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Monday, November 20, 2006

Analytic Applications - BI Apps - Documentation


It's probably been there a while now, but I just noticed that the doc library for "Oracle's Siebel Business Analytics Applications Version 7.8" (now renamed Oracle BI Applications) is now available on OTN here - http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/bi_apps.html

There are PDF download links for "Analytics Applications Installation and Administration Guide (7.8.4)", Analytics Applications Upgrade Guide (Version 7.8.4)", "Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse Installation and Configuration Guide", and a "Bookshelf for Siebel Business Analytics Applications Version 7.8.3"

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Oracle named Technology Partner of the Year by SPSS

This from Bill (William) Nee from the Oracle Database product marketing team:

Last week SPSS held their Directions User Conference in Chicago. During the conference it was announced that Oracle had been named the SPSS "Technology Partner of the Year". The award was given to Oracle for its joint work with SPSS in building integration between SPSS Clementine and Oracle Data Mining.
This integration allows analysts to use the Clementine interface to build, browse and score models in Oracle Database 10g using techniques available with Oracle Data Mining. ODM algorithms, including Naïve Bayes, Adaptive Bayes Network and Support Vector Machines, appear as "nodes" in the Clementine interface. These techniques can then be used just like the other techniques that are native within Clementine.

Visit the Oracle page on the SPSS site at http://www.spss.com/clementine/oracle.htm

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Discoverer 10.1.2.2 patch available

The Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 (10.1.2) Patch Set 2 (10.1.2.2.0) is now available for download from Metalink (https://metalink.oracle.com/).

This includes many features in Discoverer, primarily in the OLAP area.
The patch number is 4960210. It is currently available on Microsoft Windows (32-bit) and Solaris Operating System (SPARC 64-bit). Other platforms will become available shortly.
If you see the readme file, section 9.5.3 covers "New Features for Oracle Business Intelligence".

This is a list of new features in the release, from Table 10 of the readme file:

  1. Calculated Members
  2. Write-back
  3. Graph Styles
  4. Discoverer Catalog Support
  5. Share Calculations and Saved Selections In a Workbook
  6. Toolbar
  7. Floating OracleBI Query Editor
  8. Enhanced Refreshing of Queries
  9. VBA Macros

These new features span Discoverer Plus, Plus OLAP, Viewer, Portlet Provider, and the Spreadsheet Add-In.
Look for more posts on these features. Here is a list of some posts by Aneel and me on some of the new features in the "calculated member" release:

  1. Spreadsheet Add-in - Refreshing multiple queries
  2. Spreadsheet Add-In - non modal wizard
  3. Rename queries in Spreadsheet Add-In 10.1.2.2
  4. New Graph styles in the upcoming Discoverer release

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Blog Stats

Knowledge is power, or - "gyanadheenam jagat sarvam" - as the Sanskrit phrase (almost) similarly states. Whether the knowledge that 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people visit the BI blog everyday is power that I can utilize is something debatable. Whether it is even 'power' of any kind is also a question.

Sometime back I had wondered (link to blog post) about a sudden spurt in traffic to the blog. Now, blogging (work related as well as personal) is pretty much a non-monetizable activity (my compensation, reviews, and performance objectives are in no way tied to the popularity of this blog, though some may want to try and establish a negative correlation between the two), yet I do have some amount of interest in seeing that this blog gets more visitors than less.

Someone suggested I turn to Google Analytics to find out why or at least "who".
Google Analytics and StatCounter both provide lots of useful statistics. I personally find StatCounter to be more user-friendly, but Google Analytics lets me look at statistics over longer periods of time, not restricting me to only the last 100 hits for detailed info.

These then are screenshots from reports I ran using Google Analytics on the BI blog on such topics as browsers, platform, geographies, screen resolution, etc...

Unsurprisingly so, the dominant platform for visitors to this blog is Windows (96%+), followed far behind by Macintosh, Linux, and Sun OS.


When it comes to browsers, Firefox has a share (30%) disproportionate to its overall share (which hovers around the 10-12% mark). Along with Internet Explorer (64%), these two browsers pretty much are it. Opera, Safari, and others are far behind.


The situation is slightly more varied when you combine browsers with platforms; it is apparent that Windows XP is the most popular OS for visitors to the blog.
Various versions of IE & Firefox on XP made up 75% of the traffic. I was surprised to see both IE7 and Firefox 2 (neither of which were officially released till a few days back) make up more than 5% of the traffic.


No surprises here - almost every browser was Java enabled.


32 bit color is the standard - wonder if people really don't know they can switch down to 16 bit color (and thereby improve performance, if only a wee bit), or that graphics memory is now available in hundreds of megs for people to not really care (I have seen some new desktops at work with something like 200 megs of video memory!).


Everyone has Flash installed - even the latest versions: 8 and 9.


Even with large monitors, widescreen monitors, the screen resolution of choice for almost half the visitors remains the trusty 1024x768. 1280x800 seems to suggest a widescreen monitor. 1440x900 is an odd size...


Of the 119 countries that this blog has seen hits from, more than half come from the US (38%) and UK (12%). Only India (8%) and Australia (2%) are the non North American or European countries in the top 11 list.

And here is the complete list of 119 countries (in alphabetical order):
Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Anonymous Proxy, Argentina, Aruba, Asia/Pacific Region, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Europe, Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Satellite Provider, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Yugoslavia

More than 2,300 cities!