We’ve updated the training portion of our web site to include our three new hands-on courses:

• Introduction to Oracle BI Answers
• Introduction to Oracle BI Dashboards and Delivers
• Introduction to Oracle BI Server Administrator

We have been giving these several times recently and have received great comments when we have given the classes.  All of these are “hands-on” classes that get you going with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).  Please contact us if you are interested in these or other offerings.

Interest has been very strong in our Faster and Smarter Data Warehouses with Oracle 11g seminar series.  So strong, in fact, that we are planning on webcasting the seminar next week.  Since it is a webcast, we’re going to break it into two one-hour parts on consecutive days.

On May 6, I’ll present the executive-focused “business case” for using Oracle 11g for faster and smarter data warehouses.  This part of the presentation focuses on the value of using Oracle OLAP and uses Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) as the front end.

On May 7, I’ll present the techically-focused “how does it do that?” part of using Oracle 11g for faster and smarter data warehouses.  Using SQL Developer, I’ll demonstrate live how cube-organized materialized views speed up queries and allow for simpler SQL for BI analysis.

Find all the connection details at www.vlamis.com/demo under “Schedule”.  My thanks go to Oracle for hosting the web seminar.  I hope to “see” you there!

On April 30 at 10:45am Central time, I’ll be presenting OracleBI, Oracle OLAP and Essbase Compared for a webcast sponsored by the Oracle BIWA SIG of the IOUG.  This is similar to the previous webcast I gave and the presentation I gave at Collaborate 08.  See https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=108439987 for more details.

Once again, I’ll be presenting “Faster and Smarter Data Warehouses with Oracle OLAP 11g” in the Oracle Toronto office the morning of April 24.  For details, contact me or Graham Rose in the Toronto office.  I’ll be using my latest VMWare BIC2G image-based demo which will eventually get merged with the rest of the 11g BIC2G environment.  You can find PDFs of the PowerPoint slides I used with our papers and presentations page under “Faster and Smarter Data Warehouses with Oracle OLAP 11g”.

I just received my copy of the Oracle OLAP Newsletter! It can be found at the following link: OLAP Newsletter
It is interesting to note that 10.2.0.4 database patch(#6810189) is out for windows 32 and linux. I have gone thru the readme file and do not see any OLAP specific improvements or bug fixes. 10.2.0.3 has been out for awhile, as has the OLAP ‘A’ patch. It should be noted that there is no OLAP specific patch this time so things may be looking up.
Still no definite timeline for 11.1.0.7 release, which is where we will be able to use our existing BI Beans applications with 11g.

My article on Accelerating Data Warehouses with Oracle OLAP 11g in the May/June 2008 issue is now live on Oracle Magazine’s web site.  I haven’t received the hard copy yet, but I expect it within a week or two.

The article presents the benefits of accelerating data warehouses using Oracle OLAP 11g and focuses on the benefits specific to the 11g release.  If you’re more interested in the mechanics of actually building analytic workspaces, the article from two years ago about 10g OLAP is still very applicable.  Please share any comments you may have.  I’ll try to reply to them in a timely manner here in the blog.  Happy reading!

Calling all OFA and OSA customers!  Oracle is looking for you.

As I’m guessing you know, OFA and OSA lose support in 2010.  Oracle is working on a program to migrate these customers to a supported platform–likely Essbase, Hyperion Planning, or Oracle OLAP.  If you’d like to look at this program, please contact us.  We can help you evaluate whether this makes sense for you.

I just returned from the Oracle BI/EPM Partner Advisory Council meeting at Oracle HQ. It was great to meet many of the Hyperion partners and the Oracle marketing staff under Rich Clayton. Several Oracle presenters shared Oracle’s vision of where BI/EPM is heading. What I found most interesting is the amount of BI content in what I expected to be a Hyperion event. In fact the Oracle BI/EPM marketing folks don’t see the distinction. Whether BI encompasses EPM or EPM encompasses BI depends on the perspective of the speaker. But it’s clear that they are very related and inseparable. There was a lot of talk about how businesses need to have an ENTERPRISE-wide EPM (or BI) strategy.

It was very interesting to hear about the developments in the upcoming Essbase and Hyperion releases. There was a also a great deal of discussion about the upcoming OBI EE release and Hyperion reporting tools such as Web Analysis and Interactive Reporting. Stay tuned…

I just downloaded the iPhone SDK the other day and I wanted to run the simulator to see how some of our applications worked in the iPhone. Much to my surprise BIEE ran fairly nicely using Safari on the iPhone. There is definitely a problem showing charts, no Flash support, but the tables looked very nice. With the zoom in and zoom out displaying the data was extremely easy and FAST!

I thought I would post a few pictures so you can see for yourselves.

Now we have to wait for Apple to support Flash and Safari to support BIEE! Now to try BI Beans!

You know how you sometimes have one of those problems that just won’t let you sleep? Here’s one:

I’m updating the classware for our publicly available training classes.

I created an AGO measure. Works great.
I created a TODATE measure. Works great.
I displayed the AGO and TODATE measures side-by-side in BI Answers. No problem.

I then added a third column, just a simple base measure no less, and … it failed. The query returned an error ORA-00942 - table or view does not exist.

I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong. Checked out the sesion log. Ran the query in little pieces. Added code, deleted code, trying to find the answer.

So…. buried in the OBIEE Release Notes, version 10.1.3.2, is this little tasty tidbit:

If you use a version of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 prior to 10.2.0.3, you might encounter an issue with a Full Outer Join that causes severe database performance issues… (The VMware image that I’m working with uses 10.2.0.2.)

To work around this issue when using Oracle Database 10g Release 1 or 2, upgrade to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Patch Set 2 (for 10.2.0.3). For performance reasons, this is the preferred workaround.

To work around this issue without installing Patch Set 2, modify the Database Features table using the Administration Tool. This configuration prevents the Oracle BI Server from sending SQL constructs that expose the issue in an unpatched Oracle Database 10g.

To modify the Database Features table:
1. In the Administration Tool, open the properties of the Physical Database metadata object.
2. Navigate to the Features tab.
3. Ensure that the values for
- PERF_PREFER_MINIMAL_WITH_USAGE, and
- PERF_PREFER_INTERNAL_STITCH_JOIN
are selected, that is, set to True.

My thanks to Duc Huynh for his assistance on this one!