Planned Paper for UKOUG : A DBAs Guide to OLAP

A Working Title: Everything you ever wanted to know about OLAP but were too scared to ask

On Friday I finished submitting three papers for this year's UK Oracle User Group conference. In the process of trying to think of some good subjects I came up with the idea of trying to help DBAs understand what is required to support an OLAP environment. There appears to be a huge amount of information aimed at developers and designers but very little information on how to manage analytic workspaces from a DBA's perspective. The aim is look at key topics that matter on a day to day basis and my plan is to try and cover the following topics:

• What is OLAP
• Components of an OLAP data model
  
• OLAP APIs
• Monitoring and Tuning, Tracing and Debugging
• General Maintenance Issues
  

Fortunately we have most of this information available internally, locked inside email threads, responses on the OTN Forum, and various consulting manuals. Problem is bringing it all together and keeping the focus on just this one key group of users - DBAs. I am trying to include as many scripts as possible within the presentation to allow people to quickly and easily just cut & paste into SQLPlus/SQLDev etc. I have a horrible feeling this could turn into a very large monster.

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Fortunately, a customer in the UK has just asked me to spend a day with their DBA team covering this exact topic so I can at least road-test the presentation once before appearing at the UKOUG - assuming the paper is selected of course.

I have submitted two other papers covering OLAP/data mining (one of my pet subjects) and creating a data warehouse over the OWB repository for management reporting. These will be extensions to similar presentations I gave whilst working in the US last year. But I will be extending both topics by adding new ideas into the mix.

If you want to attend the UKOUG conference it will be held between 3-6 December at the International Convention Center, Birmingham. For more information follow this link:

http://conference.ukoug.org/

If anyone has any OLAP specific DBA scripts, or general hints and tips, they would like to send me I would be most grateful and obviously full recognition will be given in the presentation and the white paper.