OLAP 10g R2 web seminar

There is a short internet seminar available on OTN on the new features available in Oracle OLAP 10g Release 2 (10.2) at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/index.html - or click here. It is in the form of a short Q&A session between Nichelle Rhone-Alford from BI product marketing and Bud Endress, Director of OLAP product management.

Some of the highlights are the performance improvements (dramatic improvements actually!) in R2 over R1 and Oracle9i when building and updating cubes, thanks to Oracle's compressed cubes technology. Extensions to this technology include support for partitioned compressed cubes, incremental aggregation, and support for non-additive aggregation methods. Also new are support for MLS, and AW support for transportable tablespaces.

Performance improvements are dramatic in some cases. Some examples (these are taken from the slides):

• A 98% decrease in time taken to build a complete AW. 12 minutes in R2 compared to 660 minutes in 9i (and 18 minutes in R1).
• A 90% decrease in the size of the AW. (1.4GB in R2 compared to 118 GB in 9i and 1.8 GB in R1)
• OLAPI optimizations bring about a 80% reduction in the time taken to run batch queries (1487 minutes in R2 compared to 7171 minutes in R1)

The presentation is available for download from the seminar page, or you can download it here.
Here are a few screenshots of the performance comparison slides from the seminar...