Misc links for the year

To end a particularly slothful last few months as far as posting goes, I have as (possibly) my last post for the year with a few links to Oracle related posts:

• "Business intelligence buyers face tough decisions" by Mark Brunelli at TechTarget.com
• A post by Michael Armstrong-Smith "to determine whether a workbook that has been saved to the database has been run recently".
• A year-end post by Marcos Campos at the Oracle Data Mining blog.
• A press release on a customer running a 15 TB data warehouse on Oracle 10g, and another one RL Polk running a 4 TB data warehouse on Oracle 10g.
  

The next year should be different - with more posts and more bloggers. At least that's my hope.

Warm wishes to everyone for a very happy 2007.
Before I sign off for the rest of the year, I am off to complete two documents on what I know are going to be blockbuster features in Oracle BI when they are released.

Embedding video on this blog

Ok, so it is late at night here, Saturday morning, and in the true spirit of weekend craziness, I thought let me try and posting some video content to this blog. Not just any video content, but a small Flash based file. To keep things simple for me, this is a short video of the Oracle BI Spreadsheet Add-In, but with no explanatory text or commentary. And it is very, very short.

Update: it's taking a bit for the video to be processed on YouTube... shall check in the morning, and if it still hasn't processed...

Announcement: Oracle Data Mining Consultants Partnership Program

The Oracle Data Mining Technologies blog has this post for those in the data mining field:
We're starting a program to work with qualified data mining consultants.

You and your colleagues are invited to participate in a 2 day hands-on session designed for data mining consultants here in the Oracle Burlington MA office February 7 & 8, 2007. Space is limited, so please RSVP asap.

The Oracle Data Mining Consultants Partnership Program has been established to develop a support network of skilled data mining consultants. As part of this program, we're looking to promote knowledgeable, skilled data mining experts who can leverage Oracle's in-database functionality. Consultants that demonstrate proficiency in Oracle Data Mining and working in Oracle-centric environments will be promoted within Oracle Sales via eSeminars, web directories, user organizations, and face to face meetings.

See this link for more details.

Discoverer 10.1.2.2 Patchset for Linux

Search for Patchset Id 4960210.
It's now available on the following platforms:

• Linux x86
• Microsoft Windows (32-bit)
• Solaris Operating System (SPARC 64-bit)

So the new thing is that Linux has been added. This became available a day back - Dec 12 2006 - and is 1.7GB in size (1,803,762,801 bytes). Happy downloading.

Differences between Plus, Viewer, Desktop

Michael Armstrong has a post on the differences between the different components of Discoverer - Desktop, Plus, and Viewer. Actually the post is itself a link to a short document written by a prolific
member of the OTN forums - Russ Proudman. See this link for the actual article.

The table of differences has some errors - that I am more than happy to point out :) The first "yes/no" is for "Desktop", the sec0nd for "Plus", and the third for "Viewer". Also, these comments are based on a very quick pass of the list, so I may have missed some errors out...

• View Query With Snapshot Data No No No - I don't know what Russ means by "snapshot" data, but you can have Discoverer run off scheduled workbooks, so this line is not entirely correct then.
• Deliverable As Portlet No No No - every Discoverer worksheet can be delivered as a portlet; the component - Desktop, Plus, Viewer is irrelevant here.
• Apply Parameters To Worksheet Yes Yes No - of course parameters can be applied to Viewer, or am I missing something here?
• Save The Workbook Yes Yes No - worksheets can be saved in Viewer also (shall provide a link in the next post).
  
• Export To XML ? Yes ? - Is available in Viewer.
• Export To PDF No Yes ? - is available in Viewer.
• Drill To Link No Yes ? - is available in Viewer. In Desktop you have the ability to do hyperdrills, so I would say you can do drills in Desktop also.
• Cascading Parameters ? Yes ? - available in all three components.
• OLAP Support No Yes ? - available in Viewer also.
• Command Line Interface Yes No No - there is a EUL Command Line utility available, so this functionality is pretty much platform independent. The component inclusion is not relevant here.
• Graph Types No Yes Display - you can change the graph type, sub-type, hide the graph, view the graph, and change other properties like size, 3D effect...
• High fidelity printing via PDF No No Yes - of course you have hi-fidelity printing in Plus. Also, you have export to PDF, which is the same as PDF printing...
  
• Stoplight Formatting Display Yes Display - escapes my mind for Viewer. Shall check on this.
• Interactive Pivoting No Yes No - yes!!! This is present in Plus as well as Viewer.
• Choose which worksheet to open before opening workbook No(5) No(5) Yes - you can do this in Plus. You can expand the workbook to see the worksheets there, and then select a specific worksheet to open. The default behavior if you select the workbook and click 'Open' is to run the last saved worksheet.
• Ability to schedule and export in one step - only in Desktop using command line interface and a third-party scheduler Yes(9) No No - shall be available very soon in Discoverer. Watch this space!
• Export Crosstab to Excel pivot table - this is available in Plus and Viewer.