Monday, January 26, 2009

Gartner identifies Oracle OLAP as a key strength in Oracle's DW proposition

You may have already seen elsewhere that Gartner recently published an updated magic quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems.

It was a little bit surprising to see that the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server and the HP Oracle Database Machine hadn't provided a bigger boost to Oracle's rating (although, as you would expect, Oracle is still firmly entrenched in the leaders quadrant). Perhaps it is still a little early for their significance to be fully appreciated. There is likely to be a more pronounced improvement in Oracle's rating the next time this magic quadrant is published.

Of particular interest to this blog is the fact that Oracle OLAP is identified as a key strength of Oracle's Data Warehousing proposition. The research highlights the enhanced materialized view and cube management features added in 11g, along with transparent SQL access and incremental update.

It is really great to hear such a significant endorsement of Oracle's strategy to embed the Oracle OLAP engine inside the Oracle Database.

If you want to read more about what 11g OLAP could do for your Oracle Data Warehouse, then check out this white paper

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Get hands-on with 11g OLAP & Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

Happy New Year to everyone!!

Following the announcement last month of two new 'Oracle By Example' tutorials on building and querying 11g OLAP cubes, here are the details of a further two tutorials on working with 11g OLAP and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

The first tutorial shows how to create OBIEE metadata over 11g OLAP cubes

(if you are using 10g OLAP, use this tutorial to create OBIEE metadata instead)

The second new tutorial shows how to query 11g OLAP cubes using OBIEE Answers - using the metadata repository created during the first tutorial

While OBIEE Answers is a widely used query tool for Oracle OLAP (for an example, see the article on Micros Systems), it would be interesting to hear from people using some of the other components of OBIEE, especially some of the newly integrated 'plus' components like Smart View which appears to be receiving a lot of development effort from the BI/EPM folks.

Please feel free to share any experiences you might have in our comments section.