Oracle OLAP Newsletter - December 2008

The latest Oracle OLAP newsletter, December 2008, has been posted to the OLAP Home Page on OTN and is available by clicking here.

As usual, it contains very useful information about what is happening in the world of Oracle OLAP and includes regular features such as the OLAP skills corner and DBA tips, as well as useful links for those wanting to download the software or get training or assistance.

The featured customer this time is JD Sports in the UK. This is an excellent example of Oracle OLAP being used as part of a wider Data Warehouse solution. It is also a significant endorsement of Oracle's Data Warehouse strategy to bring smart, embedded analytics to the data and highlights the benefits of an embedded OLAP server; JD Sports has been able to leverage other advanced Oracle technologies such as Real Application Clusters (to deliver scalability and availability), whilst additionally benefiting from many of the features taken for granted by Oracle's RDBMS customers (DW integrated security, storage, backup, transaction control, etc) but often not so easily delivered by stand-alone OLAP engines.

This customer feature is also a good example of the scalability of the Oracle OLAP engine itself. Whilst far from being the largest implementation (there are customers managing several Terabytes of data in Oracle OLAP cubes), this example shows how relatively large volumes of DW data can be loaded and aggregated in Oracle OLAP, and how the cube compression and partitioning features first introduced in 10g OLAP have completely changed the game compared to what was previously possible. Taken in isolation, loading 300 million source records is not a major achievement (not for Oracle OLAP anyway), neither is having a 10 dimensional cube, or indeed is aggregating across 28 hierarchical levels. What is more impressive is doing all of these three things combined in a single cube (which is only one cube out of a total of six), and still being able to deliver all of the key benefits you would associate with an well implemented OLAP system - fast query performance and lots of advanced calcs (literally 100's in this case) serving a reasonably sized user community.

All things considered, it is easy to see why Oracle OLAP is a key, strategic component of the Oracle Data Warehouse platform.

Let's hope for some more customer features in the near future.

Greetings of the season to everyone!

BTW - you can have the OLAP newsletter sent directly to your email box each quarter by following the link at the top of the current newsletter (Unsubscribe/Subscribe to this Newsletter)