New Tutorial - Creating Interactive APEX Reports Over OLAP 11g Cubes

The latest in a recent series of 11g OLAP tutorials has been added to the Oracle OLAP product page on OTN.

The tutorial is called 'Creating Interactive APEX Reports Over OLAP 11g Cubes' and shows how you use Oracle Application Express (APEX) to create an interactive sales analysis report that runs against OLAP 11g data.



You learn how to query and create analytic reports of OLAP 11g cubes, including both stored and calculated measures. You also learn how to apply query techniques that leverage unique characteristics of OLAP 11g cubes.

The other tutorials already published in this series are:

• Building OLAP 11g Cubes
• Querying OLAP 11g Cubes
• Creating BI EE Metadata for OLAP 11g Cubes
• Querying OLAP 11g Data Using Oracle BI Answers

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.

Now Available! Two new Oracle OLAP Demonstrations

Two new Oracle OLAP demonstrations have been added to the Oracle OLAP product page on OTN:

Fast Answers to Tough Questions Using Simple SQL :- Oracle OLAP is a world class analytic engine embedded in the Oracle Database. OLAP Cubes and dimensions are easily accessible thru a star-model. Using very simple SQL, Oracle OLAP delivers fast answers to tough, analytic questions. This demonstration shows how to query OLAP cubes using several tools, including: Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Application Express and SQL Developer.

Transparently Improving Query Performance with Oracle OLAP Cube MVs :- Oracle OLAP cubes may also be deployed as materialized views. Summary queries written to base fact tables can transparently leverage the fast query performance delivered by Oracle OLAP - without any changes to the application's query. The Oracle Optimizer automatically rewrites queries to cubes when appropriate. This demonstration shows how Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition seamlessly benefits from this capability. The demonstration then provides an "under the covers" view of how this improvement is achieved.

Get hands-on with 11g OLAP

You may have already noticed but over the past couple of weeks some new 11g OLAP training material has been published on the OTN OLAP home page.

Two new tutorials have been added to the popular Oracle By Example (OBE) series.

The first is titled 'Building OLAP 11g Cubes' and covers using Analytic Workspace Manager (AWM) 11g to build and load an OLAP cube.

The second is titled 'Querying OLAP 11g Cubes' and is a guide to querying a cube via SQL, both directly using OLAP Cube Views, and indirectly using Cube Materialized Views.

Supporting both of the tutorials is a new sample schema which gives you the opportunity to get hands-on and experiment in your own environment. Remember, that patch level 11.1.0.7 is required and to always check the recommended release details for your chosen operating system.

ComputerWeekly.com : E.on transforms financial insight with Oracle OLAP Option

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/12/11/233863/e.on+transforms+financial+insights+with+bare-knuckle.htm

The article above, published last week in ComputerWeekly, follows an earlier customer profile posted on OTN. E.on, one of Europe's leading energy suppliers, has gone live with a financial transformation software project that will give it an accurate view of the profits generated by each customer and provide better forecasting of future demand. E.on has accounts with over eight million customers in the UK. To quote directly from the project leader Lawrence Edwards: "It (accurate forecasting of demand, and, therefore, margin) is a massive problem because of the data volumes and complexity. Others have tried and failed, but we persevered."

It provides excellent proof points for the use of Oracle OLAP to solve business problems that require rapid data loading and analysis of large data volumes. The E.on system is currently operating at about 6Tb and is growing rapidly, with 150Gb of new data added every 14 hours. There is a great quote from Lawrence in the OTN PDF explaining what they have achieved using Oracle OLAP Option:

"The analytical power, centralized administration, and scalability of Oracle OLAP have allowed us to process and present data in a way that was not previously possible. This has provided us with an unprecedented depth of understanding of customers’ energy use and the demand for all our products and offerings"

New 11g OLAP Cube Materialized Views tutorial posted onto OTN

Another new tutorial has been added to the Oracle OLAP home page on OTN.

This tutorial is titled 'Oracle OLAP 11g: Setting Up Cube Materialized Views for Query Rewrite'

The tutorial describes how to enable cubes as Cube Materialized Views, and how to enable and troubleshoot Query Rewrite using Analytic Workspace Manager 11.1.0.7. It is intended as a quickstart for intermediate developers.

New 11g OLAP tutorial posted onto OTN

A new tutorial has been added to OTN.

The tutorial is aimed at newcomers to Oracle OLAP and is a guide to creating and populating an 11g OLAP cube.

This is perfect for people who are looking for a gentle introduction to using the Analytic Workspace Manager OLAP administration tool and understand the basic steps in building an 11g OLAP cube.