we are past that barrier and companies now using or planning BI apps for go-live over next few quarters should look at OBIEE 11g.

OBIEE Release 11.1.1.5 content is now optimized for use with the iPad and iPhone, no third party drivers or software neded. Hence, no need for any design changes to existing reports and dashboards.

Now 11.1.1.5 supports for additional data sources including Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, Oracle OLAP, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW). This is interesting move after the 7.9.7 that was ODI based release for SAP Finance Analytics only.

The new software is not yet available for download, the announcement does not tell a date.

Collaborate 2011 Tue to Wrap!

2011-04-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

I micro-blogged this year more than I blogged... along the event...
Now that Collaborate is over I get some time to look back...

Monday I had my talk at 2:30 PM titled "Competing on Appliances..." Monday the Expo hall opened and I had my first encounter with Watson and play Jeopardy at the IBM booth... the expos hall had good finger food and drinks... good way to drive the crowd.

Tuesday was a very busy day for me... We had the BIWA keynote by Mark Townsend on Exadata and BI at 10:30 AM... Right after was our Throwdown - The Iron Applications closing event at 11:45..the videos of our presentation are on the YouTube... you can test drive the Team Shefu at http://teamshefu.info/ user id teamshefu pwd demo It is the full working application done as POC for the design contest we did in last 30 days under leadership of Tony Jedlinski and Coleman Levitar and myself (Shyam Varan Nath)...

Next I had moderated the BI and EPM Panel... I am thank for the big lineup I had Ed Roske (EPM Ace Director), Rich Solari from Deloitte (BI expert), Tobin Gilman from Oracle (BI/EPM), Swapan Golla from Gallup (Analytics expert) and Abhinav Banerjee (BI implmentor)... I plan to blog about this session a few days later... to recap the discussions. My last session was of the day was on OBIEE and BI Application at 4:30 PM... The IBM Reception was the same evening at 7:30 at Cuba Libre. I had invited my customers and some of my other friends like Arup and Vinod Haval were there as well.

On Wedesday I had one formal presentation and that was my Quick Tip on OBIEE 11g upgrade experiences.. It was also part of IOUG Plugged i.e. it could be viewed by those remote audience who registered only for plugged in... the web session was facilitated by the goto meeting. Though I have done it before, it is still unique experience to present to both in-room audience and remote audience and I missed explicitly welcoming the remote audience or saying good bye to them!

The Wed night was the best part of the event! well the private party with free fod and (soft) drinks and unlimited access to rides. I did the new Harry Potter ride which is somewhat like an indoor roller coaster. The wait was about 15 mins.. but was mainly a walking wait i.e. you walk thru the winding queue to get to the ride.

Thursday was the first day we as part of IOUG Conference Committee I did not have to wake up early for the 7 am meetings... but I did have to attend the BI Publisher presentation that Chris Gay did on our customer OBIEE and BIP implementation. Next was the Deloitte's OBIEE presentation by Rich Solari and team. At 12:15 was the IOUG Closing session and the final "Throwdown" with a quick recap of the Iron Application competition. There were man interesting questions from the judges and audience. Judge Maria Anderson said the other team's design was like a light healthy lunch and our entre was the filling sumptious dinner! No doubth we won but congrats to our worthy competitior Sheeri and Brad on the Silver Medal!

To sum up, the next year event Collaborate will be in Vegas next year! in April 2011.

Collaborate 2011 Monday Wrap up

2011-04-11T18:36:00.000-07:00

I had my first encounter with Watson, see here in the IBM booth at Collaborate. The Exhibition hall started today, and was fun to walk around and meet many familiar faces. Attendees could stop by at IBM booth and interact with Watson and play jeopardy!

This year Netezza and IBM booths are separate, it was the same situation the first year after IBM bought Cognos, the exhibit hall deals are signed way in advance, probably like close to a year.

The day started with the "energetic" keynote and ended with the Exhibition Hall reception... done with my presentation titled Competing on Analytics... 2 more sessions and a Quick tip left and then the Iron Throwdown (closing session event)....still a lot to go!

Collaborate 2011 Monday keynote - Dan Thurmon

2011-04-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

I started blogging here and will continue to blog thru the keynote of Dan Thurman who will be talking about his new book Off Balance for a Purpose! Dan is telling how he planned to start his key note that he will come running to the stage!

Is the the vision enough to do something, it is not just ideas it is the actions that determine the success in life!
He is energizing the audience, see here. He can sure do some acrobatics...

He is too engaging so I am going to stop blogging or at least slow down and rather pay attention to him!
His stage antics continues as he jumps around radiating his energy as he talks. He is talking about the experiences that one can create at Collaborate by immersing oneself into the event over the next few days.

Can you speak and juggle at the same time to create the visual aid! Well Dan can!

Dan is setting the bar really high for the speakers at Collaborate:

shyamvaran Shyam Varan Nath

#C11 #ioug can you learn a new pattern? Talk juggle and balance!

http://yfrog.com/h2761nwqj

Great analogy of Cloud Computing with the cloth in air to learn juggling!

Collaborate 2011 Monday April 11, 2011

2011-04-11T04:53:00.000-07:00

It's Collaborate Monday morning and the first key note is about to begin!
The speaker is Dan Thurmon who is a motivational speaker. Always good to listen to get a different perspective to kick-off the formal conference. A lot of attendees and organizers actually come to the event on Saturday or Sunday to take care of behind the scenes events. I got here on Saturday, being just 2.5 hrs drive door-to-door, it was fun that to stand in TSA lines!

The BIWA Bootcamp (two days on BI) and the BI centric hands on labs start today... First lab is by Joe Leva and is related installing the OBIEE 11g sample apps...get in early to get your seats as it is first come first serve with 40 seats.

A lot of conferences have the concept of a Network Catalyst who help to energize the attendees and motivate them to network with each other and make the best of the conference. Here are my personal tips:

1) Do not hide behind your your blackberries... instead to talk to real people and exchange business cards and share your interests
2) Do follow up during and after the event
3) Make use of the birds of a feather lunch table to meet like minded people!

BIWA Summit at Collaborate - Hands on Labs

2011-04-10T17:56:00.000-07:00

------------ BIWA Hands on Lab Schedule -------------------
Date Time Session Title

Mon, April 11 9:15 am - 11:15 am Hands-on Lab: Installing and configuring OBIEE 11g and the Full Sample Application

Mon, April 11 11:45 am - 1:45 pm Hands-on Lab: Essbase lab - Introduction to Oracle Essbase

Mon, April 11 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm Hands-on Lab: Creating OLAP Cubes in Oracle Database 11g

Tues, April 12 8:00 am - 10:00 am Hands-On Lab: Oracle Data Mining IOUG

Tues, April 12 10:30 am - 11:30 am BIWA Bootcamp: Visualizing Data Using Maps in OBI 11g

Tues, April 12 10:30 am - 12:30 pm Hands-on Lab: Learn Excel PivotTables for BI Direct to Oracle OLAP

Tues, April 12 3:15 pm - 5:15 pm Hands-on Lab: BI Publisher Hands On Lab

Wed, April 13 10:30 am - 12:30 pm Hands-on Lab: Tutorial Building Map-Based Dashboards with Oracle BIEE Suite

My Schedule at Collaborate 2011

2011-04-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

Collaborate Conference tends to become the busiest week for me each year, so I decided to organize my events and sessions here (think of it as my BI related session recommendations!):

April 9 Sat 4:00 PM, Conference Committee Meeting at Room 106A
April 10 Sunday Speaker Orientation at 3:15,
Conf Committee at 4:30PM and IOUG Reception at 5:30
-----------------------------------------------
April 11 - Monday
Conference Committee Meeting at 7:00-7:30am AM
1:15 304 A BIWA Bootcamp: OBIEE Creating Basic Analyses and Dashboards
My Talk at 2:30 PM at 308D "Competing on Appliances: Exadata Exalogic and More..."

3:45 pm - 4:45 pm BIWA Bootcamp: Reporting on Essbase and Oracle OLAP using OBIEE
----------------------------------------------------
April 12 - Tue
7:00-7:30am Conference Committee at 106A
Mark Townsend Keynote at 10:30 AM - Better Together: Exadata with Analytics and Business Intelligence
11:45 is the Throwdown Contest
BI EPM Panel at 3:15 PM - Moderator
OBIEE and BI Applications talk at 4:30 PM - Speaker
-----------------------------------------------
April 13 - Wed
Conference Committee at 7:00-7:30 AM at 106A
Balaji's Keynote - Oracle BI and EPM: Overview of Strategic Direction
11:45 to 12:15 QT OBIEE 11g Migration Experiences - Custom and BI Applications

April 14 - Thurs
Closing Session Throwdown
Conference Committee after closing at 106A

Countdown to Collaborate 2011

2011-04-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

Dear BIWA SIG Members,

Follow up on Twitter for real time updates!

Check out the BIWA Summit at Collaborate details:
http://collaborate11.ioug.org/Education/BIWASummit/tabid/83/Default.aspx

A static listing of BIWA Sessions can be found here (check Conference Schedule for latest list):
http://collaborate11.ioug.org/Portals/1/attendee/BIWA%20Summit%20Sessions.pdf

You can still be a part of IOUG Collaborate as remote attend, Plug-in to Orlando:
http://collaborate11.ioug.org/Education/PlugintoOrlando/tabid/139/Default.aspx
Register using code BIWA2011 for your BI-nefits!

Mark the BIWA SIG meeting on-site at your calendars:
Wednesday, April 13 10:30 am - 11:30 am at Room: 307C

Attend BI and EPM Panel : The Foundation for Success
Time: 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm Room 306A
Listen to the Industry Experts

Thanks
Shyam V Nath
http://OracleBIWA.org
Blog: http://oraclebiwasig.blogspot.com/

BIWA Summit at Collaborate 2011

2011-03-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

BIWA Summit at Collaborate 2011

Two great ways to get Oracle education and training for more than 50% less than full week training programs. First: COLLABORATE 11 –IOUG forum gives you access to our hands on labs, our online conference proceedings, discounts to access post event audio/presentation capture, special IOUG only events. You’d pay over $2500 for just a portion of this type of education so leverage your budget wisely and attend. If you haven't registered yet, navigate to the COLLABORATE – THE IOUG Forum Registration page by Thursday, March 31st , and secure your place at the premiere Oracle education event of the year! Use code BIWA2011 for discounts and BI-nefits!

How deep do you want to go? Sign up for FREE for one of over 12 IOUG Bootcamps across three days of in-depth training by industry leading experts and users:

Business Intelligence

DBA 101

Database Development

Upgrades

Virtualization

High Availability

Or attend Virtually! Hundreds of licenses have already been sold and we want you to be able to stay connected without having to travel. IOUG's virtual education program, Plug-In to Orlando is the perfect remedy for unexpected travel and budget roadblocks. Over 40+ Oracle Education sessions are on deck on topics such as Virtualization, Data Governance, Security, DBA Trends, SQL Techniques, Data Mining, OBIEE and many more.

Save Money- With a $299 price tag, you're getting unparalleled value with no chance of unexpected travel expenses or accidental hotel-room service charges
Top-Notch Oracle Education- Get access to more Oracle sessions than you can imagine, led by the Who's Who of the Oracle ecosystem

Your Choice of Sessions- Multiple sessions available at every time slot, so you can make sure the education you get is relevant to your interests

Opportunity for Group Training- Fly solo when you watch the sessions, or GO TEAM! Bring your colleagues, grab a meeting room and attend the sessions of your choice (you decide who brings the donuts)

Unlimited Access- Can't get the time in April to sit in on the streaming sessions? No problem. Plug-In to Orlando gives you On-Demand access to numerous archived sessions.

For a full list of scheduled Plug-in sessions, click here

--------
Now for some fun stuff - the closing session of IOUG, here are some memories from 2005 closing session debate "Do we Still need DBA's" I was on the pro side and guess who is still right!

This year the closing session is Iron Throwdown on Tue 11:45 AM room 310 A and B and then in the closing session! Checm our team intros here:
Don't miss the fun!

RMOUG 2011 - BI & EPM Panel

2011-03-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

This was my second year at RMOUG where I had two sessions, namely:
1) BI EPM Panel on March 16 and
2) A talk "Competing on Appliances" on Mar 17.

While for a talk you have to write a white paper and submit your presentation deck, a Panel requires gathering a group of people with experience and eminence in the related space. For the BI (DW) and EPM Panel, I was able to get in touch with the below and get them excited about the event:
Robyn Sands fro Cisco,
Faun deHenry from FMT Systems,
Stewart Bryson from Rittman Mead and
Tim Gorman from Evergreen Database Tech

While some of the Panelists knew each other, some were meeting for the first time. The biggest challenge is to make sure that we present a coherent story to the audience, specially if it is not a well-rehearsed session. Given, all the last minute conference related items (like travel for one!), it is rarely possible to be able to rehearse in advance. So this leads to a challenge to manage the Panel in real time and the Moderator has to act as the "glue" between the Panelists and the audience.

To give myself some latitude i Panels, I try to propose a broad topic, this time it was BI and EPM - Critical Success Factors. Since I did not have a prior circulated set agenda, I tried to take the Panelist responses and turned them into a theme and a dialogue. This is best done by providing a few teaser questions and phrases to the Panelists around the topic.

The team selection is critical to provide a 360 view of topic. In this case I trie ot get a customer (Robyn), someone around BI implementations (Stewart), some around BI Strategy (Faun) and then Tim as the DB/DW heavy-weight.

During the discussions, the topics that came up are:
> Iterative processes for BI projects, and
> Executive buy-in for BI and Analytics in the organization

No longer customers, are in favor or 2-3 yr large DW projects with waterfall methodology and willing to wait a few years before the mega "EDW" goes to production. The Panelist noted they are sessiing more incremental or agile BI approach with some deliverables every 90-120 days. This could be just one new subject area or a subset of it, depending upon the size of the company and EDW project. Robyn mentioned the need for showing results to the business and Executive sponsor along the way. She mentioned "BI projects are long, involved and expensive: asking the business to trust that they’ll be happy with the results when it’s all over isn’t going to get them on board. But when we can give them something they can see, even when it’s just a small piece of the total picture, that’s really the only way to ‘transfer the vision’ to the shareholders and those that need to champion the project."

Since BI / EPM projects, do have sizable costs (software, infrastructure and development, support costs), top executive buy-in and the " analytics culture" has a big role in success of the BI projects. I would like to quote Faun who mentioned , "Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast" [from Peter Drucker] is quite true for BI/EPM too. You can come up with a neat BI strategy but it is the culture of the company that will ensure its adoption and implementation.

As Oracle has become a H/W and S/W player now, often infrastructure decisions are taking a center stage of BI discussions. Stewart defined it as the "beautiful marriage" of Exadata and OBIEE. In other words, some of the BI technology decisions can be made with the infrastructure in mind. A simple example might mean less indexes in the Star schema if it will be deployed on a powerful DW appliance.

To support that BI/EPM is an iterative process, Faun mentioned organizations and economic environments change, which demands that BI/EPM programs are refined and redefined over time. A successful BI effort requires 3 different skill sets -- business, analytic, and technology skills.

Tim observed, that several analytics oriented applications are emerging in the Oracle landscape like Demantra (an analytic application for trade promotions, campaigns etc). Such applications are bridging the gap between the ERP applications and BI / EPM applications. I understand the BI will be more embedded into the next generation Oracle Fusion (ERP) Applications.

You might have noticed even though we had EPM in the title we were lighter on the EPM content and party due to the nature of the profile of the audience.

Feel free to post any comments here on the Panel and its subject content.

OOW Day 1, Sunday Sep 19, 2010

2010-09-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

The day started with a Cable car ride from my hotel to the Moscone Center, it is quite an experience as the streets are quite hilly and it is wonder to see how the tram runs on what seems like 30 degrees incline. With my jacket on the weather seems veery pleasant...

The first event of the day was Exadata Board SIG Meeting, where we had good discussions about the current and near future state of the SIG. The main action items on the list were to get a proper website for the SIG and a Web conferencing facility. This took place over the breakfast at Mel's. Then we had the Exadata SIG Meeting with over 30 attendees, including Rich Niemiec, Rob Stackowiack, VP for BI, Arup Nanda, Vinod Haval and many others.

Then I was in the IOUG BIWA sessions first one by Mark Rittman on OBIEE 11g new features, Rich Solari and Teresa Wong speaking on OBIEE implementation experiences followed by my presentation with Abhinav on De-Mystifying OBIEE and BI Applications. All this was followed by the BI/EPM Panel where we had two real customers, BI and EPM experts and Oracle Veteran Joe Thomas. A lot of interactive discussions.

Judy (Oracle CMO) says that 41,000 attendees in this Openworld 2010, from 116 countries. 726 thousands seats in the sessions all together, 3622 Oracle employees involved.. It has impact of 67K hotel room to the San Francisco economy. Lance Armstrong will be at event on Tuesday morning.

Judy is touting it as a "green conference." The American Cup team is in the audience. The trophy was outside the keynote hall. The Wed band is Plack Eyed Peas, Steve Miller band etc.

Oracle now has 370,000 customers... next person to speaker is Safra Catz. She is introducing HP's Ann Livermore followed by Larry Ellison. Oracle Excellence Award, Global CIO are being announced. It seems Safra's voice is shaky today, is it too much excitement!

Ann will now be speaking who is speaking for the 3rd time to the OOW audience.

Next up is Larry!

The prelude to Larry is a lot of video on the stage! the America Cup etc...still waiting for his appearance.

Ok 6:40 PM (PT) now... Larry's voice is explaining that BMW was the American team and he is happy to bring home the Cup. Seems like I am in IMAX watching the America Cup on the big screen. Ok finally Larry is up now. He brought his own water...

Larry is acknowledging the Cup's winning team - Extreme Performance!

Larry is starting with Cloud Computing and will define the "cloud." He will define the Oracle's use of term cloud computing. He gave example of Salesforce.com and Amazon's EC2. Is it an application or a platform? Is it just the application on the web? EC2 is not an app like Salesforce.com

Larry defined Amazon EC2 as the platform for application development and execution. The "cloud" is partitioned into virtual machines. Faults are isolated.

Larry does that not thing that Salesforce.com is not a real could provider as it is shared environment, one database. It seems he is leading to Oracle's agreement with Amazon on the the definition of cloud computing. Larry thinks Amazon is cloud and Salesforce.com is not cloud rather an application.

Larry just announced the Oracle Exalogic elastic cloud, 30 compute servers, 360 cores, infiniband connects to Exadata Database machine. Exalogic costs $1m, can run EBS, Siebel, Java etc...

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.2 is out

2010-09-18T11:22:00.001-07:00

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.2 is out, major features:

1) Now JD Edwards Supply Chain Connectors are available
2) Peoplesoft 9.1 support is available
3) OBIEE 11g can be used with 7.9.6 by following the infrastructure upgrade guidelines in Doc 1196943.1 ( I can't seen to find it though on support.oracle.com)

Oracle Openworld 2010 Keynote Line up

2010-09-17T11:43:00.000-07:00

Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne and Oracle Develop 2010 Keynote Lineup

Sunday, September 19 | 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. | Moscone North, Hall D
Join Larry Ellison, Oracle Chief Executive Officer, and other Oracle Executives, as they discuss Oracle's latest innovations and kick start this year's conference.
Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, HP Enterprise Business will present a keynote titled "Transformation: From Applications to the Cloud."

Monday, September 20 | 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. | Moscone North, Hall D
Oracle President Mark Hurd will kick off Monday's activities at Oracle OpenWorld; and Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems John Fowler and Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven will discuss their vision for the next-generation datacenter and the latest innovations in Oracle SPARC, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Solaris and Oracle Server and Storage products.
Noriyuki Toyoki, Corporate Senior Vice President, Fujitsu Limited, will give a keynote on "shaping tomorrow with you," which will discuss the customer-centric approach of Fujitsu to building business and enhancing the future of society.

Monday, September 20 | 5:45 p.m. - 7:15 p.m. | Moscone North, Hall D and Hilton
Thomas Kurian, Oracle Executive Vice President of Product Development, will share Oracle's vision of Java strategy and direction, and describe how Java will continue to grow for the global developer community.
Doug Fisher, Vice President and General Manager, Intel will discuss how Oracle and Intel continue to work together to provide high performance Java on optimized platforms.

Tuesday, September 21 | 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. | Moscone North, Hall D
Join Thomas Kurian, Oracle Executive Vice President of Product Development, as he discusses Oracle's complete cloud offering and the impact of cloud computing in today's market, from development and deployment to management and self-service administration.
Thomas Kilroy, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager, will discuss how to effectively harness the growing amount of data generation many industries face today and turn it into profit with Intel- and Oracle-based solutions.

Tuesday, September 21 | 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. | Hilton
Join an Oracle Develop keynote with Tom Kyte, Oracle Architect, as he showcases new capabilities in Oracle Database development tools.

Wednesday, September 22 | 8:00 a.m. - 8:45 a.m. | Moscone North, Hall D
Michael Dell, Dell Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, will discuss how insights gained from listening to and collaborating with customers are shaping the next quarter of a century of IT innovation.

Wednesday, September 22 | 8:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. | Hilton
Hear Ted Farrell, Oracle Chief Architect and Senior Vice President, Tools and Middleware and Rally Software Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Ryan Martens, discuss the new opportunities behind Java applications evolving into rich enterprise applications and the importance of software agility, at this Oracle Develop keynote.

Wednesday, September 22 | 2:30 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. | Moscone North, Hall D
Larry Ellison, Oracle Chief Executive Officer, will discuss the state of the software and hardware industry and highlight the latest in Oracle innovations.
Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, will give a keynote titled, "The Future of the Cloud: Innovation, Service, Sustainability, Performance."

Thursday, September 23 | 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. | Moscone North, Hall D
Join a special, not to be missed, Java frontier keynote with Ray Kurzeil, inventor and futurist.

Oracle Openworld 2010 - Getting Ready

2010-09-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

As we get close to Oracle Openworld 2010, from Sep 19 to 23, at San Francisco, CA, I will be posting information of interest to the Oracle BIWA, Exadata SIG and related user community. Let us first begin with the events this week leading to the Openworld:

Thursday, September 16, 12 noon Eastern, Webcast Series
Exadata V2: Porting a Complex Application and Lessons Learned
by Aaron Werman
What are the best ways to make an application work well in Exadata and what design choices should be considered? This TechCast will offer substantial advice on porting existing applications to Exadata. We will also review risk areas and aspects worth testing based on migration experience.

The reviewed application domain is a large-scale trickle feed ETL for very high volume reporting, also including a variety of smaller transactional and ad-hoc query systems. We'll discuss porting and running a large mature ODS and reporting data warehouse from Oracle 10g to Exadata. We will cover migration strategies, tuning, and application rearchitecture.

Presenter: Aaron Werman is a senior architect at a large prime brokerage and architect for the data warehouse and its technical strategy and performance. He has deep experience in VLDB, Oracle, and heterogeneous systems.

Audio Dial-In:Audio Dial In: 866 682 4770 Meeting ID 1683901 Passcode 334451
List of Toll-Free International Dial-In Numbers: http://www.intercall.com/oracle/access_numbers.htm
Note: Audio will *not* be streamed over the internet.

Web Conference: To register and join in conference
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/727139232

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Exadata SIG Meeting at Oracle Openworld 2010, will be held on Sunday at 10:30 AM PT at Moscone West, 1st Floor North side of the bldg. If you get lost please call 954 609 2402 cell for last minute directions.

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After the Meeting head to IOUG sessions on Sunday, the details can be found at:
http://pdf.smithbucklin.com/files/OOWAllSessionsforweb.pdf

OBIEE 11g

2010-07-07T05:49:00.000-07:00

OBIEE 11g is launched! (does not mean it is Generally Available!)

Last week at ODTUG-Kaleidoscope the Product Managers from Oracle demonstrated some of the products on the roadmap including OBIEE 11g. Attendees were requested to blog or post about the new features. However, with the formal launch today the user community can learn about the new features from the web. The visual above shows the new looks and feel of the dashboard in OBIEE 11g.

The new sliding chart feature is described here:

One of the cool features demonstrated was to intiate workflows from the dashboard via the BPEL technology..

Actionable Intelligence: In the above example there is a difference between the blue and orange bars o nthe right, indicating a gap between the ordered quantity and quantity in stock, the user invokes an action and orders to meet the gap....look for some more explanation here

Also check out the other screenshots of OBIEE 11g here

Kaleidoscope (ODTUG) 2010 Kickoff!

2010-06-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

The venue is DC this year...for the 2010 Kaleidoscope - the annual ODTUG event. Check out the detailed agenda here.

I picked up registration on Saturday which was right after the US- Ghana soccer game... and guess what the speaker gift this year is a soccer jersey that says on the back "ODTUG 10"

Sunday is always the day of the Symposium and I have attended the last two years the EPM session so that is where I will be most of Sunday. Looking forward to Robert Gersten's session that is the second one...

Well it so happens that Robert Gersten could not make it, so Al Marciante did that part as well. Incidentally, organizers requested no blogging of the content from today as that can put PM's in a spot if some of the shown features are not actually released, so I am going to honor that and will only write about not feature related items, unless the feature is already out.

The soccer fever has really caught on the the Brits are in the pub watching the UK game, folks like Debra Liley, Mark Rittman etc..so far the first two days (Sat and Sun) have lead to exit of US and UK from the world cup...

I detoured from the EPM Symposium to attend Cahrlie Berger's talk on Oracle Data Mining on Exadata Platform....good to learn about ability to convert SAS models to ODM models now...

The afternoon session includes Hyperion Planning Applications, Essbase and OBIEE by Mike Duran from UK, who I met during the lunch...right now Shankar Vishanathan, one of the Product Managers for Planning is presenting the talk. He mentioned that HAL support ends in June 2010. FDM, ODI and flat file centric will take this place for moving data.

The next talk is by Aneel Shankar for Essbase.

What do BIWA SIG members want to learn about in BIWA TechCasts?

2010-04-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

From the 2010 BIWA Membership Survey, the BIWA Board of Directors received a lot of valuable insight into the interests of BIWA members. While at Collaborate ’10 last week in Las Vegas, we agreed to post these interests to help presenters tailor their TechCast proposals to meet these interests.

Even though a particular topic may have received a small percentage interest among members, the BIWA Board of Directors may still consider a presentation on that topic to ensure a well-rounded set of TechCasts for all of our membership.

1) Type of TechCast – percent of members who rated these “very useful” or “moderately useful”
Best Practices – 98%
Tips and Tricks – 96%
Case Studies – 91%
Oracle product demonstrations – 79%
Oracle product overviews – 73%

2) Database Usage – percent of members who use the specific database
Oracle 10g – 83%
Oracle 11g – 58%
Microsoft SQL Server – 39%
Oracle 9i – 30%
MySQL – 17%
IBM DB2 – 16%
Oracle 8i – 13%
Teradata – 11%

3) Technology Interests – percent of members who expressed interest in area
Business Intelligence – 95%
Warehousing – 74%
Data Mining and Predictive Analytics – 72%
OLAP – 64%
Database Technology – 57%
Data Quality – 53%
Extraction, Transformation, and Load (ETL) – 51%
Performance and Scalability – 46%
High Availability – 35%
Security – 31%
SOA, BPM, Web Services, App Server – 30%
Enterprise Management – 24%
Grid/Oracle Real Application Clusters – 24%
Middleware – 20%
Identity Management – 19%
Spatial – 16%
Content Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0 – 10%

4) Product Interests – percent of members who expressed interest in area
Business Intelligence – 95%
Enterprise Performance Management – 47%
Master Data Management – 46%
Project Management – 32%
Customer Relationship Management – 29%
Financial Management – 22%
Product Lifecycle Management – 19%
Governance, Risk, and Compliance – 17%
Supply Chain Management/Planning – 17%
Procurement – 13%
Fulfillment (Order Management/Logistics) – 10%
Human Capital Management – 9%
Asset Lifecycle Management – 8%

5) Application Interests - percent of members who expressed interest in area
Hyperion – 54%
Oracle E-Business Suite – 42%
Fusion – 37%
Strategy – 34%
Application Integration Architecture – 33%
Siebel – 32%
Development and Management – 30%
BEA – 17%
Agile – 16%
PeopleSoft – 15%
Oracle On Demand – 14%
Primavera – 8%
JD Edwards – 6%

6) Development Environments – percent of members who expressed interest in area
Oracle BI EE Admin Tool and Presentation Services – 51%
Oracle Application Express – 31%
Oracle JDeveloper – 22%
Eclipse – 20%
Oracle Forms – 20%
Microsoft .Net – 15%
Microsoft Visual Studio – 15%
Other Java IDE – 8%

7) Industry – percent of members who are in specified industry
High Technology – 38%
Financial Services – 33%
Professional Services – 23%
Public Sector – 20%
Communications – 19%
Consumer Products – 18%
Retail – 18%
Travel and Transportation – 16%
Education and Research – 13%
Industrial Manufacturing – 13%
Aerospace and Defense – 11%
Media and Entertainment – 10%
Engineering and Construction – 9%
Automotive – 8%
VAR or System Integrator – 8%
ISV – 5%

If you’d like to submit a proposal for a BIWA Wednesday TechCast, please click here for submission information. We look forward to seeing your TechCast proposal.

Collaborate 2010 - Tuesday

2010-04-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

The major events for Tuesday included the second data of the BI BootCamp that started with my talk "De-Mystifying OBIEE / Oracle BI Applications" at 8:00 AM and ended in the BI Panel at 4:30-5:30 PM slot. My talk was followed by the General keynote where IBM's VP of the Optim group, Al Smith delivered the talk.

The BI keynote at 10:30 AM was delivered by Robert Gersten, SVP of BI and EPM at Oracle, who finally managed to fly back from Europe after being stuck due to Iceland volcano. The room was jam packed in Robert Gersten's talk, my estimate is about 110 people. Gaurav Rewari, VP of Product Strategy spoke with Robert and gave an overview of the current product and Robert gave the overview of the future roadmap. He mentioned that OBIEE 11 g is expected this summer! There were a fair amount of questions and discussions after his talk on BI/EPM topics.

The data mining and the OLAP bootcamps took place and were well attended. Karl Rexer delivered the data mining lab and also demonstrated ODM running off the Amazon cloud via the iPad. Marty Gubar delivered the OLAP lab.

The BIWA SIG meeting took place at 3:15 in Lagoon D and we had very good discussions for an hour, with over 15 people in the room. Some of the topics discussed were the need for more local BI events with perhaps an add-on training offering. IOUG and ODTUG are in talks as well to achieve the same.

The BI Panel was at 4:30 PM and the Panelist were Mart Rittman, Matt Vranicar, Joe Thomas and Jean-Pierre. I moderated the Panel and started with challenges faced by companies to "Get Analytical." The reasons quoted included from departmental nature of organization culture to technical reasons such as how to validate the data in the warehouse from the business perspective.

The next part of the discussion was about how to go about selecting the right tools and business fit of the solution. The importance of the Proof of Concept was emphasized in this part of the talk. A good POC should go into production, if you are doing the right due-diligence upfront. The last part of the talk was about determining the ROI of the BI/EPM implementation.

The last event of the day was the BIWA SIG Reception in Tradewinds D at 6:30 PM. This was an invitation only event and featured Robert Gersten with a 10-15 min talk. Also announced were the winners of the BIWA Haydu Contribution Award for 2010, Karl Rexer and Dan Vlamis. This award is given to those who have shown a high level of commitment to BIWA SIG over the last year.

Amongst the attendees of the BIWA Reception were BIWA SIG Board Members Karl Rexer, Dan Vlamis, Doug Hahn, Ian Abramson, Swapan Golla and Oracle Advisors Mark Hornick and John Haydu. Also present was Lejla Causevic, who is working on the next BIWA newsletter. The IOUG Board members in attendance included (apart from Ian), Todd Sheetz, Andy Flower, Kent, Judy etc... A number of Oracle Product Management members were also in attendance and along with the present users it created a lot of informal networking. That marked the of Tuesday, at this stage the BI Bootcamp and the Hands on Labs are over.

Collaborate 2010 - Sunday - Monday

2010-04-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

The highlights on Sunday at Collaborate 2010 were:

1) Deep Dive into OBIEE by Mark Rittman (9-3 PM) the session was well attended (~30) people who came on Sunday. While I could not attend in person, I looked at his handouts and saw that he covered from the the basics of OBIEE and BI Publisher with product demos. He also covered integrating with Essbase towards the end with details like registering an Essbase cube in OBIEE.

2) Apart from attending the IOUG Conference Committee Meeting and helping in setting up the hands-on-lab for BIWA Track, I was able to attend the IOUG Speaker orientation meeting. As IOUG Conference Committee we got some cool Hawaiian shirt and was able to wear it around.

3) At 5 PM was the SIG Reception that was very well attended. Apart from some food and drinks and the SIG tables, there was also the painting of the Mural in the center of the room. The artwork will be donated to a local hospital. IOUG also gave away the Volunteer awards. The Ken Jacob award went to Charlie Berger and was received by Mark Hornick on his behalf. Ian Abramson, the IOUG President also received a surprise award.

4) After that I headed to Excalibur for the IOUG Volunteer Reception and met Tony Jedlinski there, who is a former IOUG Board Member.

The Day started early for me on Monday morning as we had to get ready for the BI Bootcamp with the BI keynote by Ray Roccaforte, VP of BI from Oracle. Ray is the only person who had a keynote in both the BIWA Summits (2007 and 2008) and was the keynote speaker today. His session was attended by 60+, even though it was very early!

Ray spend a fair amount of time taking about Exadata and its new features like Hybrid Columnar Compression. He explained how data has more redundancy in columns and that is used for columnar compression leading very high compression ratios.

The next event of the day was the keynote session where Chuck Phillips spoke remotely via web conferencing followed by Thomas Kurien. The Kurien's part of the talk included demos of EPM stack and the Web Center.

My next destination was the BI Bootcamp where Ian Abramsom gave a talk on ETL features of Oracle Warehouse Builder. His session had over 30 attendees. I missed the Juan Loaiza talk at the same time, but I found some comments on that talk here:
http://www.oraclenerd.com/2010/04/collaborate-exadata.html

Over the lunch hour, I had to attend SIG Council Meeting. I found out that IOUG is planning a $50/yr web only membership that will be between the Associate membership (free) and the full paid membership. Additionally, the Content Management SIG is try to help IOUG migrate the SIG/RUG sites to an Oracle Content Management Software called Site Studio, if you have never heard of it, then check this.

In the post lunch session, the first talk was by Mark Rittman on OWB 11 R2 features followed by the talk by Marty Gubar on OLAP.

I had to rush after that for my own talk on Exadata that was also transmitted to the virtual audience. For a change, instead of focusing on just the technical features of Exadata, I included a lot of details on the background of the product, the details of TPC benchmarks, the feedback from Gartner (Jan 2010 - Magic Quadrant) and well as the Proof of Concept (POC) results posted on the web both for Exadata V1 and Exadata V2. It was nice to see the Oracle Product Management members like Herman Baer, Jean-Pierre (JP) and Ron Weiss in the room. There were a few Exadata V2 customers we well in the room. The talk generated a lot of questions and discussions. One attendee from IRS wanted to know if Public Sector customers are using Exadata as well.

The last event of the day was the Welcome Reception in the Exhibit Floor. Got a chance to see UPK for HFP and Planning application. There are still no plans for UPK content for BI Apps.

I have OBIEE talk right in Tuesday morning, so more later...

Collaborate 2010 - Las Vegas, April 18-22

2010-04-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

Collaborate 2010 Conference starts in a day!

BIWA SIG will be present in full force at the event, most of our Board of Directors are speaking at the event under the "Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days"

BIWA SIG started in 2006 and now has over 2100 members worldwide. It hosted two BIWA Summits - first one at Reston, VA in Sep 2007 and then in Oracle Headquarters (Redwood Shores), CA in Dec 2008. To take a conference to next level BIWA SIG joined hands with its parent organization IOUG, to be a part of Collaborate Conference. "Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days" is a Conference within a Conference. The highlight of the events are:
1) Sunday Deep Dive session covering OBIEE by Mark Rittman
2) BI Boot Camp spanning over two days Mon and Tuesday (all sessions listed below)
3) Hands on Lab covering topics like OBIEE, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), BI Publisher (BIP), Oracle Data Mining (ODM), Oracle OLAP, Excel Plug-in for OLAP and Oracle Spatial (demo). These are on first come first serve basis. Indicate your interest in this Wiki site
4) BIWA Reception on Tuesday Evening by Invitation (Please see Shyam V Nath or Dan Vlamis for your invitation if you do you have one in your registration packet).
5) Other BIWA related sessions Mon-Thursday

Gartner 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence

2010-01-31T06:23:00.000-08:00

One of the most respected sources of ratings of Business Intelligence platforms (tools/tool-stack) is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Now that the 2010 Magic Quadrant is out, let's take a deep dive into it.

Let us focus on the 4th Quadrant. There are 7 players here namely Oracle (Siebel/Hyperion), IBM (Cognos/SPSS), SAP (Business Objects) and Microsoft - the large infrastructure service providers (or mega vendors) and then the independent BI providers like SAS, Microstrategy and Information Builders. All other are essentially in the niche player category...and in my opinion more suitable for specific company needs rather than go-forward strategy for entire enterprise wide BI initiative.

Gartner notices that though mega-vendors account for over 75% of BI Platform, the pure-play or niche vendors are not loosing ground and companies are sometimes impatient with results from large BI projects and turn to smaller vendors for more point solutions. Departments acting as independent cost centers are under pressure to show immediate results and select departmental solutions for quicker ROI without necessary alignment withe corporate BI & DW direction.

Tableau is a new entrant into the Quadrant. It is good to see that users are placing increasing importance to visualization of data - as they say a picture is worth many times the text or numeric reports. Gartner feels that players like Tableau with the "surf and save" model are becoming challengers to the mega-players.

Gartner survey reveals that customer satisfactions is higher for Oracle customers on the Siebel / Hyperion front compared to IBM and SAP where the Cognos and Business Objects acquisition impact is still out there for the customers.

Oracle and Microsoft stand high on ability of execute. IBM and SAP are on the higher end of being visionaries. IBM incidentally has received overall highest number of patents for 17 years in a row! Another trend is the "completeness of [BI] vision" and that will lead to increasing integration of predictive analysis and features like visualization into core BI functionality. Oracle is also focusing on integration of BI into the Oracle Applications (e-Business Suite) to strengthen in Operational BI and provide insights to users of ERP software, at their finger tips. This is apart from the Oracle BI Application effort, which is a Data Warehousing offering with ERP applications like EBS, Siebel CRM, Peoplesoft and now JD Edwards.

So how did recession impact the BI space? We see Microsoft has gained quite a few points on the Magic Quadrant. Though SQL server has its sweet spot in SMB space - small & medium businesses as it runs on Microsoft Servers only, yet on the BI side, it seems it's increasing maturity has increased it's market share as a lower cost BI platform. However, I personally doubt due to lack of integration with the major ERP systems like SAP or Oracle EBS, how far will this trend go for Microsoft as Enterprise BI platform?

Myself, coming from a BI Systems Integrator company IBM - Global Business Services (which is the largest Oracle Service provider - Refer Forrester Wave 2009 Q4), it is heartening to read "Gartner's view is that the market for BI platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software markets despite the economic downturn." This means a lot of new business for the SI's with BI / DW and EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) expertise. Though BI dropped from top (2009) to #5 (2010) initiative per the CIO survey, there will be alternative forms of BI initiatives like in conjunction with Cloud Computing and BI for getting value out of multimedia and unstructured data in the enterprise. Likewise, BI's ties with social and collaboration software will gain importance.

Some of the key vendor specific observations by Gartner

"IBM Cognos customers reporting that they need only three administration staff per thousand users on average."

"Oracle has established the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform as the "BI standard" in 82% of the references that responded to our Magic Quadrant survey. "

"Oracle has created within its references a very positive perception of its vision and success."

"Oracle lags behind the competition in introducing new and innovative solutions, such as the ability to integrate interactive visualization, search and collaboration as part of the BI platform offering."

"Surveyed customers continue to indicate that OBIEE, for the developer role, is more difficult to use, on average, than other BI platforms."

"SAP BusinessObjects' reporting and ad hoc query capabilities continue to be cited as its top strength by its customers..."

"For the third year in a row, customer survey data shows that customer support ratings for SAP are lower than for any other vendor in our customer survey."

"SAS customers rate their sales experience with SAS above average, despite complaints about pricing"

"Tableau was chosen more often for functionality than any other vendor in the survey"

What surprises me most though that Gartner did not comment on Datawarehouse or Database Appliances in the context of BI! Are we awaiting a new Magic Quadrant for Datawarehouse Appliances that will compare Exadata, Netezza, Teradata and the like?

Book Review - OWB 11g - Getting Started (Bob Griesemer)

2009-11-01T07:48:00.001-08:00

One of the privileges of being in the BIDW field for long enough, is to do book reviews. Currently, I am looking at the book by Packt Publishing, titled "Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Getting Started." The author is Bob Griesemer.

This book has 9 interesting chapters, however I am jumping to Ch5 for now as it is the Extract, Transform and Load Basics. Someone with a weaker ETL background could reach this first. The interesting section of this chapter is "To Stage or not to Stage." The author talks about key considerations in ETL, such as:

> For faster movement of data, amount of source data, degree of manipulation of source data and nature of source is important; AND

> Handling failures due to connectivity and handling changes in the source data.

The author has presented options for extracting data directly into staging without worrying about computations in the source system or extract along with some manipulation from the source. He brings up a good point that creating a performance load on the source system may not be desirable compare to loading the ETL or the staging database. Another good point, that author raises is that we should look at staging as even the flat files, extracted from source, organised in certain folders, so that OWB can use them without taking space in the DW. I think this is an interesting way to look at staging.

The use of flat files is not a new concept, as often when fetching data from legacy such as main frames that do not provide direct connectivity to ETL tools, we use flat files. This way the DW team does not have to become an expert on the structures of the legacy system. Likewise, the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, also support the concept of Universal adapters to interface with flat files when the source system is not directly supported with pre-built ETL connectors. However, the onus of change management of the source, may be little more involved.

De-Mystifying the "Cloud"

2009-10-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing is drawing attention from almost all the CIO's. Is it another fad or is the Cloud "real." Since the field is evolving, let us look at some of the details here.

In general Cloud Computing allows users and organizations to use computing power on demand just like water or electricity from the grid. Users can request computing power, storage, enterprise applications or even databases from such Cloud services providers. These Cloud Services providers will act as data centers, except they are no longer privately owned by each company. I simpler analogy would be single family home v/s a condominium with multiple tenants who share the common facilities like the hallway, elevator, pool and the club house. The users of Cloud pay only for the computing or storage they use. Thus, companies no longer need to create their own data centers thus do not need to buy servers and massive storage arrays.

Cloud Computing is not really something obscure, a lot of us are actually using it in daily lives perhaps not realizing that. For instance, Gmail, Twitter, Skype and YouTube are all built on the Cloud Computing technology. All these collaborative applications are delivering services to PC's and mobile devices. The users do not have to worry about the "location" of these service providing computers and storage. Hence, a key concept of Cloud Computing is Virtualization. Virtualization allows a single powerful computer to function as multiple virtual servers running a diverse range of operating systems and different applications. This is the key concept as physical computers are not dedicated to single or a group of related users, say from a small company.

Are all organizations ready to embrace the public Cloud? There is also a concept of Internal Cloud where the Cloud infrastructure sits inside the corporate firewall. The BigBlue (IBM) is a promoter of Internal Cloud or Private Clouds. In this approach, typically a large company would create an internal cloud to meet the diverse software application needs of its user base. No single server or SAN is dedicated to a unique application and user groups or departments use computing resources on demand from this internal cloud.

If you are an individual user or a small to mid-sized company, how can you get a first hand feel of the Cloud Computing. You can test drive services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2. Developers can buy computing power and storage as they need it. IBM provides Cloudburst as a hardware and software package to allow organizations to build their private cloud. In others words it is a "cloud in a box" approach. Companies often invest in storage space for data backup. EMC provides Decho or digital echo to backup data-storage cloud. Microsoft cloud play is called
Azure and is comparable to Amazon's EC2.

Cloud Computing is not an altogether new IT concept. We have known SaaS or Software as a Service, Grid computing, remote hosting (webservers, ftp sites etc) and different kinds of utility computing. "Cloud computing is really a culmination of many technologies such as grid computing, utility computing, SOA, Web 2.0, and other technologies." While a precise definition is still being debated, Open Cloud Manifesto was signed in 2009 by companies like IBM, EMC, Boeing etc. The goal is to put the CIO's and IT leaders at ease to make it easier for end customers and developers to plan transition to cloud services.

The origin of the term Cloud Computing is from the metaphor that computer architects often create graphic designs to show flow of information. When the source of information in such diagrams, is external or unknown, often cloud is used to depict that. Will the Cloud Computing be disruptive technology? It seems to be evolving that way. Today Google Docs seems to be going after Microsoft Office, Salesforce.com is giving Larry Ellison's Oracle CRM a run for money. Likewise, Mozy.com is competing with EMC's remote storage capability and Amazon EC2 may hit the sales of Intel servers for private data centers.

Is Cloud Computing free of any silver bullets? On Aug 31, Google's GMail server was down for a while, it seemed to bring up the question of risks associated with over indulgence in the Cloud computing model. Let's us see how it plays out over the next few months and as we get into 2010!

[ This blog posting was inspired by the Wall Street Journal Article titled How Well Do You Know... the Cloud?]

OOW Wed

2009-10-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

The keynote sessions have started and CEO of Infosys S (Kris) Golapakrishnan is now speaking on innovation and how he create a culture of innovation in his company. Each department has to come up with at least 2 new innovations for productivity boost every year. Every building looks different in Infosys, some even like flying saucer. Thus the culture of innovation has to be ubiquitous.

Kris is explaining the need for simplifying Organizational complexity. They operate in 27 cities but airline booking is done from one city (Bangalore). Anyone can email Kris (Ask Kris) directly, he gets about 600-800 emails a week and directly responds or are posted in company blog.

Kris saus we often use 2000 year old learning techniques..."Learning through collaboration and personalization delivered at their own pace" is most effective" Infosys uses web based training delivery internally to achieve these.

ICICI bank of India is power by Infosys solution and is an exaple of branchless bank, an example of IT led banking. Today Infosys has 62% revenues from North America, 25% from Europe and rest from rest of the world. However, the company envisions that in longer run it will be spread as 1/3 from each market as the most growth is in the rest of the world like India, China and Latin America for IT services.

The next event is Larry's keynote, and as usual what will be the new announcement? He started talking about open source Linux. He will talk about Exadata V2, a tool using data mining for discovering problems proactively.

Oracle VM is being used by companies like Dell, BT etc are using it. 65% of Linux users are running Oracle DB on Oracle Enterprise Unix, per survey by HP.

Larry is now talking about SUN Oracle DB Machine (Exadata). However, the machine he talked about on Sunday for TPCC benchmark, that is a SPARC Solaris machine running Oracle DB. Larry is presenting customer testimonials from Exadata V1, where the performance improvements are over the older configurations in their organization.

Larry is explaining that fast computers like Teradata, Neteeza are mainly for Data Warehousing only but not for OLTP or transactional system. The use of Flash Memory allows high speed random I/O.

The memory hierarchy in the Exadata V2 allows high speed random hierarchy, as there is no need to spin the disks for seek, on Solid State memory. The Exadata is meant to be fault tolerant with redundancy at every level.

Flash is slower than DRAM, but it is used to keep most of the database itself in the Flash memory. The use of compression allows 3X the size of DB on disk by use of OLTP compression. Thus a full 15TB database can reside in a single RACK of Exadata, theoretically. The RACK can do 1 million I/O's per sec.

Exadata is compared to IBM - 8 IBM DC8300 Turbo (76 racks) with cost of about $10.7 million. The capacity of two Exadata RACKS is compared here. Larry is now introducing the Hybrid Columnar Compression for Data Warehousing applications only.

In memory parallel query execution feature is used to compare with Parcel and other in-memory databases. The grid architecture helps to make the Exadata faster, allowing multiple CPU's to be used. The Flash and the Compression helps to improve the speed.

Porting applications to DB machine - "runs existing applications unchanged" However, we saw in customer panel from the V1 customers, that they had to leave behind the indexes and then add back some of the indexes. However, partitioning remains key in DW workloads. Larry is now showing the price without the software costs like the DB cost per node and Exadata software or Compression (OLTP).

So far no new announcements from Larry today....Arnold is too funny so I am not blogging any more... just Tweeting...

shyamvaran #OOW09 Who needs the $10m more than State of CA & Arnold at this time..may be will buy him the new house if he makes 2 much fun of his wife!
less than 5 seconds ago from web

shyamvaran RT @eyesonopen Here comes arnold schwarzenegger. Maybe state of CA wants to grab that 10 million dollar prize. He's actually hilarious.
2 minutes ago from web

debralilley Very funny, cell phones, action, food supplements, much funnier than I expected = Arnie is great #oow09
3 minutes ago from web

shyamvaran #OOW09 Arnold could not have done it - Terminator without the Technology, or his body building with the technology for Training and food
3 minutes ago from web

OOW Tuesday

2009-10-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Highlights include key note by Michael Dell
Release of Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.1 with support for databases like DW DB2 and Teradata.

My session was at 5:30PM

OOW Monday - OTN Night

2009-10-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

The OTN night started at 7PM, in the Tent, good food as usual and the drinks! Entertainment in the far side of the tent, Middle Eastern dancers... On the near side (towards 3rd st) was the Trivia sponsored by Blackberry. I was drafted to be on the stage with 5 other contestants to fight it out for a Blackberry, in front of the crowd!

It was a tie with 300 points each, the other contestant from was from Canada. The questions were in three different categories - about Oracle , about RIM/Blackberry and about San Francisco.

So what was my winning strategy? Let me explain it in Exadata terms. The storage index is a new concept which is not a pointer to the row or block rather a negative index, i.e. where not to look for data. Likewise, I won with a similar strategy today, the last question was about San Francisco and neither on knew the answer, the other contestant answered and lost the point on the tie breaker, I won... so my "negative" strategy of not answering won me the Blackberry!!

OOW Monday Evening

2009-10-12T17:16:00.001-07:00

I spent a good part of the day in the Exhibit Hall (Moscone West and Moscone South). Some of the things that caught my attention were:

1) Pretty Large Presence of Salesforce.com ( I think it is their first time at OOW)
2) Focus on Oracle on the Cloud, Amazon is also present
3) A real Sumo wrestler in the booth on Application Security - You don't know who you are up against?

Steve Miranda is talking now about Oracle Applications including Application unlimited. The customer Smucker is also expected. Janet Foutty of Deloitte will be on the stage.

Deloitte is the sponsor of this session. "Business Led and Technology Enabled" is the mantra. Tie back every penny to shareholder value. Janet is talking about Value maps that Deloitte uses to map business problems to Oracle products. Janet has a financial services background. Clients are focussed on cost cutting, efficiency and re-tolling their IT.

What's next, in the mind of clients - Improved Agility... is one of them. Next is Information Integration. According to Janet, Exadata enables new slices and dices of data that was not possible a few years ago.

Upgrading software is good hygiene, so customers should upgrade, per Janet. However, upgrade is not a casual decision, business and IT should co-own it. Janet believes that cloud and SAAS is truly a flex point in the IT history.

Steve Miranda is now going over the different application releases across the product suites. Rapid Planning is a new VCP (Value Chain Planning product) and it will be demoed. You can drill down to Sales and Operational Planning (S&OP) to see the detailed budget that has come from Hyperion via AIA.

Rapid Planning can help to bring demand fulfillment with the supply. The Planner can setup alternates and launch the plan. Integration with Web 2.0 is available, such as IM and Meeting request using Webcenter. Overall, it can help to solve the business planning problem without the use of 'spreadmarts'.

OOW 2009 Ann Livermore of HP

2009-10-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

According to Ann 40% of Oracle deployments are on HP!!! Ann will tell how HP and Oracle work together to unleash the business potential. Now that EDS is part of HP, it is a big services company as well. Businesses spend 70% of IT budgets on routine operations and 30% on innovation. HP's goal is to help businesses reverse this tread.

HP has 3400 Oracle related professionals. I wonder if that includes that came with EDS. HP's goal is to help manage the Information explosion. Now Ann is talking about BI solutions? HP is number 1 on number of server for BI deployments, a lot of these are on Oracle software stack. She mentioned about Neoview - the HP DW appliance.

Oracle Openworld 2009 - Day 2 Monday

2009-10-12T08:05:00.001-07:00

It's Monday at the Openworld. Having breakfast when my biological clock thinks it is lunch hour (almost!).

Karen Tillman VP of Oracle Corporate Communications is sharing details with the media today. Now Oracle is a software and a systems player rather than just a software company. This is the media briefing event. The keynote today is called the Art of the Impossible by Safra Catz and Charles Phillips. Next is Ann Livermore from HP.

There are general sessions today in the Hall D (keynote hall) such as the Andy Mendelson's session on Database.

Judy Sims is now introducing the event - 1900 sessions, 81,000 hotel room night impact, will serve 170,000 cups of coffee to the guests!!! Spin to Win is a new attraction where some attendees will be able to spin the wheel for VIP status in the customer party. This year most of the reading material will be in the Virtual Collateral with e-bag. Show your badge and get 15% off with 138 merchants here. Use opentable to book dinner. Tonight is the OTN Night is a great event for networking.

Join AeroSmith on Wed night. Roger Daltery, Three Dog Night, Shooter Jennings... the event closes with It's a Wrap on Thursday after noon at 4PM.

If you sign up for OOW10 now, its a $900 discount. Now Judy is giving out her tips such as schedule builder...wear comfortable shoes.... leave high heels home!

meet 5 new customers everyday....there are total of 345,000 customers of Oracle.

Now Charles Phillips and Safra Catz are here... who welcomed the 37,000 registrants for OOW, down from 44,000 last year. Safra is talking about the onus on customers in past to put the different parts of software together, image having to order car by parts and assembling it together... Likewise, it seems Oracle will focus on integrating different parts to make it more enterprise ready...

Wy is this event called "open" world, Safra explained that is Oracle's commitment to Open standards, Oracle's $3B spend in enterprise R&D.

According to Charles, Oracle listens to customers via Customer Advisory board, User Groups and Special Interest Groups (SIG) and this feedback is used to channel the $3B for R&D.

A lot of customers of SAP are using Oralce products (AIA) for SAP to SAP integration. He mentioned 5X savings in storage by compression. Oracle VM 2.2 is out along with OEM 10gR5.

Now Primavera is being introduced by Joel Koppelman who is in his first OOW. A lot of Primavera customers are in Oil & Gas, Utilities etc... Often accounting information is not made available from project management. Primavera P6 will not have integrations with JD edwards and E-business Suite using the AIA. Next will be for Peoplesoft, Agile etc... More so with Oracle BI ( I look forward to that!)

I wonder how it competes with the E-business Suite Project management modules. The acquisition of Primavera completed over 11 months... Next person on will be Paco Aubrejuan who heads Peoplesoft development. He is talking about challenges related to disconnect of budgeting from the day to day operations and differences between budget and actuals. Commitment control in PSFT can pull data from Hyperion Planning and use the concept of commitment spend and encumberances...this way there is continuous check on budget v/s actual throughout the year. Every new hire or speding can be checked with the budget.

This can lead to budget exception, so a PO can be blocked right away if it is not in line with the budgeted spendings. The budget from Hyperion can be published in PSFT.
Thus there is closed loop between budgeting and spending.

The next is the Retek and Profitlogic product. Duncan Angove is on the screen. From 2 seasons in traditional retail to 10+ floor sets now with 20% or less gross margin. a lot more mix and match of merchandise. So the floor set is constantly changing. No longer last season's information is enough for fast fashion. Oracle Retail now has Integrated Fashion Planning with modules like Clearance Optimization, Retail Demand Forecasting, Item and Asortment Planning. All these integrates with OBIEE. Planned obsolesacence is the key...

A good live demo of Retail levers that the retailer can pull say price or alter the product assortment. Good use of integration with mapping and BI. At this time the system's price optimization may help to reduce the give up of the margin by too much reduction in price. The demo used Profit Logic for price optimization and send the information to Retek for operationalizing "fast fashion."

The next section is Anthony Lye Senior VP for CRM. He is talking about Trade Promotions. How to optimoize the Trade Promotions? How to integrate Demantra with Siebel CRM and Demand Planning? The link to Promotions and supply chain was missing. What is being presented is Siebel CRM with Advanced Planning of Demandtra using AIA.
The demo is Siebel CRM and Demantra integrated flows.

Oracle Openworld 2009 - Day 1 (Sunday) - Keynote Session

2009-10-11T17:29:00.001-07:00

It's 5:30 PM (PST) now and am getting situated for the first keynote of the OOW. Just finished a hectic day of user group events, most of the BIWA SIG and Exadata SIG sessions were very well attended (multiple sessions with over 100) in the audience. That is impressive as there were ~140 user group sessions today at Moscone West.

The day ended in BI Panel discussions that I moderated where Mark Hornick, Mark Rittman, Greg Rahn and Marty Carangelo kicked off some really interesting discussions with good audience participation.

Now I see Safra Katz, Larry and Judy Sim walking in to take their seats... at 5:48PM
The event starts with a video on Scott.... He is dressed in almost red... and he commented that as Sun is "almost" an Oracle company but not fully red yet. He started with his top 10 list that is known for....top 10 list that makes engineers go wild...

Scott's list of top 10 innovations (after 27 yrs of business) under the "SUN":
PC NFS
SPARC first 64 bit computer
Open source
BSD + UNIX System 5 = Solaris
Java
E10K (64-bit Solaris, RISC SMP way)
ZFS/Open Storage / Flash (Exadata)
Project Blackbox (modular data center or data center in a shipping box)
SunRay (thin clients)
Chip Multi-threading (cool threads)

Scott is talking about MySQL, whether it will get clobbered? In his view is does not compete with Oracle or DB2, but with Microsoft. Likewise, InnoDB is still alive after Oracle bought it.

Jave is on 1 B PC's, on 2.2 B mobile phones... "Jave speaks for itself" Now the father of Java, James is invited on the stage...The Oracle's fastest growing products are huge bags of Java code. Oracle is involved in almost all the JSR's in some way... 15 million JRE's are downloaded a week. In Brazil the tax system is Java based and can be done only online...it spikes the Java downloads at that time. The London Oyster card for local trains uses a Java card... Scott is concerned if Moscone center can hold Openworld and Java one together...

Sun is also a storage company. About 1/3 people run their business on Oracle, Java and SPARC. It begs the question the question when will Exadata come out on SPARC?

Scott invited John Fowler, who had unveiled with Larry, the Exadata V2 (Sun Oracle Database Machine) on Sep 15. John announced that Sun holds all 7 key commercial benchmarks...on SUN SPARC platform like OLTP, OBIEE, Hyperion etc...

Scott showed the Sun FlashFire card to emphasize the small size... In old days flash wore out quickly so question is - is it reliable. It seems the flash technology has improved over time and is quite reliable now...

The future of data center is compute, networking and storage...

Larry is now on the stage...the slide where they say IBM... we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business. Larry thinks that IBM is dissuading SUN customers and telling them that Oracle will get rid of hardware business. Larry says that is why the ads about competing with IBM....

Larry says that they will demonstrate that Oracle works best with SPARC...Oracle will increase investment for MySQL. They had bought Innobase and have not killed the product. InnoDB is integral part of transaction processing. Larry believes that Apple has done a good job in managing the H/W and S/W problems together. It seems Oracle with Sun wants to do the same. Oracle talked about the TPC benchmark that exceeds IBM's Power series benchmarks.

At a later session during the Titan Awards, IBM picked up a few Titan awards and a Global Partner Award..... more details to come

Oracle Openworld 2009 - Day 1 (Sunday)

2009-10-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Oracle Openworld 2009 is here, sitting in Moscone West (Room 2002 BIWASIG, Exadata SIG 2004), in San Francisco downtown. The sessions are open to all categories of registrant of Oracle Openworld 2009. The Special Interest Group sessions will go on till 5 PM.

The first BIWA SIG session was on real world OBIEE implementation related experiences and had over 100 (114) attendees which is a good number for a session right 8:30AM in the morning while folks are busy picking up their badges and taking care of registration.

The room 2004 is full of Exadata SIG sessions, the 8:30 session was kicked off by Matt Morris of TUSC and then Dan Norris did a session on best practices. The next session in 2004 is a panel of X team experts from Oracle.

More to come....

BIWA SIG at Oracle Openworld 2009

2009-10-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

BIWA SIG is very excited to be present at the Oracle Openworld 2009 with its sessions as below (all these are on Moscone West on Sunday Oct 11):

1) Deep Dive into Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition Support in Oracle BI by Mark Rittman

2) BI Panel: Critical Success Factors for Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing Projects, Moderated by Shyam Varan Nath

3) Lies, Damn Lies, and Visualizing Data with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications by Dan Vlamis

4) Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Implementations in Real-World Environments by Richard Solari and Teresa Wong

5) Oracle Industry Data Model: An “off-the-shelf” Data Warehouse- Faster and Cheaper by Sudip Majumder

Thus the topics covered range from Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data Mining to OLAP. Enough content to keep you busy for whole day on Sunday!

What to Expect at Oracle Openworld 2009?

2009-10-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

I attended the Speakers meeting on Monday (Oct 5), and wanted to share some of the things I learned:

1) There are 5 Streams, 47 Tracks, ~1963 sessions and 398 Partners in the event. Last year the attendance was close to 45,000, I wonder with the developments with SUN, what will be the attendance this year!

2) Management and Infrastructure Track is new this year. This stream talks about OEM, Storage/Flash Storage, Compliance, Oracle VM ...

3) Primavera Conference is new this year with a separate 2 day registration.

4) Oracle Develop is a 3 day event at Hilton, San Francisco. Tom Kyte is one of the Keynote speakers in that event.

5) The Sunday keynote, after a full day of User Group and SIG sessions (140+), will feature Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison at 5:30PM. This is followed by the Tent Party on Howard Street, yes it is really a tent....

6) There will be a Green Market Place this time. others things of interest are Solution Spotlight, open to Discover Oracle Openworld pass holders, Callaway Experience by Tata (practice your golf swing there), Digital Playground by Blackberry (RIM), BMW Oracle Racing Experience etc...

7)On Wed the keynote is by Infosys CEO S Gopalakrishnan and Larry Ellison. That is the day some accouncements about SUN (SPARC) + Oracle is expected.

8) Unconference is the powerpoint free zone with demos and informal discussions...this is the third year of the event.

9) No throw-away water bottles, rather water station serving city of San Francisco tap water!

Watch out for more details to come....

Announcement:World's First OLTP Database Machine with Sun FlashFire Technology

2009-09-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

I am getting ready to listen to LARRY Ellison's talk on OLTP version of Exadata using SUN hardware. I see that this may be useful for mixed workload boxes. Larry had said last year while announcing Exadata in Sep '08, that 70% of the workload of OLTP's are for querying of data.

Oracle is claiming "The result is a quantum leap in performance over Oracle's previous generation Exadata machine, including a 20x increase in random I/O and a 5x I/O bandwidth speedup with FlashFire Technology, as well as a 2x speedup in compute and network performance capacity." Let us see how Larry is going to explain this.

Follow up to: OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite

2009-09-09T02:23:00.001-07:00

I had posted about my BIWA SIG Techcast here.

I would like this to follow up the event, if you had a question that you wanted to follow up, please use the comments here. I will try to answer those.

Oracle 11g R2 - What is new?

2009-09-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

Today Oracle 11g R2 was released. It is interesting to note that Linux version is the first to be out as usual, even though Oracle is on verge of owning Solaris OS. Sun and Windows version are expected later this year. The timing is good, it's about 1 1/2 months to Oracle Openworld. I am sure the 11g R2 related session will be a good draw.

So what's new in this release:

1) Enhancements to Real Application Cluster, Oracle RAC One Node option is now available for relatively less critical systems. The ASM get's a face lift with intelligent data placement leading to better retrieval rate for data.

2) Advanced data partitioning to allow more online application upgrades.

3) One of the Exadata related feature is called “Warehouse” Compression and is based upon Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression. This technique delivers a typical compression ratio of up to 10:1 for data warehouses, with virtually no negative impact on query performance, per Oracle. The "archive" compression can get 40:1 compression factor.

The 11gR2 documentation is here.

OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite

2009-08-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here is my personal invitation to come and attend the next Oracle BIWA SIG Techcast called:

OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite

I plan to discuss the following high level topics:

1) Oracle BI Applications for supported Oracle E-Business Suite Modules and other Oracle Applications. It will include real world experiences for implementing BI Apps Version 7.9.6 {yes I have brought a 7.9.6 implementation to production recently!}

2) Custom OBIEE Development against E-Business Suite (when no BI apps are available)
3) Migration of Discoverer EUL to OBIEE RPD using Migration Utility

While OBIEE and BI Apps are clearly the strategic analytics reporting direction from Oracle, only certain Analytics applications are available. Sometimes all customer needs for BI reporting may not be met by these pre-built analytics. For instance, JD Edwards has pre-built ETL connectors only for Financial Analytics. While more BI Apps and ETL connectors are in the pipeline, how can users meet their reporting needs today as they go live in near future? In this session, we will look at several short and medium term solutions without deviating from the long term strategic goal of using pre-built BI applications to reduce the overall risk.

Several real life situations will be evaluated with demonstration of the steps involved such as how to Migrate Discoverer reports to OBIEE with the highest degree of automation. Likewise, we will cover how DBI views be used for custom OBIEE reporting.

------------------------------------------------------

While the above is my suggested outline, I am open to requests and suggestions so that it best serves your needs. Please feel free to comment or email what you would like to hear about in this webcast or its follow up.

SPSS Announcement - IBM on the Horizon!

2009-08-28T05:17:00.001-07:00

Dear Shyam Varan

These are exciting times for SPSS and for you, our customer. By now you have probably heard the news that SPSS Inc. has entered into an agreement to be acquired by IBM Corporation.

First, I want to personally thank you for your patronage over the years and for enabling us to reach this pinnacle event. Second, I want to assure you that, as we go through the process of finalizing the acquisition, our level of support and dedication to academia will remain as strong as ever. During this time, account management and support infrastructure will be at the forefront of our focus and, of course, we will continue to honor our outstanding commitments and contracts. In short, our action plan for the immediate future is business as usual.

This agreement is a momentous step, as becoming part of IBM will provide us with the scale and resources to better meet academia’s need for the most advanced data analysis and decision-making tools. We are firmly committed to:

Providing academia the power of Predictive Analytics and the combined technologies and expertise of both companies. By partnering with you, we will be able to advance the use of data in decision making throughout the student lifecycle, across the campus and into the research lab.
Continuing our long standing relationship with academia and the universities, professors, students and researchers who rely on our technology to help create a better future.
Making the best technology tools and resources available to the academic community. To learn more about IBM’s strong academic presence, visit www.ibm.com/developerworks/university.

We expect a smooth transition and will continue to communicate with you as new information becomes available. We encourage you to visit http://www.spss.com/ibm-announce/ for updates and FAQs or contact your account representative to discuss any concerns you may have.

We hope you share our excitement in the positive prospects this announcement brings. Together, we will be even better positioned to lead an industry we helped create. We place a high value on our academic relationships and know that our success comes from helping you succeed. We appreciate your business and, as we enter this new chapter, look forward to continuing our relationship with you and your institution.

Sincerely,

Jack Noonan
Chairman, CEO and President
SPSS Inc.

The Business Case for Social Networks

2009-08-04T18:08:00.001-07:00

It has been a while since I blogged, BIWA hosted a webcast on Data Mining by Charlie Berger and is ready for another one tomorrow on Oracle database 11g optimizer by Maria Colgan. Her talks are generally "sold out." In my opinion her topic is not mainstream BI, yet something that all BIDW professionals need to know to drive performance out of the Oracle DB based data warehouses. We have a few more talks lined up such as Oracle OLAP at Gallup: A Scalable Unified Approach to BI Reporting by the Gallup folks and then mine on OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite

Now that my Blogger status for Oracle Openworld 2009, registration is approved, I am "licensed to blog." :)

You might have observed that the title of this section is "The Business Case for Social Networks" yet I start talking about BIWA Techcasts. Well, I want to build the business case implicitly and not explicitly. You can note that today almost all the BI experts quoted here are using social media to get their ideas across. Apart from being a blogger, this year at Open World I am a panelist in a Web 2.0 session on a topic related to My Oracle Support. From the conventional TAR based support, Oracle is looking to a 360 Social Strategy of Support. We will discuss more about it in the Oracle Panel.

Well, so far I have used sentiments to build the business case for social networks. As an "analytics" person, I am suposed to justify based on hard numbers and real business cases and trends and not on emotions. So here are some solid cases:

New airfare deals pop up on Twitter - but act fast Jetblue posted a "Cheep" Cheaps+ Tweet for $9 one way trip from JFK to Nantucket. United posted "twares" or Twitter only fares that are usually available for next 1-2 hours.

USATODAY also quoted there are 35 million Twitter users already and 45% of 1015 advertisers surveyed by Linkedin said Twitter will continue to grow. Facebook has 250 million members and MySpace has 130 million members. Another article by USAToday shows how people are texting / tweeting several hundred messages a day, to their social circles. Thus, eletronic social media is here to stay both at the social and business level.

Few of the Twitters that I have been following are ERoske, Valueselling, EtiquetteExpert, OracleAce, IOUG and Markrittman and not forget another Oracle Ace Mohan Dutt. I responded to his Tweet and got my Oracle openworld Panelist registration, isn't that enough of a cause for me to be a "social junky?"

Before I close, I want to mention Linkedin, another of my favorite, where I have over 1200 connections. I have started a few successful Linkedin groups like Oracle BIWA SIG, Exadata SIG and IOUG. The collective membership of these groups is in 4 figures.

BIWA Techcast Series: Next July 8 on OBIEE

2009-07-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 8, 12 noon Eastern
BIWA Wednesday TechCast Series - Second Event!
Tales from the Front: Strategies for a Successful OBIEE Implementation

Click here for details
Are you starting a new OBIEE project? Or perhaps you're mired in the muck of an existing project, and things aren't going well. No matter what your experience with OBIEE has been so far, no matter what industry your company is in, this session will provide you with helpful tips and techniques to guide you toward a successful OBIEE implementation.

We'll discuss topics such as:
Divide and Conquer: The key strengths you need on your OBIEE implementation team.
Nothing Stops a Train: But a lack of proper training can stop your project in its tracks.
Any Way You Slice It: Why your security model should be one of the first, second, and third things you consider.
What's In a Name?: Ideas for implementing a standardized naming convention for the objects in your OBIEE schema.
Who's On First? The first, most important steps when beginning your project.
Tiny Steps, Big Results: Building your OBIEE environment in successive stages for quick Proofs of Concept.
Stars, Snowflakes, Constellations, and other Unnatural Phenomena: The proper schemas for a clean configuration and ease of maintenance.
Aggregates, OLAP, and Cache, OH MY: Your three-prong approach to great performance.

We'll use examples pulled from real projects. If you're interested in avoiding the "gotchas" of an OBIEE implementation, then come along for the ride and learn from our mistakes.

Presented by Cathye Pendley of Vlamis Software Solutions
Audio Dial-In: 888 967 2253 Meeting ID: 572994 Meeting Passcode: 334451
Web Conference: https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/sch_mtg_details.uix?mID=149973030
Compatibility Check: If you have not used oracle web conference system before, please ensure your system compatibility by going to https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/nuf_sys.uix.

Other TechCasts Coming Soon - Mark Your Calendars!
July 22, 2009 - Oracle Data Mining Overview and Demos
Charlie Berger, Sr. Director of Product Management, Data Mining Technologies, Oracle
August 5, 2009 - The Oracle Database 11g Optimizer: Good things get even better
Maria Colgan, Principal Product Manager, Oracle
August 19, 2009 - CASE STUDY - Oracle OLAP: A Scalable Unified Approach to BI Reporting
Swapan Golla - Lead Developer, Gallup Organization

Smart Strategies for Uncertain Times

2009-06-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Monday keynote by John Kopcke (happy the keynote is in the BI/EPM space, so the lanyard by RittmanMead and bags logo of Interrel!)

Do business executives really do not know what they want for BI/EPM is it simply the dashboard envy that drives the projects? John is highlighting the importance of economic downturn for new opportunities. Smukers has grown in profits recently. So what are the high impact strategies:

- Cash conservation is a no-brainer here...
- Manage risk and performance
- Management Excellence (ability of business to be agile in changing times)

E.g. Southwest took 4 days to respond to the 911, to change routes and supporting changes... how does this compare at other business... an example of management excellence. I would add the oil price hedging as an another example that has given Southwest an advantage over others.

John is now talking about he Hackett Value Grid based on 2000 companies surveyed, as the foundation of World class companies and how they outclass others. They have lower DSO and other Finance KPI's are better but they have lower % headcount in Finance and hence lower costs, compared to peer groups. The SOX impacted the peer groups a shot their costs up.

So far the keynote is quite technology agnostic... more generic EPM / BI terminology... the next topic is 7 imperatives to deal with Crisis:

1) get insight and share it (e.g. provide finance professional with operational insight)
2) monitor continuosly
3) plan flexibilty
4) rething strategy
5) invest and divest
6) build trust
7) ... and do this all correct (not just YADT... it should not be Yet Another Dashboard Tool!)

Now John is explaining the importance of BI Applications in this challenging situation. Use the pre-packaged applications and quickly implement to get the insights in your business. Now once you have "insight" into the business problems, how do you "Plan Flexibly?" Time to rethink what does Planning process mean.

Yesterday, there was a lot of focus on the public sector Planning and performance management. Often budgeting is an yearly rituals and then forget about it... can it be used to convert to a rolling business event based activity...

We will see more of integrated business planning. I think BI apps for HFM will be a key bridge between BI and EPM... and will help to close the bridge between IT and Business.

Rethink Strategy: A good example when cost of oil went to $150/barrel.... financial modeling is back in fashion, a good example from IBM - had a financial model on mainframes. Seems like we forgot about financial modeling, important when "obvious" history would not tell us about future... now you need deep mathematical / data mining models to use financial models for "knowing" the future. ABB is a good example of using this to survive a financial crisis ($4B debt restructuring). Gave a good example of who should go to Univ of Vermount - use of data mining to go after the right target prospective students.

Invest and Divest Wisely: Companies need to identify porfolio of best product-market-channel combinations.

Customer success story - Burger King is using 3 month and 5 year planning cycles. Crystal Ball or the Monte Carlo simulation for predictive Modeling is being reintroduced. By the way, at Colaborate Steve Stein of Perot system had explained in brief how Crystal Ball works using human readable rules, so I need to look at it in details. John says, we often plan and budget but do not go and verify how the real worked outperformed viz-a-viz the plan/budgets.

Build Trust: How to "gain to sustain?" Identify the right stake holders...here you identify who are the right consumers of EPM and BI information. New York City (NYC.gov) used dashboards to make govt transparent to the citizens.

shyamvaran John: "TWEETing is great but you cannot run business on Tweets unless you have processes in place", (I think #ODTUG has process in place)
half a minute ago from web...

Before the Hyperion acquisition, BI was looked as add on technology by Oracle. BI / BI apps were post-ERP implmentations. Hyperion has made Oracle realize that BI/EPM cannot be an after-thought, rather needs to be part of the application strategy.

I will be touching some of the concepts today in my MDM for BI - talks at 3:45PM, Session 91

Monday at Kaleidoscope

2009-06-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

Monday sessions start...

Todd Trichler is getting the Oracle Contributor Award.
Second award goes to Al Marciante - for contribution to Hyperion SIG, having seem him last year and this year at Hyperion Symposium, this is a well-deserved award.

Paper awards being announced now (Editor's Choice)
...and the winner is Peter Koletzke!

Speakers awards based on speaker feedback
1) Presentation style Peter Koletzke (won a kaleidoscope as his award! the real one)
2) Best presentation content topic ...and the winner is Dimitri Geillis (a proud new father this week)

I am sitting next to Tom Kyte and have asked him to touch on the recent Big Blue announcement in the Database Panel, that he will participate in.

Jeff is explaining why Kaleidoscope has grown in size this year in size, an important milestone in this economy...focus on content. They are inviting Track Managers for next year. The event received over 500 abstracts for 2009, in the 4 main tracks. The APEX track is shown explosive growth. If you look at Oracle Mix, some of the top proposals are related to APEX. The Sundown session on Tuesday evening is for attendees to talk to the Oracle ACES.

Now the Keynote speaker is being introduced as former Hyperion, now Snr VP of BI & EPM (developer's developer as head of development from Hyperion)...

Hyperion Planning

2009-06-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

Hyperion Planning Roadmap

11.1.2 Release Theme

Public sector Budgeting (out of box ERP implementation using ERPI, Support position based budgeting for public sector, public sector process / workflow management, budget books etc)

Establish MS Office as a prominent Planning user interface

Enhance and Evolve Planning Web Functionality and Usability

11.1.2 also has Data Validation Rules in the Forms for Traffic lite kind of display, based on thresholds. Also this release introduces a much robust member selector.

ASO Reporting Cube Links are possible.
Lightweight Data Entry Pages (Ajax grids): Planning client can retrieve data from the server asyncronously.

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM)

2009-06-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

Financial consolidation is almost synonymous with HFM both for Oracle and SAP customers. Janette Hollar of Oracle will be speaking now. In last 25 yrs HFM is the industry leader. It has 1500 customers worldwide. EPMA is used to manage dimesionality over multiple applications. Calculation manager is coming out for it in CY09. On the roadmap for CY10 is better hardware utilization.

HFN-GRC provides fully integrated GRC reporting. GRC has application access controls governor to enforce the proper segregation of the duties in applications. The OBIEE and HFM integration will allow HFM data participates in Common Enterprise Information Model. There is plan for BI app for HFM. It will be to see if new content for Informatica will be generated or only ODI connectors will be provided. With this HFM BI apps, dashboards will be able to BI and EPM data in same dashboard out of box.
SEC is adopting XBRL for reporting 10K, Quarterly reports in a fashion such that companies can be compared easily.

There are new products that are under NDA... so can't be detailed here.

ERP and EPM Integration (ODTUG 2009)

2009-06-21T14:11:00.001-07:00

Mike Cassey is now speaking on ERP and EPM integration.FDM source adapters for eBS R12.06 and 12.1. Target adapters for HFM etc...the goal is to integrate metadata and prevent re-development for the users.

FDM ERPI ERP integrator is a new product.

Also see this

Peoplesoft V9 is also supported. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is used behind the scenes. More support such as public sector planning, SAP and Oracle Fusion GL will be coming in future. Look for some of these in the Talleyrand release. Two important features are Drill Through and Budget write-back. Public sector Planning needs budget data being written for GL encumberances. eBS hierarchies can be pulled by the EPMI, with no need to re-define them. The EPM System workspace has a data load with places for creating the data rules. Likewise, the calendar mapping can be set. Incremental data loading is also possible.

FDM allows flat file load, but there is no Universal adapter in the plan right now.

Robert Gersten at Kaleidoscope 2009

2009-06-21T13:10:00.001-07:00

The first key note of today, from Robert Gersten, Snr VP (EPM and BI Development), starting now. Tim did a nice intro of the speaker but there audio problems to begin with... Robert, thanked the Hyperion customers for their loyalty to the product. The 5 core processes of EPM are metrics, planning, management reporting, specialized analytics and financial reporting.

Specialized analytics includes what-if, predictive analytics etc. EPM is part of Oracle Fusion Middleware group under Thomas Kurien...The current largest install base of EPM is on 9.x Fusion EPM System 11 will work with OBIEE 11g. This version of OBIEE will support HFM etc. out of box. Oracle EPMS ERP Integration expected in Aug 2009. 11.1.1.x (also called) Kennedy) was a very feature rich release - HFM 64-bit), Essbase (ASO/BSO enhancements) etc.

11.1.2 (Talleyrand) will include features for Public sector, full-featured experience in Excel etc...expected in 4th Quarter. The OBIEE 11g is code named Negril (vacation spots!!!) will have OBI Server + essbase, HFM Planning and other integrations. Robert said that BI apps is the fastest growing segment of the Oracle BI/EPM market segment. The PL/SQL API for MDX sounds cool, you can expose data from cube via PL/SQL calls.

do you have an interesting EPM implementation, check out:
http://www.oracle.com/goto/2009biepmaward/index.html
This is the first time any company has made concerted efforts to bridge the gap between BI and EPM. Though, there are some areas yet that need work such as high availability, failover, cluster etc....

Question about Essbase applicance or EPM appliance like Exadata? Is that in near future?

Sunday at Kaleidoscope (ODTUG) 2009

2009-06-21T10:53:00.000-07:00

The sessions started today, got registered at 7:30AM, a see a lot of people, met MArk Rittman picking up his registration. The location is quite a contrast from last year..in the heart of New Orleans with all the traffic, here a very quite resort location, just off the Pacific, and the Hyperion session is in room called Pacific.

Got a nice ODTUG jacket at registration, will be good for the chilly weather here (50's). Ed Roske opened the HYP session and talked about the Hyperion Board ballots in the registration bag for the ODTUG attendees. Ed mentioned that there will be a lot of Twitter use this year. And there is mid-night session with chocolates...

Al Marciante, mentioned we do not have to see for 8 hrs today and he is going to delegate the tasks much more to the others today (unlike last year). First session on Essbase roadmap started around 8:30AM - speaker is Aneel Shenker. This was followed by the OBIEE 11g roadmap... a number of cool features were talked about - Mike Donohue and Kris. After a little break, Toufic Wakim is now entertaining the crowd and in the background telling us about Smart View for Office. Next would be session on HPCM...

Journey from Kaleidoscope to Oracle Openworld 2009

2009-06-18T18:14:00.001-07:00

This is the week prior to Kaleidoscope and also the week when Oracle had started inviting the speakers based on the call for presentations. So let's look at what is hot this year, more from the Information Management perspective - i.e. Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Data Warehousing (DW), Enterprise Data Management or the Master Data Management (EDM/MDM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM). In other words, IM is the catch all phrase today for BI/EPM/DW, EDM/MDM and ECM.

The Sunday Symposium in Kaleidoscope has Hyperion/ EPM as one of the tracks. BI will be in the back drop. However, there are about 13 talks in the BIDW track, about half are by Oracle speakers.

There are about 26 talks in Hyperion related topics, and a number of hands-on sessions. Equal number of Essbase talks.

Thus EPM outnumbers BIDW, a few times at Kaleidoscope and that has been the historical trend.

What is interesting though that this is a Development Tools User Group and the only 10 sessions are categorized as Oracle Tools related.

Overall, these is a lot of content and as usual there are many sessions at same time that one would like to attend...

This week also marked the selection of the Oracle Presentations for Openworld 2009. So far I will be in two sessions at Oracle Openworld (OOW). Starting from 2003, this year would be my 5th appearance as speaker (past ones being 2003, 06, 07, 08).

There will be at least 25 sessions on MDM alone at OOW, compare that two in Kaleidoscope (one being mine). At least 48 that have Hyperion in the title or abstract and 18 related to Essbase. OLAP in 13, 5 for data mining. About 125 that are related to Business Intelligence!!! Only 5 talks will mention about Discoverer, really the product is phasing out...

Exadata is hot, we did a webcast today on it, see http://tinyurl.com/EXADATASIG
OOW 09 will feature as many as 19 Exadata related talks and Panels...
At least 50 talks will touch on RAC....

So does Larry have any more big announcements to make this year, no clue...Exadata was a real big announcement last year. May be Oracle 11gR2 will be released in the OOW timeframe. Also user community is awaiting the OBIEE 11g version...

Enough for now... keep any eye here for more hot of the press from Monterey!!!

Kaleidoscope (ODTUG) 2009 is a week away!

2009-06-13T10:51:00.001-07:00

It was not too long ago that I blogged about Collaborate '09 and now it's about time for Kaleidoscope. It will be my second time at this event. Last year, it was at New Orleans where I volunteered on Saturday to paint a school along with several other volunteers such as Mary Lou Dopart from Oracle.

This year the scene shifts to Pacific, Monterey Beach, CA is a very beautiful location. So all those who do not often go to CA or more so to this part of coastal California, about 100 miles south of San Francisco, should definitely try to set aside some time to visit the surrounding places. About 30 miles south is Big Sur...the picture below is a nice view but any picture or video cannot do real justice to the natural beauty of the Monterey and its surrounds.

Well enough about the surroundings, let's now get to what we are "really" to the conference for. So even though the conference starts on Saturday with the voluntary event, the main attraction for me is the full day Sunday event. I am looking forward to the Hyperion Symposium, details in this post below. I sat through a similar session last year, and plan to assimilate more this year. Hope to meet Ed Roske, Tracy, Tim etc...even though it is an all day event where you practically sit in the same room, time flies...as I recall from last year.

Monday, I have a few sessions in my personal schedule builder, but my speaker session #91 is towards the end of the day : 3:45–5:15 PM Session 4 (90 minutes). The 90 minute format reminds me of the large slots on the SIG day (Sunday before Openworld). At Collaborate, I think there are either 60 min slots or 120 min expert sessions only... I will be talking about Master Data Management and its usefulness in context of Business Intelligence Applications.

I will be blogging and Tweeting on #ODTUG... with tips on logistics, what else to see in the area and so on...

-------------------
Hyperion Symposium
Moderated by Al Marciante, Oracle Corporation

Oracle’s Sunday Symposium at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 will give attendees a unique preview to upcoming development work in Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management applications and Business Intelligence Platform. The symposium includes demos, prototypes, and slide content, as well as interactive Q&A for attendees to provide feedback to help validate and shape the features under development. The all-day symposium is planned to include previews in the following areas:

EPM Foundation and common services
Oracle Hyperion Planning
Oracle Hyperion Financial Management
Oracle Essbase
Oracle Business Intelligence
Other projects in development
This symposium is offered for in-person attendees, and will not be recorded or available for download

Proposal for Oracle Openworld 2009 via Oracle Mix

2009-06-13T10:33:00.001-07:00

Check out my proposal for Oracle Openworld 2009, via the Oracle Mix:
http://ow.ly/dVg1

Any comments are welcome. It is about implementing Oracle BI Applications - 7.9.6
Thanks

Collaborate 2009 is over!

2009-05-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

Returned home from a hectic week at Collaborate, was mainly focusing on the BIDW content and was nice to read this article of how BIDW is doing in the current market.

Also read Larry's Q&A about his plans for Sun.. one of the obvious questions in people's mind is will Exadata support extend to SPARC processors, seems like that is not on his mind right now...

Thanks
Shyam

Keynote by Al Smith of IBM

2009-05-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the keynote by Al Smith of IBM... towards the starts he talks about the importance of BI....liked the analogy of cost the of "dirt" in a landscaping project to the cost of managing the "data" as an infrastructure element in the enterprise.

Interestingly, IBM handed DB2 flyers on the way in to the keynote....some of you might have seen the recent a announcement about emulating Oracle DB in DB2.

This year IBM and Cognos booth are the same unlike the last year, however, noticed Piocon and TUSC have 2 different booth though both are under Rolta umbrella now. A good example of business case for Master Data Management (MDM. Stat from IBM keynote that managers spend more time looking for data than actually using it.

Al gave a good example of series of hardware upgrades with small performance boost, but with dimishing returns as data / database keeps grows. Tomorrow, I am speaking on Oracle Exadata and this a great example of why large DW shops need to include Exadata on theor road rather than plan incremental H/W upgrades...

Al built the case for data archiving, t support the IBM Optim family. Reminds me of the ILM (Information Lifecycle Management)...mainly how do you keep in compliance and keep huge amounts of data but not necessarily within the OLTP or DW rather in the data archives.

BIWA Sessions for Tuesday

2009-05-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

Here are the sessions for Tuesday...

BIWA Centric Sessions at Collaborate 2009! (Monday)

2009-05-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

Attend the IOUG SIG Orientation on Sunday at 6PM in Peabody Hotel, opposite the convention center.

Things about Orlando and FL they would not tell you at Collaborate 2009!

2009-05-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

It's only a day at Collaborate and I heard some folks asking where are the bars! Well close to Convention center are the highways and it is not right in any Downtown... but there is plenty to do in Orlando, it is the Entertainment Capital of the World with about 52 million tourists every year! That is little more than Las Vegas (~48 million) or London (~27 million).

Orlando has second largest hotels room, next only to Vegas... The top destination is Magic Kingdom, Disney. Universal Studios and Island of Adventure are close to City Walk, i.e. you get to same parking lot and then walk to City walk (11AM onwards till 2AM!) or go to the Parks Universal Studios (movie based rides) or Island of Adventure (roller coaster like rides)- the two theme parks. City Walk is couple of miles from Convention Center, but I best bet is to drive or take the shuttle from the hotel. Parking is $12 for cars or $3 after 6 PM (used to be free after 6 but 2009 it changed)

These Universal Theme Parks rival the 4 Disney Theme Parks - Magic Kingdom (great for kids, gentle rides mainly), MGM Hollywood Studios (movie based rides), Epcot (science based rides, good for us Geeks! and world showcase) and Animal Kingdom (more like an upscale zoo!). Then Disney has Downtown Disney, free to visit and Park there... but its not close to the theme parks.

I will keep posting... for tips to Navigate Orlando... been in FL for 14 yrs and been 50+ times to Orlando... well have lost count frankly.

Collaborate 2009 is here!

2009-05-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

Arrived at Orlando today... to get situated before the event starts... The attendees can expect a "warm welcome" as it will be 68-90F for the next few days...

However, almost all hotels have pools and the shuttle from the conference hotel starts early, so one can easily avoid the hot day outside...unless you are from the Sunshine state like myself where 90F is the norm...

Main activites start tomorrow for BIWA SIG...

BI Panel will have a few BI experts such as Mark Rittman, Martin Carangelo,Dan Vlamis, Charlie Berger and Michael Schrader and the mightly Ian Abramson moderating it... so do not miss it

Sunday, May 3
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm: SIG Reception - come by the BIWA SIG table and chat with your Colleagues and Oracle PM's

Monday, May 4
8:00 am - 9:00 am:   rm W230A  - IOUG BIWA SIG Orientation
1:15 pm - 2:15 pm:   rm   W230A - BI Panel - Critical Success Factor for BI Projects
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm:   rm  330A - BIWA SIG - Meeting

Tuesday, May 5
7:15 am - 8:15 am: rm 330A - BIWA SIG - Networking Breakfast

I will be posting the BIDW sessions for the day so keep any eye....

SUNsational Collaborate 2009!

2009-04-20T16:20:00.001-07:00

Just about when we though we were all set for Collaborate 2009, Larry throws a curve ball! Yes it is the SUNsational news that Sun will be soon under the Oracle umbrella. What does it means for the user community? Well if you check the picture below, newly posted on the Oracle's website, now the Linux layer has become Solaris/Linux:
I really wonder how the marketing slogan of Oracle + Linux is unbreakable combination will change now? Well, when I was sitting in Moscone Center in 2003, listening to one of the keynotes, I remember Scott McNeally joking telling Larry "Are you gonna buy us next?" It's only six years later and several billion dollars lower, Sun is going to be part of Oracle family.

While we rarely look at Sun as one of the database players, really Sun does own MySQL, that Oracle once tried to acquire for a billion dollars. On the hardware front, it's not long ago that Oracle announced the HP Oracle Database platform. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how Sun plays a part in the Exadata front. I do not even want to mention the impact of owning J2EE can be, I am sure others are writing pages sceculating the impact of this to SAP and IBM...

Anyways, I will in the center of action at Orlando, during Collaborate to see how is all works out as Sun admins and MySQL developers make a last minute march towards the Disney city!

It's Time to Collaborate!

2009-04-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

We are just about two weeks from Collaborate 2009, the user group event for Oracle Technology and Applications.

My first event on this lines was IOUG Live in 2003 at Orlando. Year 2005 it was back to Orlando, while 2004 was in Toronto. The major change took place in 2006 where Collborate was born when IOUG, OAUG and Quest shook hands together, the event grew many fold in size. Now I am told its over 5000 attendees. 2007 the Collaborate went to the Sin City and from there to the Mile High City in 2008. 2008 was my first time being in the IOUG Conference committee and get a behind the scenes feel.

Being a Floridian for a long time, I am happy to see Collaborate being held 2 1/2 hrs of drive away! And I am a big fan of Universal Studios and Disney. The Wed night event will be at City Walk.

So what I am looking forward to this time... Apart from the 50+ sessions related to BIWA Track, I am also looking forward to the launch of the Exadata SIG. I thing the release of 1/2 the Exadata rack this Spring was quite timely...and as Kevin explained it today in his webcast that the Optimised Warehouse Initiative can only at best provide 2GB/sec bandwidth for "Extreme Data Warehousing." So while the full Exadata rack can provide 14GB/sec bandwith which may be an overkill both in price and performance, the half X Database Machine is a good compromise... to fill the void in the times of economic downturn.

I wll post most on the sessions and events that I look forward to Collaborate '09

2009-01-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

Competing on Analytics - Jeanne Harris at BIWA Summit 2008
Listen to Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics and keynote speaker at BIWA Summit 2008 speak about her key ideas in this brief (1 minute) audio clip. Thanks to Jeff Erickson of Oracle for sharing this!

2009-01-13T17:23:00.000-08:00

Oracle Exadata Storage Technology
See Oracle Vice President of Data Warehousing Development, Ray Roccaforte, discuss the value of Oracle's new Exadata Storage Technology in this brief (under 2 minutes) video clip taken at BIWA Summit 2008.

The Critical Success Factors of BIWA Summit 2008

2008-12-06T09:43:00.001-08:00

While we had a Panel focusing on the Critical Success Factors of BI Implementations, I though I would list the CSF's of the BIWA conference here. Since, this was the second BIWA Summit, we had some history behind us. However, just like Jeanne Harris said the biggest fallacy "if you will build a DW, they will come" - the conferences have to deal with the same issues. With a fairly successful inagural BIWA Summit in 2007, we kind of assumed the same attitude, you organize a BIWA Summit and the attendees will come. As we got closer to the event, we had to re-look the strategy and go out and "Push" the information to attract more attendees. Finally, we managed to attract attendees from all over as shown in the visual that Dan Vlamis created for the opening ceremony.

We realised there is no substitute for experience in hosting a conference. To list a few we had Dan Vlamis the conferece chair with 26 years of experience in the field related to Oracle technologies. Dan has been a member of user groups for a while. Among the Oracle Advisors, Charlie Berger, has organized several events for Life Sciences User group and has been involved with BIWA from very early stages. Karl Rexer, has been on the organization of KDD and related conferences. We were also very lucky to have the presence of Ian Abramson (President of IOUG) and Tony Jedlinski (IOUG Board member) to share their experiences, each having 10+ years of involvement with IOUG/Collaborate.

Our CFO, Matt Vranicar, who is President of Piocon, managed the finances of the event, to make sure we can support the event without a "stimulus package" from Larry! Rich Solari, who is now part of Deloitte, has a 10 yr history with Oracle, helped to us find the first ever Platinum Sponsor IBM. I was quite surprised with the existing relationship that IBM has with Oracle, as outlined by Marty in the Welcome to the Platinum Reception talk. Unlike last year, we were able to throw the reception at the end of Day with the help of the contributions from the Platinum sponsorship.

BIWA Board has been weaker in the involvement from the West Coast. This was all the more important for Summit 2009 due to the Oracle HQ based event. However, presence of John Haydu in the Oracle HQ and the 20 years of experience of Lynda Yana of Oracle Marketing, was quite useful to us.

Alissa Kang, has been the link of the BIWA Board to the Education industry and has been able to send the message out to the Higher Education folks. As for myself, my involement with IOUG pre-dates BIWA or my direct involement with Oracle. My first IOUG conference was in summer of 2003 at Orlando that got me interested enough to speak at Oracle Openworld in Sep 2003. The RAC SIG was launched in the same event. When I was invited to launch the BIWA SIG in Summer of 2006 at Collaborate (Nashville, TN), I knew I could use some of the "best practices" from the RAC SIG, such as the periodic webcast. However, BIWA SIG has been a pioneer in its own annual event. However, for the regional Oracle user groups, a periodical in-person meeting is not a complex event.

Apart from help from within the BIWA and IOUG community, we received help from the ODTUG, NCOUG and BI SIG of OAUG, to get their advice and help in spreading the word out. I think all these were our Critical Success Factors for the BIWA Summit 2008.

BIWA Summit 2008 - Bloggers Coverage

2008-12-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

Last Year Mark Rittman was a keynoe speaker and he blogged the event, this time Peter Scott created some blog entries .

However, unlike blogging by the speakers themselves, we encouraged media to blog about the event. Here are a few of these blog entries:

The blog by James Taylor
Links:
Live from BIWA Summit - Competing on Analytics
Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM)
Critical Success Factors for successful BI and analytic implementations
From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets
Getting to the Right Price with Oracle Data Mining
Oracle's BI Strategy
Intelligent OLAP: Data Mining and OLAP
Fraud Detection with Oracle Data Mining

BIWA Summit 2008 a recap

2008-12-06T08:47:00.000-08:00

First of all Thanks to all the attendees, speakers and Sponsors/Partners for making this event a success!

The BIWA Board deserves an applause for working for close to an year to organize this event. While it is hard to single out any particular Board member, we decided to award Mark Hornick and Tony Jedlinski - the BIWA 'Haydu' Contribution Award for 2008.

BIWA SIG as a user driven group, tries to balance the voice of the actual users, vendors and the Oracle Product managers, VP's etc. Being not too long after the announcement of Oracle HP Machine with Exadata storage, it was inevitable to avoid the presence of Exadata in a far too obvious way. It is indeed a "BIG" invention, just to highlight how big is the 'X' box, I took the picture with me in the frame!

However, is the real word ready for Exadata, or there are other choices for the companies in 1-25 TB range? Our Platinum Sponsor IBM, helped ot fill that space. They showcased their tight relationship with Oracle as hardware vendors. The Optimised Warehouse Intiative (OWI) serves the customers in that space. IBM can ship the H/W compoments for the refernce configurations or the fully functional optimised stack for Oracle Data warehouses. Others in this space are HP, SGI, Sun, Dell/EMC etc. While none of the other H/W vendors were present as sponsors, Pillar Data was a new discovery for us at BIWA. They claim their niche as "application-aware" storage company and they ship a box that is optimised for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) or commonly known as BI Apps. This box runs the Oracle DW as well as the BI server.

BIWA Summit 08 Day 1

2008-12-03T04:18:00.001-08:00

Dec 2, day 1 of the Summit is over. Three keynotes, BI Panel, Lightening round by the Exhibiting sponsors and the IBM Platinum reception, along with the countless Sessions and the hands-on labs!

As BIWA SIG is totally run by volunteers, it is important to take time to thank them for their efforts. Last year at Reston, BIWA awarded John Haydu, the BIWA Contribution Award 2007. This year, John would be again a worthy recipient so instead of giving him the award, we decided to name the award as BIWA 'Haydu' Contribution Award. The recipients for this year are:
Mark Hornick and
Tony Jedlinksi

Both, were instrumental in implementing the BI to run the BI conference. They together devised the system that managed the abstract submission and selection progress. Then as we got closer to the event, we used the Admin's dashboard with critical reports to monitor the registration sources and numbers to keep a strict eye on the conference and take remediation steps to steer it towards a registration level of 300.

I would personally like to Thank Karl Rexer, Matt Vranicar, Alissa Kang, Rich Solari and Ian Abramson for all their help to Dan, Charlie and John in running the show.

Day two will have more sessions, as there is only one key note.

More later...

Three more days to BIWA Summit 2008

2008-11-29T21:27:00.001-08:00

As we get close to the event, the weather is likely to stay mostly dry, at least compared to the heavy rains from the prior week. The low will be 45F, so if you are from a warmer place, please be prepared with some jacket.

We are requesting help from all speakers and attendees of the BIWA Summit, to compete the speaker survey forms, this will help us bring you the speakers that you liked the most in the future years as well. The speakers will receive an envelop with the speaker evaluation forms, all attendees are requested to fill these out and hand over before they leave the room. Please bring along your pens, hopefully the exhibiting sponsors will have pens as giveaways if you did not bring your own...

We have posted the public transit information to the Oracle campus to help keep the event green. However, if you prefer to rent a car, the goos news is there are places selling gas for below $2 in this area. If you still are looking for hotels, Sofitel is very close with a shuttle to conference center. If you are looking for really low cost deal, them Motel 6, is 6/10 th of mile away and rates for Dec1-4 are $54+tax...
#1251, US 101 at Ralston Avenue/Marine World Parkway
1101 Shoreway Road, Belmont, CA 94002, (650) 591-1471
Motel 6

If you will stay here, for an extra day after the event or are getting here on Monday early, check out some of the places worth seeing, specially if you are not from Bay area and donot come here frequently. Some of my favorites are:
1) Golden Gate Bridge, Marina and Fisherman's Wharf (in San Francisco downtown area or close by)
2) Half Moon Bay (Take 92 W - N 101 from Oracle, to the beach... and drive up to San Francisco through the Pacifica!) or if you love the mountains, take 101 S to 84 W, 25 miles of drive up and down the mountains to reach the coast...South of half moon bay
3) Drive north to Napa Valley or Sonoma valley and take wine train ride... (will need almost a full day)
4) Drive along the coast, on 1, thru Santa Cruz, Monterey to big Sur! This will take you at least 3-4 hrs each way... you better not be afraid of heights and cliffs!!! I will post some of the pictures of these areas...

Oracle BIWA Summit - Dec 2-3, 2008

2008-11-25T18:29:00.000-08:00

It's now only a week!

All the session abstracts and details at posted at this site:
http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/f?p=219:77:139866668583012::NO

So if you are heading there, please make your personal schedule as the event will be packed with 4 keynotes and sessions in 6 || tracks along with the hands-on-lab.

This year IBM is the Platinum vendor who will showcase their Optimised Warehouse Initiative i.e. how to run Oracle DW's very fast on the IBM hardware. While there will be a fair amount of focus on the Oracle HP Database Platform, each one has its own niche. If you are a 1 TB to say 25 TB customer and have standardised on a non-HP hardware platform, then you will look at the Optimised Warehouse Initiative (OWI) space. You will find all major H/W vendors such as Sun, IBM, HP etc shipping you a reference or tested configuration with Oracle instance ready for use in DW. Typically, if you have standardised on HP hardware or are pushing over 25 TB, then Oracle HP Database Platform is something you need to look at...

Well at the BIWA Summit, you will find all the experts, Product Managers etc who can give you the first hand information and share the success stories of the pilots and early adopters. This is just one piece of the full pie that the BIWA Summit represents. The full spectrum will have talks on Analytics, other DB featueres that make Oracle a compelling platform for DW, OLAP, OBIEE and much more...

As we get to this event, we are also plannin for the next event and we would like your ideas, the time of year, the place and any changes you would like to see.

Oracle BIWA Summit 2008 (Dec 2-3)

2008-11-04T23:07:00.000-08:00

Now we stand 4 weeks from the Summit, 4 keynotes, 50+ sessions, ~ 10 hands on Labs.
Attend a Webcast on Wed Nov 5, 2008 to learn why you should attend the BIWA Summit.
See details at http://OracleBIWA.org

Learn about Oracle BI, Data Warehousing. Learn about Optimized Data Warehouse,
Learn about Exadata (Oracle HP Database Platform)

Still time to grap good flight deals, or the hotel near the Oracle Head Quarters.
Spend 2 days at the conference, speand some time visiting San Francisco Downtown or the nearby beaches.

The 'X' Box

2008-10-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

So did Larry miss the boat again? Gates introduced the X-box years ago and its a house hold name. So what's fascinating with this new 'X' box? Joking aside, let's look deep into the Oracle/HP Database Platform based on the Exadata. Larry compared it to Teradata and Netezza in his keynote. No doubt DW appliances have been out for a while and were giving Oracle run for money in the very large DW environments. Oracle's history has been as a key database player for transactional/OLTP systems. While the database features like partitioning, bit-mapped indexes, support for upto 32K block size etc have slowly tried to transform the DB for DW market, till now Oracle was never really looked upon as a DW player in the same league as Teradata or Netezza... and the key note is a proof of that.

Interestingly, what about HP. "Operational business intelligence drives business outcomes HP Neoview has industry unique, patented capabilities to make it the premier enterprise data warehouse for operational business intelligence." In the yesterday years Scott McNealy of Sun was a regular keynote speaker in OOW. So it's interesting to note that Oracle shook hands with HP, on this DW appliance. It is sold by Oracle, serviced by HP. So what is the future of Neoview? HP lists its Neoview BI partners here but Oracle is not part of that list. Neoview is also supposed to be on Open platform using industry-standard components, which is something Larry used for Oracle Platform as different from Teradata and Netezza.

On the positive side, for the Oracle shops, now its a one stop shop. "BI in a Box" seems reality now. I remeber in my DBA days, I spend hours with our performance and benchmark expert, tunning the SAN, moving the data files around to squeeze the performance out of the EMC Clarion SAN. As human time get's more important (yes 80% of BI/DW project costs is human time), paying for a DW appliance as an insurance policy to higher speeds is a better option. The DW community around Oracle is very happy that first time Oracle has truly "created" something for the DW data bottlenecks. Yet, the box is a good fit for the OLTP databases as well.

Where does all these leave SAP, IBM and Microsoft? SAP has been selling a BI accelerator card for a while along with its SAP Business Warehouse (BW) solution to speed up the performance. IBM is a key player in the Optimised Datawarehouse initiative for Oracle where it wil ship a machine pre-loaded with Oracle Database for a any range between 1-100 TB, for use as a data warehouse box. Other players in that Oracle's initiative are Dell/EMC, Sun, HP, SGI etc. Well it was July '08, that Gates acquired the company called DataAllegro, whose tag line was data at the speed of business. However, we are yet to see SQl Server as the platform of choice for very large DW's.

Now that we have looked at all the major players, it seems everyone has there hand in the game. Let's wait and see how the other large players plan their market strategy against Larry in the weeks and months to come.

Smart Scan is the key to Oracle Exadata and 'X'

2008-09-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

I googled Exadata last night after Larry's keynote and it returned 934 hits, this morning it was in 3000's, right now its 3440 and sure anything that Larry Ellison has said or done in past, becomes an instant hype...

So what is that makes Oracle Exadata storage or the Oracle HP Database Platform unique? It is the Smart Scan technology that reduces the amount of data to be sent from the storage system to the database server. For general description of the new technology, I suggest reading the White Paper:
Oracle Database 11g for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

The new Storage Server returns a query result set of the SQL, rather than entire tables. This reduces the network bottlenecks and frees up database server resources. When analyzing data stored in their data warehouses, Oracle claims, that the performance improvement can be 10X or more. Whaty if you are still not satisfied? Well Oracle's advanced compression, can typically reduce the data volumnes on the storage servers by 2-3 times easily. This will further improve the performance in Exadata or the 'X' machine.

It requires Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition 11.1.0.7 or later for the database accessing Exadata storage. Let us look at the visual on top of this post, to see how the Smart Scan reduces the data blocks send to the Database server. As Larry explained, a SQL query in Data Warehosue report, specially on an unindexed column, will do a FULL SCAN and return all blocks to the Database server, unlike the SMART SCAN will only retuern the result set, reducing the number of blocks to be tranasmitted to the database. This will reduce the I/O load substantially. So the key to Smart Scan are:
>Offload predicate evaluation
>Only return relevant rows and columns to host
>Join filtering

SMART SCAN is totally transparent to the SQL writers, so all current applications will work as it is, what a relief! Let's take an example of a Telecom provider. They want to know which customers are spending over $200 in a single call. If the huge customer table is 1TB, these small set of customers are actually in say 2MB of space. Traditionally, the 1 TB space will have to be searched for these customers even though it may be by partition pruning etc and a lot of blocks have to be send to the DB. Using SMART SCAN, the data reduction takes place in the storage sub-system itself.

Som of the other uses of SMART SCAN are:
>Join filtering where Star join filtering is performed within Exadata storage cells
or Dimension table predicates are transformed into filters that are applied to scan of fact table

With SMART SCAN - Exadata Way!

Without SMART SCAN (traditional storage)
>Backups I/O for incremental backups is much more efficient since only changed blocks are returned

>Create Tablespace (file creation)Formatting of tablespace extents eliminates the I/O associated with the creation and writing of tablespace blocks

Smart Scans correctly handle complex cases including
Uncommitted data and locked rows
Chained rows
Compressed tables
Date arithmetic
Regular expression searches AND
Partitioned tables

Oracle Exadata 'X' is out

2008-09-24T15:39:00.001-07:00

Convergence of hardware and datab ase soft

Larry Ellison announed the database machine today in his keynote, a machine build on radicle new ideas. He used the sail boat analogy on the out of box thinking needed to overcome the bandwidth limitation between the storage system and the database. The large DW's are tripling in size every two years and are plagued with the data bandwidth problem. There is a disk to Database choking. Storage disks can easily store 100TB but movement of data is the biggest.

Most hard configurations slow down at even lesser values 1-10 TB range. The largest storage systems show the exponential increase in scan time at 10TB. This problem can be solved in two way, as a data problem, reduce the data - compression or indexing the data or partition pruning etc. The other way it to enhance the amount of data travelling over the data pipes. Make the pipes faster and increase their number.

This lead to the announcement of Oracle's first hardware product called Exadata programmable storage server in partnership with HP. This is a combination of hardware and software. The idea is to locate the intelligence next to the storage server, to process the query in the h/w side and ship only the results. Typically a query on a large table that is not indexed, results in full table scan, i.e. shipping of all the blocks to the database, this is the point of choking. To reduce that, now the intelligence in in the storage system that limits the results and only ships the result blocks to the database. This will help to improve the parallel query. Now the idea is resturn results not disk blocks. Query is now moved to a lower layer. There will be three grids now, grid of database, grid of fusion middleware and grid of storage servers. The connection between the storage server and DB is the Infiniband pipe at that can practically transfer data at 1 GB / sec.

The exadata is available for immediate shipping for Linux and will be extended for all OS. The Oracle database machine or 'X' was announced as the competitor for Teradata and Netezza platforms or the hardware database appliances. The results of three years of R&D leads to X as the fastest database machine on earth. It has 8, total of 64 Intel cores and 112 cores of Intel CPU just for storage. It can hold 168 TB of data and is 1000 X larger than largest Ipod.

The pilot customers were Yahoo, NPD (the company I cosulted at last summer when I was in Oracle's BI practice), Country wide, Retailer Giant eagle, Amazon etc.
The European Telecom provider, saw 10X to 72 x query performance 4.5TB of CDR's, average 28 X perf (on half the config of X). This is compared to 2 IBM p series and EMC disk array. The largest imporovement was in CRM report - customer discount report
LGR telecom DW for phone companies saw 30X performance improvement, compared to HP superdome + based config with Hitachi array.

Other Examples of Performance Improvement
Chicago Board of Trade 10-15 X perf
Giant Eagle Retail sales 16 X performance
Oracle's Internal financial data warehouse netapps 30X speedup

In a nutshell, X has intelligent storage and more bandwidth. Rather than conventional movement of disk blocks, X shows almost same access time as the DB's in size making is very scalable as DB and DW's grow into petabyte ranges.

Market comparision: X is faster than 5 rack Terdata 5550
Larry said that there is no query intelligence in Teradata, very sophisticated DB though, proven over many years. Teradata moves disk blocks.

Unlike Teradata, Netezza, is a storage server, however, in the comparision shows, it was about 2:1 improvement in data bandwidth (14 GB/sec compared to 7.5 GB/sec)
Besides, the Netezza h/w does not run Oracle database.
One one had the Teradata is a very good DB, netezza is not. X provides the balance between both the current market leaders for DW appliances.

Now let's look at the pricing model, $1,680,000 for the license for X, about 650 for the H/W, cost of about 4K/TB of data at undiscounted level. Its open technology, Intel CPU's with 6 cores can be used in future, will take advantage of
cpu and ram speed etc. reducing the cost to the end user.

Currently, 90 of the load in OLTP systems is queries and reports. Therefore, it is imporant to make sure that both databases for OLTP and data warehouses can be run on this platform.

HP and Oracle will together take orders for X, Mike Hurd of HP came "online"

Let's keep an eye how the rest of the world will respond to this news..

BIWA Sessions at OOW 2008

2008-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

Dan Vlamis started the day...about 100 attendees, well received talk, was in parallel with Mark Rittman's talk. Mark had arrived at 4 AM and said he was jet lagged...

Next session was Ian (his story is he lost his wallet on the way to San Francisco), he spoke on Master Data Management. This was in parallel Matt Vranikar's talk.

After lunch, was my talk on Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator, Carl Daniels from the Oracle Development, ran the demo during my talk. They will also be on the demopod L23 in Moscone west.

Richard Solari and Teresa Wong's tag team talk was very powerful and very well received. It ran amost full 90 mins. The final event of the day was the BI Panel, moderated by Joe Thomas, participants, Charlie Berger, Dan Vlamis, Jon Mead, Matt Vranikar, myseld and Rich Solari. The Q&A was quite interactive at the end, followed by some post Q&A discussions, one on one...

Sunday Openworld

2008-09-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in the keynote session, Sunday evening, the first big event. Today BIWA had 7 sessions, ending the in the BI panel. Bareley made it in time this keynote. This time a see reserved tables for bloggers, and I am in one of those.

Safra started the evening, announced >43K attendees, over 450 exhibitores, 300 oracle demos. Safra joked that no way Oracle say show all its 9000 applications!

She told that Michael Phelps will be in tomorrow. Although the green theme is being emphasised this year, the confernece book is only offered in print and not on the USB stick like last year!

Safra introduced the San Francisco mayor, the youngest mayor ever...Gavin Newsom.
Gavin said that SF's bond rating was increased recently, highest ever.

The next speaker was Ed Begley and actor and activist. He talked about the "sustainable conference"

Last Working day before Oracle Openworld

2008-09-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

TOday was the last working day before the Openworld kicks off. The stock market had a good 2 day run, and Oracle stock ORCL came postive from the 52 week lows, so the stage is all set for a bigger, better OOW. BEA will be there on the red side of the fence for the first time. Last two years, the BI folks (Siebel and Hyperion) got the spot light, this time its middleware, let's see what is new in Fusion this time. An interesting trend though is "fusion" of BI and SOA. Oracle is well placed in both the segments. The new paradigm is to think of BI components as "services" in the enterprise SOA architecture. This has a lot of potential as SOA so far has lacked "content" and growing popularity of BI can provide that missing "content" to the service oriented architecture.

So I would be airborne in 12 hrs, getting there middle of day on Sat to Bay area, so that I am all set of the marathon 7 seven session for BIWA SIG on Sunday. Actually two of the BIWA sessions will current concurrently as one room can have only 5 sessions in a day...

BIWA SIG does not formally have any business meeting, but please feel free to stop by at my session as I will spend a few minutes on what is BIWA upto lately. IT will be at 1 PST at Room 2001 in Moscone West on Sunday Sep 21. There is also a BI panel at 4 PM in the same room on "Why do BI projects Fail?" Joe Thomas, the Oracle veteran will drive that session.

Oracle Openworld 2008 - Countdown begins

2008-09-17T13:26:00.000-07:00

This is the last week before the Openworld starts on Sep 21, 2008. The Wall Street has really pushed the panic button, 500 and 400 points in the red, in last two days! Will the state of the economic union have any impact at an event like OOW?

Well the Oracle stock ORCL was at its 52 week low today at $18.07, the earnings call is tomorrow and the guidance had been less than optimistic. However, Larry is known to announce new products, offerings every time at Openworld. So what is the speculation this time? Oracle database guru Mark Townsend says it's going to be the biggest one ever! Over 50,000 are expected to participate online apart from 43,000 attending in person. The Extreme Weekhand starts on the weekend and will feature how to setup RAC cluster, Data warehousing, JD Edwards hands-on and other stuff with pizza and beer in the room. The Oracle Develop event runs in the Hilton...with purely development focus. Google and others will talk in this event and his event will cover beginer to advanced level developers who will learn about .Net, Java, PHP etc.

Two large exhibit halls will house about 500 exhibitors. Chuck Roswat will speak on Information Management, Andy Mendelson will talk about the future of databases.
Tom Kyte will talk about the database "worst practices" like he did recently at NY Oracle USers Group. We hope to hear a lot about content management products like the content DB and records DB. Records DB helps with the compliance and security with the help of rules that can be implemented with these product. Database Vault will also be show cased for internal security of data with roles based segregation of data access in the database.

Secure backup and Secure Enterprise Search (SES) have been around for a while but will get some attention this time. IT will be good to compare / contrast SES with Goolge search applicance.

In the data warehousing space, Oracle Warehouse Builder is bundled in database. With OWB base product being a free product, it's likely to get more popular. The data quality and enterprise connectors will stay priced options.

Stop by the demogrounds for demo of all these products in the Exhibition Hall.

Those attending in person, if you will be driving in the San Francisco downtown, be ready to observe altered traffic patterns:

BIWA SIG Sessions at Oracle OpenWorld - Sep 21, 2008

2008-09-15T18:21:00.001-07:00

Oracle BIWA SIG presents to you, 7 sessions at SIG Day - Sunday Sep 21 at Oracle Openworld

Building Cubes and Analyzing Data with Oracle OLAP 11g (IOUG)
S301022 8:30 AM, Dan Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions, Moscone West 2001

Be the Master of Your Domain: MDM Explained (IOUG)
S301156, 10:00 AM, Ian Abranson, IAS Inc. Jeremy Fitzgerald , Dimensional Strategies, Moscone West 2001

A Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator: Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail (IOUG)
S301009, 1:00 PM, Shyam Varan Nath, Deloitte Consulting, BIWA SIG President, Moscone West 2001

Case Studies: Implementing Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition in Three Environments
S301190, 2:30 PM, Richard Solari, Teresa Wong, Deloitte Consulting, Moscone West 2001

The State of Oracle Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing: BI Discussion Panel (IOUG)
S301191, 4:00 PM, Joe Thomas Oracle Corporation, other Panelists, Moscone West 2001

Note Different Room

Extending and Customizing the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Data Warehouse
S301063 8:30 AM, Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting, Moscone West 2008

2009: A BI Odyssey
S301163, 10:00 AM, Matt Vranikar, Piocon Technologies, Moscone West 2008

Oracle BIWA Summit 2008

2008-08-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

Dec 2 is coming up faster than I thought...the Second International BIWA Summit will be held on Dec 2-3 in Oracle HeadQuarters! (Redwood Shores, CA).

If you are inerested submit your abstract at http://BIWASummit08.org

If you are not ready to speak but attend the event, go ahead and register to take advantage of the early bird pricing ($200 for IOUG members). Please also tell us what topics would you like to hear in the summit, your feedback will be vital to the abstract selection committee.

Thanks
Shyam
http://OracleBIWA.org

Kaleidoscope - 2008 (ODTUG)

2008-06-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

Seems like the last 4 days flew away, I reached my first ever Kaleidoscope on Sat June 14, and now its Tuesday on my way back....

Sat ODTUG Brigade - Voluteer work for Reconstruction School District (incidentaly my talk at the event a Case Study of BI for K-12

Sunday - Essbase Developer Symposium... Tom Kyte's keynote, welcome reception

Monday - My talk at the 4:00PM and the speaker reception

Tuesday - attended some of the BI talks and way back...

more to come...

Collaborate Day 2/3

2008-04-16T17:02:00.000-07:00

Day 2 My presentations were related to Total Recall and Database Development Best Practices. The day ended with the invitation only Geek meet that also had the Linux installfest managed by the OTN staff.

Day 3 The Grand BI Debate, Topic was:
Are Pure Play BI Vendors on Road to Extinction?

The pro team was Joe Thomas, Matt Vranikar and Dan Vlamis

The against team was Steve Lemme, Scott Rappoport/Steve Stein and Shyam Varan Nath.

The debate was moderated by none other than Ian Abramson who will be the next IOUG President. Both sides gave good arguments such as pro side stated that Larger companies only can afford to invest in the integration of BI technologies with the Applications and Database. An example is IRI the owner of Oracle Express or the root of modern day OLAP was in heavy debt when Oracle bought it and helped revive the OLAP technology on Oracle platform.

The against side pointed out the cannibalization of products by Oracle such as OLAP/Essbase, Discoverer/OBIEE and pointed examples such as BI apps where link between Oracle Apps (EBiz) and OBIEE is a pureplay vendor - Informatica.

Later today is the Explore Colorado party and since it is snowing today in Denver, its great to "explore" Colorado inside a hall. The Exhibit hall closed today. So now things are coming towards a wrap up....