Friday, October 10, 2008

New Oracle OLAP White Paper released to OTN

A new Oracle OLAP white paper has been released to OTN titled "Using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 11g"

This contains a guide on how to configure the OBIEE metadata layer to leverage the 11g Oracle OLAP option, both indirectly via OLAP cube based materialized views, and directly via OLAP cube views. For those working with 10g OLAP (cube views only), the best guide to configuring OBIEE is found in the online tutorial on OTN.

Personally, I think that it is great that this white paper captures an explanation of how to write SQL that is optimised for Oracle OLAP cube views. This is something I find customers initially struggle with - they write what they believe is a simple query and then cannot understand why the performance is not good.

This is because there are a few golden rules to writing optimal SQL for OLAP cube views and while they are simple to understand, they are not obvious to those who are new to the technology. I hope to write a more detailed Blog entry on this subject very soon, but for the time being take a look at the white paper (particularly pages 10 & 11) to see what I mean.

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