Gartner on Oracle and Sigma Dynamics deal

Gartner has a three page news analysis of Oracle's purchase of Sigma Dynamics's assets (link to page on Oracle.com). This is the link to the page on Gartner.com. They have a PDF version of the document available for download. The document is sparse on details, but does give some useful background information to people not famililar with the company or how its product is used in Oracle's Analytics offerings.

From Michael's blog

Michael Armstrong-Smith, Discoverer expert par-excellence, an Oracle ACE, publisher of two hugely popular books on Discoverer, has published the first in a series of posts on how to use third party scheduling tools and products with Discoverer. Here is the link to the first post.

More on OpenWorld and BI

To add a few more sessions of interest (in addition to my previous post) in business intelligence:

Paul Rodwick, vice-president of business intelligence product management, has a session titled "Oracle's Business Intelligence Road Map" (session id S282268). While Chris Leone (also a vice-president of product management, but with the applications strategy group) has a session titled "Oracle Analytic Applications Road Map" (session id S281900).

Matt Elumba has a session titled "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Architectural Overview" (session id S282269).

Specifically to the Maui release (that's the code name for the upcoming release of Oracle BI EE), Dave Granholm has a session titled "What's New in Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2?" (session id S282281).

In the area of OLAP there are at least two sessions that people may be interested in. The first one is by Matt Bedin on "Seamless Access to Your Oracle OLAP Cubes" (session id S282273). The second one is by Bud Endress along with the Gallup Organization, titled "Oracle OLAP Option: How the Gallup Organization Turbocharged Reporting and Analysis" (session id S282385).

And there are many more. Just use this link to get a list of all "analytics" related sessions.

What about me, the curious may ask... I shall not be travelling this year to OpenWorld.

Oracle Open World and BI

This is a brief post on the different BI sessions at this year's Oracle Open World at San Francisco.

BTW, you can and should use the schedule builder to build a schedule that suits you (link to page on Oracle.com)

• There is an "Extreme Program" titled "Business Intelligence Data Warehousing: Next-Generation Business Intelligence for Actionable Insight to Everyone in the Enterprise, Part 1 & II." It boasts a glittering array of stars from our BI product management, including Aydin Gencler, Kasturi Shekhar, Kurt Wolff, Dave Granholm, Matt Bedin, Krishnan Viswanathan, Mike Reller, Chad Frank, Dan Hilldale, Jim Sarokin, and others. If you haven't, register for X-Treme (link).

Separately, Ed Suen, Vice-President for BI at Oracle, is presenting two best practices papers:

1. "Best Practices for Implementing Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition" (session ID S282275).
2. "Best Practices for Implementing Siebel Business Analytics" (session ID S282028).
   

Mike Durran is presenting a paper on Discoverer, titled "Oracle Discoverer Future: Protect, Extend, Integrate", session ID: S282295.

As you may have heard, the upcoming release of Oracle Business Intelligence (code named "Maui" - for exotic honeymoon locations) will provide direct access to SAP BW InfoCubes. Alan Lee has a session titled "Get More Value from SAP BW with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition" (session ID S282279).

Oracle recently that it has acquired the intellectual property assets of Sigma Dynamics (link). Stefan Schmitz has a session "Enabling More-Intelligent and Profitable Customer Interactions, Using Oracle Business Intelligence Real-Time Decisions" (session ID S282062) where you would be able to see the product and the technology in action.

Phil Bates shall be talking about the integration between Oracle BI and Oracle BPEL in a session titled "Using Embedded Business Intelligence Within Operational Applications" (session ID S282277). This integration, btw, is also one of the many new features in the upcoming release of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite.

BI/DW Training at OpenWorld 2006

The Oracle OpenWorld conference is being held, as usual, in San Francisco from Oct 22-26. This year's conference is shaping up to be a very big event with even more activities than last year.

As always there will be hands-on labs. However, this year they have all been brought together under the banner of "XTreme Weekend". This year the labs will be a lot more intense than in previous years and are intended to give delegates as much hands-on time as possible. For example for Warehouse Builder we will be providing a whole day of exercises that work through many of the new features we have added to 10g Release 2. For users more interested in reporting, this will be an excellent opportunity to get some quality time with the new BI Enterprise Edition suite of products. Full details of both tracks are below.

The labs will be staffed by product management, developers, and experienced sales consultants. So this is a great opportunity to get free advice and guidance as well as learn about the products. There will be two BI/DW tracks spread over two days (Saturday 21 and Sunday 22). There are only 75 seats available for each track and both tracks are filling up very rapidly and registration is on a first come, first served basis. Register today to attend the X-Treme program to avoid disappointment

• Oracle OpenWorld attendees: Register now for the X-Treme Weekend program for the discounted rate of $650. Register now.
• Non-Oracle OpenWorld attendees: $950. Register now.

The full details of the two BI/DW tracks are as follows:

The Leading, End-to-end Data-Warehousing Platform with Enterprise ETL, OLAP, and Data Mining Capabilities
The Oracle Database is the best platform for supporting your business intelligence applications. Oracle provides an industry leading ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool, deeply integrated OLAP capabilities, and sophisticated data mining capabilities. Join us for deep-dive BI and DW hands-on workshops that you won't find on the regular OpenWorld agenda. Here you'll learn directly from Oracle experts in the following areas:

• How to design, deploy, and manage a feature rich data warehouse environment using Oracle Warehouse Builder
• How to deliver rapid query-response times and sophisticated analysis with Oracle OLAP
• How to incorporate predictive analytics and advanced data-mining techniques into your business intelligence infrastructure with Oracle Data Mining

Designed for administrators, data architects and database developers of data-warehouse and business-intelligence systems, you will have hands-on experience across all of the key database capabilities for delivering business intelligence.


Next Generation Business Intelligence for Actionable Insight to Everyone in the Enterprise
In this session, you will learn how end users can construct their own queries and build their own dashboards using Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition. Oracle BI Suite EE lets you empower employees at all levels with the information they need to make better business decisions easily and efficiently by creating reports, charts, and performance management dashboards through drag-and-drop interface in a completely self-service, Web-based environment. Oracle BI Suite EE lets you collaborate and share business insight through email, and schedule and deliver your reports to dashboards or even wireless devices. You will also have hands-on experience in administrative tasks for defining the physical, logical, and presentation layers to define how end users will interact with the data using business terms. In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to use the components of Oracle BI EE, including Oracle BI Answers, BI Dashboards, BI Advanced Reporting, BI Delivers, and BI Server Administration. Join us for deep-dive BI hands-on workshops that you won't find on the regular OpenWorld agenda.

For a list of all the XTreme Weekend tracks (Database, Fusion Middleware, Apps) click here to go to the Oracle OpenWorld XTreme Weekend site.

OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-in advantages

Thanks for the introduction Abhinav...:)

I will start out with highlighting some of the advantages of using the OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-in. They might not all be quite obvious, but you will appreciate them when you use the product.

Ease of use.

• It installs really easily. Just run the .exe file, walk through the wizard and you are done. Start Excel, and you will see the OracleBI menu.
• We have tried to make the product intuitive to use, so the user can use familiar Excel functions. More on this below.

Formatting and printing.

• You have finegrained control over the appearance of the data. Essentially, you have full control over the format for each individual cell, as you do in Excel
• You can move the Query area around within the sheet using cut/paste, to make space for Charts, formulas etc.
• You can then print the worksheet as a nicely formatted report. Although you don't have pixel perfect control, it is good enough for most purposes, and you still have live, refreshable data.

Extended analysis.

• Add Excel formulas into the Query area just by inserting rows and columns. The add-in will preserve the formulas even when drilling, provided that the cell references are still there.
• You can create formulas that combine data from OLAP with data from other sheets, which could be external data. This is not possible with the built-in Calculation Wizard.
• On the other hand, the Calcuation Wizard enables you to create easily calculations such as 'Variance from Last year' without the need for downloading last years data to Excel first. The calculation runs in the OLAP Server where the data is stored, making this possible.

Using VBA.

• The data is written into the Excel cells, just as if you typed it in, so if you have VBA skills, you can perform additional processing of data by looping through the cells, comparing with other data, creating charts of the data etc. We have added support for some new VBA calls in the upcoming release that will help you with this type of thing.
  

Multiple queries and databases.

• It is possible to create multiple queries in a Worksheet, and even multiple queries against multiple databases in a workbook. This is a quite unique feature.
• In the new release there is be a Refresh Workbook/ Refresh Worksheet feature to make it easier to reconnect multiple queries. If there are multiple connections, the login dialog will be displayed as needed.
  

Write-back to Oracle OLAP cubes.

• Write-back has been added in the upcoming release. The OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-in is currently the only Oracle product that does this, short of building your own java application with BI Beans and JDeveloper. This is not trivial, as there are lots of things you have to take into account in designing your cubes and your workbooks, but this is a major feature.

And a new BI blogger

I am very happy to announce that very soon we shall have another Oracle BI product manager start posting on the Orale BI blog. Aneel Shenker is a product manager based out of Oracle's Burlington development center and is responsible among other things for the BI Spreadsheet Add-In. The latest release of the Spreadsheet Add-In, just round the corner, features some cool enhancements that you shall be reading about from Aneel himself. Here's welcoming Aneel!

Row Banding in Oracle Answers

Row banding is something that is used frequently to help make multi-row data more readable. That is a truism.
Oracle Answers (part of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) has support for row banding.
Here's a quick example:
This is a crosstab (called "Pivot Table" in Answers) built on the Video Stores schema. Here the report is grouped by "Region", and the measures are "Sales" and "Profit". "City" is the other item. The report is paged by "Product Description".

By default this check box is checked off. But I can check it on to enable banding. The default color here is "green bar", and the alternate banding applies only to the innermost columns. Simply speaking this means that it will apply to the non grouped items.

This should make it clearer. Region is not banded as it is a grouped item. City, Sales, and Profit are.


If I now choose the "All Columns" option from the dropdown, the banding applied is as shown below.
As you can see, even the Region column is now included in the alternate row banding.

Not that I am restricted only to the light green color. I can go and set an alternate format. I select a bright yellow (would this be canary yellow? probably not... let's call it bright yellow)


Voila - here is my color banding in yellow now. Bright yellow at that.

Free OWB and DM Review seminar

Too embarassed to even explain why I have not blogged for almost a month... If I say there has been a lot of work, does it mean that BI blogging is not work? Or if I say I have been lazy, does it mean that I have been lazy in general, at work also? Let's just say that blogging is going to be a bit slow in the coming weeks till some things are sorted out and I get a better handle on some new projects I am taking on.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g release 2 (link to product page on OTN) released last month, and DM Review is conducting a free web seminar (sponsored by Oracle) on OWB titled "Moving Beyond ETL with Oracle Warehouse Builder: Providing Data Integration and Data Quality". It will be held on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006, at 2:00 p.m. ET / 11:00 a.m. PT. It shall feature Mary Jo Nott from DM Review and Paul Narth from OWB product management.


The link to the registration page: http://www.dmreview.com/web/reg_oracle0306.cfm

Winter Corp's Spotlight on Oracle White Paper

Analyst papers don't get any better than this!
Winter Corp has published a white paper titled "Spotlight on Oracle - Key Findings from the 2005 WinterCorp Top Ten Program", which measured the world's largest databases. The report can be downloaded from Oracle.com here.

Some of the highlights of the paper are:

• The largest data warehouse runs on Oracle
• The largest scientific data warehouse runs on Oracle
• It is unlikely that any database vendor's product is as omnipresent as Oracle in the VLDB arena
• In both the 2003 and 2005 TopTen surveys, all ten databases in the UNIX OLTP workload category run Oracle
• Oracle is the only database with a showing in the survey, and a strong one at that, across UnIX, Windows, and Linux platforms
• Nine of the ten largest UNIX OLTP systems run Oracle

Upcoming BI releases

Got hold of shiphomes being used by QA for testing and installed them on my machine. One is the Oracle BI Standard Edition, which includes Discoverer, Discoverer OLAP, the Spreadsheet Add-In, and more, while the Enterprise Edition includes the Siebel based Analytic Server components like Answers, Dashboard, Delivers, and more. This release also has many, many enhancements that had been in the works from last year. Next month and as we get sooner to the release, I shall start posting on the install and OOTB experience. If there are specific things that people would like to see screenshots of or have me write about do let me know. Also, there is a lot of collateral, demos, white papers that are being prepared, so expect a lot of information to flow your way closer to the release date.

I now have Oracle BI 10g (10.1.2) - infrastructure and middle-tier, the latest shiphomes of BI SE and EE (10.1.3), XML Publisher, an Oracle 10.2 database, a non-Oracle database, and more on the same machine, which also happens to be my work machine. Add to it more than a gig of emails, doc for the app server, tools, and the database, work related docs, Dilbert cartoons (a healthy dose of cyncism is a sine-qua-non), and of course Google Desktop Search (which itself uses up close to 2GB of hard disk space), and I had to uninstall Oracle Database XE because I was starting to run out of disk space - I like to keep at least 6-8GB free. Having 2GB of memory certainly helps though!

See http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/ for more information.

ODTUG Conference Day 2

Day two of the Oracle Developer Tools Conference. What a broad spectrum of topics, you can get presentations from six sigma techniques, SOA, ADF, spatial analytics, predictive analytics, OLAP, unit testing and so on. If only I had time to attend them to all. I think the biggest buzzes are around Application Express and SQL Developer. The best part of these conferences is meeting people face-to-face, people you know from various blogs and just being able to sit down and just chat about any topic.

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as an interest group within ODTUG is growing rapidly. The presentations on BI Enterprise Edition have been well attended and everyone is impressed by the quality of the presentations and most importantly the product demos.

Tomorrow is the last day and I will be in the hands-on sessions all day. In the morning we have the Warehouse Builder 10g and in the afternoon there is the Oracle BI OLAP tools. This session will be show casing the new updated version of Discoverer OLAP and the BI Spreadsheet Addin that supports custom aggregates. This allows business users to create their own dimension members by manually selecting dimension members or alternatively by using a dimensional query. Sales Analyzer used to have this feature and it at last been added to the BI OLAP tools so now customers can at last upgrade from OSA to Discoverer and still have all the functionality they enjoyed in OSA (apart from the ability to create a forecast). As an FYI, the OWB team has developed an OSA flat file migration Expert that uses the metadata flat files to create objects and mappings within OWB that can be deployed to an analytic workspace. Using the Expert and BI OLAP tools most OSA customers can be upgraded and up and running in a very short time.

There are plenty of people in cyber space blogging about the conference and so far everyone seems to be impressed. One more day to go...

Live from ODTUG...Monday

ODTUG 2006 opens with Marco Tilli.

Well not quite, because although the ODTUG 2006 conference in Washington, DC, really kicked off today, there were presentations and hands-on labs happening over the weekend as well. As a result the whole OWB PM team, along with many other PM groups from Oracle, arrived en-masse in Washington, DC on Friday evening ready for weekend opening of ODTUG 2006. In total, I think we have over 20 Oracle people here at the conference, from Product Managers through to Development Directors.

Saturday
On Saturday we "kicked" off (the World Cup is also happening at the same time, just in case you did not know that) with two hands-on labs to give attendees real live experience with the latest 10gR2 release version of Warehouse Builder. We created a very compelling set of exercises around the following topics:

• Data Quality
• Data Modeling
• ETL
• Extensibility (experts)

Each topic lasted and related exercises lasted about 40 minutes. Overall, everyone found the lessons very valuable and we had a lot of great questions and feedback both during and after each session.

Sunday
This year I was asked to participate in the panel that reviews all the papers accepted by the conference, to select the top 5 five papers. I must admit I was extremely impressed by the quality and breadth of the subjects covered. One of the papers selected was Lucas Jellema's great paper on "Pretty JavaServer Faces". The session associated with this was one of the more in-depth presentations that ran on Sunday afternoon. Hopefully, Lucas will publish the paper on the AMIS blog website for download (http://technology.amis.nl/blog/). The full list of finalists for this year's prize are:

• Andre Beland, The Oracle 10g Release 2 Rules Manager and Expression Filter - Events for business rules
• Lucas Jellema, Pretty Java Server Faces - breakthrough of attractive and productive user interface development
• Alex Nuijten, One Analytic Function can do more than 1000 lines of code
• David Schleis, Polish up Your Web Applications with Ajax
• Maggie Tompkins, Lean Six Sigma Tools and Techniques for Software Process Improvement

Unfortunately I was not able to attend Lucas's session as I was in the Business Intelligence CAB where we presented our BI/DW road map to key, mostly US based, customers and partners. Again, we got some great feedback about feature requirements and feature priorities.

The CAB was followed by the BI Summit Presentation, co-presented by George Lumpkin and Paul Rodwick. George Lumkin, Director of Data Warehouse Product Management, presented on the Oracle database as BI platform and provided great customer success stories such as Amazon.com to show how many customers today are being extremely successful with their BI solutions by leveraging the Oracle database.

George also announced the release of OWB 10gR2 and Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE and recognized influential blogger) gave a personal overview of this new release and how he is using it to make his customers more successful. If you have not seen Mark's website, please visit http://www.rittman.net/. Mark's website and blog contains lots of really useful information about Warehouse Builder and all things Oracle BI.

Just before George's session I attended a session by Donna Richey Winkelman who is Director and Editor in Chief of the ODTUG magazine. This was about "How to get published in the ODTUG technical Journal". A great session about how to write technical articles with links to websites that can provide guidance on how to start and plan your articles. I know I am going to sit down when I get back to Redwood Shores and draft some topics and send them to Donna. I would actively encourage everyone, even if you are have never written a technical article before, to just submit your ideas to Donna for review and if they are accepted the ODTUG Journal team will work with you to help you create, polish and finally publish your ideas as a formal paper.

Monday - Opening Keynote
Personally, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday preparing for today's keynote presentation by Marco Tilli, which was entitled "Who moved your Cheese - The Road Map to Fusion". As part of this presentation we again announced the launch of Warehouse Builder 10g R2 and yours truly was on stage to provide a live demo of the data quality feature. I am pleased to say the demo went very well. This new feature of OWB is extremely powerful and I am sure customers are going to get a lot of value from using it. I had a quite a few people stop me as I left the keynote session to ask more detailed questions and I am sure I will be getting lots of emails asking for more information. What we have created with the data quality feature is a unique and simple value proposition relating to data quality issues - Find it, stop it, cleanse it. All fully automated, fully extensible and integrated as part of the product.

In the afternoon I presented my paper on using data mining to help design OLAP cubes. I won't bore you all again with the details regarding this as I have already written about this last year on the blog. I have refined my ideas and messages since then and extended some of the ideas. In fact I got some new ideas during the session from the Q&A during the presentation. Anyway, I am currently working on creating an Expert to provide the attribute importance feature within OWB. I have other ideas but those I will put in storage and wait for this year’s OpenWorld before unleashing them.

So Monday has ended and tomorrow is definitely OWB today, we have wall-to-wall presentations all day long. Paul Narth, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Ali el Kortobi and myself are all presenting during the day. In fact I have three presentations tomorrow, one in the morning and two in the afternoon. One of our partners SAIC is also presenting on a very interesting topic - OWB and spatial. I will certainly try to get to that one, although it does clash with Jean-Pierre's paper on OWB's new extensibility features.

For more information about the conference and the list of papers and presenters simply visit the ODTUG website (http://www.ordtug.com).

One day over and gone, and two still to go and lots to look forward to. This is certainly a unfolding into another great conference by the ODTUG team. One piece of great news, next year ODTUG is going back to the beach with a return to Florida. Start planning your presentations for next year now.

Other Information
For reference the full list of OWB papers at this years ODTUG 2006 conference are:

• Introduction to Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2
• What exactly is an expert?
• Why use OWB for data modeling (JP)
• How to Extend Warehouse Builder 10g to Include User-Defined Properties, Icons, and Objects
• Climb to the OLAP Summit with Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2
• Reporting against the Warehouse Builder Repository

These can all be download from the collateral link on our OTN Home Page, or by simply clicking here to go directly to the website. In addition there other related OWB papers being presented. If you are ODTUG member these can be downloaded from the ODTUG website. There are two customer papers:

Using OWB Paris to Implement Production ETL in a Geospatial Data Warehouse
by Rob Palmer & Blythe Norris, SAIC
This presentation focuses on using OWB Paris and Oracle Spatial to implement production workflows for daily refresh of the Operational Data Store. Topics include design, performance tuning, and lessons learned.

Building an Effective Data Warehousing Architecture Using OWB 10gR2
by Mark Rittman, SolStonePlus
OLAP or relational, real-time or batch updates? Do you still need an ODS or staging area? This presentation cuts through the jargon and proposes an effective, layered architecture for Oracle data warehouses based on the new features in OWB 10gR2, Oracle Database 10gR2, and the OLAP and data mining options.

We also have a paper presented by one of our partners:
Lifecycle management (LCM) for Oracle Warehouse Builder and other Oracle Development Environments
by Piet Oomkes.
IKAN SCM4ALL offers an easy, transparent way to fully automate the software change (of lifecycle) management of your applications through CVS or SUBVERSION and complements the versioning with build and deploy facilities. During this presentation we will cover concepts of LCM for Oracle development and deployment environments (JDeveloper, OWB, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Database) and give a live demo with Oracle OWB, Paris Release.

Two blog posts on ODTUG 2006

One is by Mark Rittman (link to blog, link to his ODTUG blog post), and the other one is by AMIS Technology (link to blog, link to blog post on the BI keynote).
See my earlier posts on the event here and here.

Small but neat feature in 'Answers'

Starting today (yes, this precise instant in time) I shall start posting on the new Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (link on OTN) product features, and here is the first post, albeit a short one.

In 'Answers' (see link for an explanation for what 'Answers' is: actually, it is Oracle Business Intelligence Answers, and is the ad hoc query and analysis component of the Oracle BI EE suite), when you create a request (that would be a report / query / worksheet in Discoverer parlance, though not quite: a query is what is used to fetch data into a worksheet where it is formatted and displayed), data is automatically sorted by the first column, then the second column, and so on. Furthermore, a group sort is also applied so that i the example below the region does not appear multiple times. This report has been created from a Subject Area (think of a subject area as a Business Area in Discoverer) that is built on the familiar Video Stores dataset.
As you can see here, Region is group sorted ascending, and within each region the cities appear sorted ascending.

SELECT STORE.REGION saw_0, STORE.CITY saw_1, SALES_FACT.COST saw_2, SALES_FACT.PROFIT saw_3 FROM "Video Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1

If you click the 'Advanced' tab, you can see the SQL that is issued to the analytic server, and also the XML representation of the report (request) you are working with.

In the coming weeks and months I will also include posts on the new features in both the Standard Edition as well as the Enterprise Editions of the Orace BI Suite.