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.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
New article on 11g OLAP Cube-Organised Materialized Views published onto OTN
Oracle ACE Director Arup Nanda has published a series of articles onto OTN covering important new features in Oracle Database 11g titled 'Oracle Database 11g: Top Features for DBAs and Developers'.
The series includes a feature on 'Data Warehousing and OLAP' which looks at how Cube-Organized Materialized Views can be implemented alongside other features to deliver a compelling platform for data warehousing.
With Oracle's data warehousing proposition featured heavily in the news at the moment following the recent announcement at Oracle Open World on the availability of the Exadata Storage Server and Database Machine, this is an excellently timed reminder that Oracle OLAP is a core part of this data warehousing proposition.
The series includes a feature on 'Data Warehousing and OLAP' which looks at how Cube-Organized Materialized Views can be implemented alongside other features to deliver a compelling platform for data warehousing.
With Oracle's data warehousing proposition featured heavily in the news at the moment following the recent announcement at Oracle Open World on the availability of the Exadata Storage Server and Database Machine, this is an excellently timed reminder that Oracle OLAP is a core part of this data warehousing proposition.
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.
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.
More 11.1.0.7 ports now available
The Oracle Database 11g Release 11.1.0.7.0 Server Patch has now been released for several other ports, including Windows 32-bit.
The full list of operating systems currently supported is:
I would also recommend that all 11g OLAP users upgrade their AWM client to the 11.1.0.7A release which can be downloaded from Metalink or OTN
As always, the best source of information for recommended releases and patches is the Oracle OLAP certification page on OTN
I'm now going to download the Windows 32-bit patch (all 1.5GB of it!), and give it a roadtest....
The full list of operating systems currently supported is:
- Linux x86
- Linux x86-64
- Solaris (SPARC) (64-bit)
- IBM AIX (64-bit)
- HP-UX Itanium
- Microsoft Windows (32-bit)
I would also recommend that all 11g OLAP users upgrade their AWM client to the 11.1.0.7A release which can be downloaded from Metalink or OTN
As always, the best source of information for recommended releases and patches is the Oracle OLAP certification page on OTN
I'm now going to download the Windows 32-bit patch (all 1.5GB of it!), and give it a roadtest....
Monday, October 6, 2008
Analytic Workspace Manager 11.1.0.7A released to Metalink
The 11.1.0.7A version of AWM has been released to Metalink as patch 7420490
It includes important fixes and new features including:
To take advantage of all the new fixes and features, the Oracle Database 11g Release 11.1.0.7.0 Server Patch must be installed as well. This is currently only available for Linux 32-bit & Linux 64-bit, but other ports are likely to be available soon.
It includes important fixes and new features including:
- the ability to add multiple languages to a single analytic workspace
- individual aggregation definitions may now be defined for each measure of a cube
- the Create Dimension user interface has been modified to allow levels of the dimension to be created at the same time as the dimension
- the functionality of dimension and cube mapping has been enhanced to allow the application to refresh the definitions of database objects interactively to reflect the current state of database schema tables
To take advantage of all the new fixes and features, the Oracle Database 11g Release 11.1.0.7.0 Server Patch must be installed as well. This is currently only available for Linux 32-bit & Linux 64-bit, but other ports are likely to be available soon.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Oracle OLAP Newsletter - September 2008
The latest edition of the excellent Oracle OLAP Newsletter has just been released here
Highlights this time include a customer feature on Oss Council in the Netherlands who use Oracle OLAP for management reporting, details of the new 11.1.0.7 release, and a guide to delivering summary management through cube materialized views.
Highlights this time include a customer feature on Oss Council in the Netherlands who use Oracle OLAP for management reporting, details of the new 11.1.0.7 release, and a guide to delivering summary management through cube materialized views.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Oracle Open World 2008 - HP-Oracle Database Machine launch
The big news at Oracle Open World last week was that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used his keynote, entitled "Extreme. Performance." to talk about Data Warehousing and launch the HP-Oracle Database Machine featuring the innovative new Oracle Exadata storage server.
The market reaction to the news that Oracle, together with HP, are now offering a 'DW Appliance' with superior performance, based on proven hardware components & including Oracle Database 11g, has reflected a common view that I heard while answering questions from customers at Open World: that the rationale for purchasing one of the niche vendors' DW Appliances, with their narrow sweet spot and less capable database software is now more questionable than ever.
But why would anyone say that? Surely 'performance' is a game of leap-frogging, and if/when one of the DW Appliance vendors releases a newer faster machine before HP-Oracle does, won't that mean that the Oracle Database Machine's advantage is short-lived?
Not at all.
The HP-Oracle Database Machine is a DW Appliance like no other. This is because Oracle Database has depth & breadth of functionality and power that none of the others can claim. When you purchase a Database Machine you get Oracle Database EE, Real Application Clusters and Partitioning pre-installed and preconfigured, with ASM being used to manage the storage grid. All of the features included in there are available for use as soon as you plug in your new machine. But you can leverage much more even than that, of course.
And this is a key point - all the capabilities, features and options available in Oracle Database 11g are available on the Database Machine. Security, High Availability, Manageability, support for a Mixed Workload, and Embedded Analytics - all of it. And because this is standard Oracle Database, it is easy to run any of your applications on it - no specialised knowledge of rarely used niche RDBMS's required. Anything that runs your existing Oracle servers will run on Database Machine without change.
This includes OLAP of course. Oracle Database OLAP is there too - pre-installed along with the rest of Oracle Database EE. You just need to license it for use on the DB Machine when you choose to use it. And this is great news as it adds multidimensional calculation and analysis sophistication to an already awsome piece of kit.
A majority of the Oracle OLAP Option customers that I have met who report disappointing performance turn out to be IO Bound on their servers. That is, the server and storage they are using is out of balance, and constraining the ability of the Database to process the data. The HP-Oracle Database Machine (like some of the Optimized Warehouses also available from Oracle and it's other hardware partners) provides excellent IO performance thanks to the balanced high speed infiniband interconnects between the storage and the database servers included in the machine, and is optimised for data warehousing queries across the spectrum - OLAP included. Good IO performance directly translates to even more effective OLAP implementations.
So, the HP Oracle Database Machine is a great fit for Oracle Database OLAP Option, and other embedded analytics features of the Oracle Database, including Data Mining, SQL Analytics and Statistical Functions, and the OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder) Data Profiling and Data Quality features. Delivering BI applications that leverage these powerful capabilities is also much easier thanks to them being pre-installed on the Database Machine.
And Oracle OLAP is a great fit for the Database Machine, too. Which leads to the other question I have been asked by a couple of people: if Database Machine makes queries really really fast, does it mean that OLAP is no longer needed? Can I just dump all the data into tables and ignore all the other optimisations for Data Warehousing that Oracle Database provides?
This question misunderstands the primary reason that people invest in OLAP systems. It is not only about performance, but also (especially) about the calculation capability, and the ease with which even the most complex of business calculations can be expressed. Many business calculations are difficult to do in SQL on regular relational tables. Some are still not even possible. And in turn, many BI tools resort to the transfer of large amounts of data across the network to mid-tier servers, or even the client, where the calcs are performed. Database Machine will allow them to pull the raw data much faster than before, but you still have a more complex architecture than you need, and network performance will be impacted. The OLAP Option makes time series, shares, indexes, ratios and so on that businesses use on all their performance dashboards really easy to define, and really efficient to process. In the Database.
As regular readers of this blog know, the OLAP Option provides sophisticated multidimensional calculation and query functionality, accessible by pretty much any tools via a simple SQL query. There are hundreds of multidimensional-aware analytic calculation functions delivered by the OLAP Option - best of breed capability. This in turn leads to further performance benefits of course, but especially phenomenal ease of use and cost of ownership improvements. If all your KPIs are calculated within the Database, and surfaced to your BI tools, BI apps and Dashbards as simple columns that can be SELECTed; you reduce to trivial levels the amount of work you need to do in each BI Tools metadata layer with regard to (re)defining those calculations.
Other Data Warehouse vendors - appliance & non-appliances alike - cannot do this, and instead force you into further fragmenting your information asset across multiple servers and engines, with the added complications to the BI infrastructure that brings. The other vendors will require you to purchase, install, build and manage seperate standalone multidimensional data marts, usually from 3rd party vendors. None of them have embedded analytics into the core of the Database like Oracle has. And none provide simple high performance SQL access to the results of these analytics.
The combination of extremely fast performance for IO intensive queries (which characterise the work of some of the users of the data warehouse and are typicaly the queries targetted by the DW Appliance vendors) together with the multidimensional calculation power of the OLAP Option (which are commonly consumed by the masses via interactive dashboards etc, as well as used by the analyst users) in an easy to install, pre-configured, balanced hardware platform is very compelling.
Exciting times for Oracle BI and Data Warehousing.
The market reaction to the news that Oracle, together with HP, are now offering a 'DW Appliance' with superior performance, based on proven hardware components & including Oracle Database 11g, has reflected a common view that I heard while answering questions from customers at Open World: that the rationale for purchasing one of the niche vendors' DW Appliances, with their narrow sweet spot and less capable database software is now more questionable than ever.
But why would anyone say that? Surely 'performance' is a game of leap-frogging, and if/when one of the DW Appliance vendors releases a newer faster machine before HP-Oracle does, won't that mean that the Oracle Database Machine's advantage is short-lived?
Not at all.
The HP-Oracle Database Machine is a DW Appliance like no other. This is because Oracle Database has depth & breadth of functionality and power that none of the others can claim. When you purchase a Database Machine you get Oracle Database EE, Real Application Clusters and Partitioning pre-installed and preconfigured, with ASM being used to manage the storage grid. All of the features included in there are available for use as soon as you plug in your new machine. But you can leverage much more even than that, of course.
And this is a key point - all the capabilities, features and options available in Oracle Database 11g are available on the Database Machine. Security, High Availability, Manageability, support for a Mixed Workload, and Embedded Analytics - all of it. And because this is standard Oracle Database, it is easy to run any of your applications on it - no specialised knowledge of rarely used niche RDBMS's required. Anything that runs your existing Oracle servers will run on Database Machine without change.
This includes OLAP of course. Oracle Database OLAP is there too - pre-installed along with the rest of Oracle Database EE. You just need to license it for use on the DB Machine when you choose to use it. And this is great news as it adds multidimensional calculation and analysis sophistication to an already awsome piece of kit.
A majority of the Oracle OLAP Option customers that I have met who report disappointing performance turn out to be IO Bound on their servers. That is, the server and storage they are using is out of balance, and constraining the ability of the Database to process the data. The HP-Oracle Database Machine (like some of the Optimized Warehouses also available from Oracle and it's other hardware partners) provides excellent IO performance thanks to the balanced high speed infiniband interconnects between the storage and the database servers included in the machine, and is optimised for data warehousing queries across the spectrum - OLAP included. Good IO performance directly translates to even more effective OLAP implementations.
So, the HP Oracle Database Machine is a great fit for Oracle Database OLAP Option, and other embedded analytics features of the Oracle Database, including Data Mining, SQL Analytics and Statistical Functions, and the OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder) Data Profiling and Data Quality features. Delivering BI applications that leverage these powerful capabilities is also much easier thanks to them being pre-installed on the Database Machine.
And Oracle OLAP is a great fit for the Database Machine, too. Which leads to the other question I have been asked by a couple of people: if Database Machine makes queries really really fast, does it mean that OLAP is no longer needed? Can I just dump all the data into tables and ignore all the other optimisations for Data Warehousing that Oracle Database provides?
This question misunderstands the primary reason that people invest in OLAP systems. It is not only about performance, but also (especially) about the calculation capability, and the ease with which even the most complex of business calculations can be expressed. Many business calculations are difficult to do in SQL on regular relational tables. Some are still not even possible. And in turn, many BI tools resort to the transfer of large amounts of data across the network to mid-tier servers, or even the client, where the calcs are performed. Database Machine will allow them to pull the raw data much faster than before, but you still have a more complex architecture than you need, and network performance will be impacted. The OLAP Option makes time series, shares, indexes, ratios and so on that businesses use on all their performance dashboards really easy to define, and really efficient to process. In the Database.
As regular readers of this blog know, the OLAP Option provides sophisticated multidimensional calculation and query functionality, accessible by pretty much any tools via a simple SQL query. There are hundreds of multidimensional-aware analytic calculation functions delivered by the OLAP Option - best of breed capability. This in turn leads to further performance benefits of course, but especially phenomenal ease of use and cost of ownership improvements. If all your KPIs are calculated within the Database, and surfaced to your BI tools, BI apps and Dashbards as simple columns that can be SELECTed; you reduce to trivial levels the amount of work you need to do in each BI Tools metadata layer with regard to (re)defining those calculations.
Other Data Warehouse vendors - appliance & non-appliances alike - cannot do this, and instead force you into further fragmenting your information asset across multiple servers and engines, with the added complications to the BI infrastructure that brings. The other vendors will require you to purchase, install, build and manage seperate standalone multidimensional data marts, usually from 3rd party vendors. None of them have embedded analytics into the core of the Database like Oracle has. And none provide simple high performance SQL access to the results of these analytics.
The combination of extremely fast performance for IO intensive queries (which characterise the work of some of the users of the data warehouse and are typicaly the queries targetted by the DW Appliance vendors) together with the multidimensional calculation power of the OLAP Option (which are commonly consumed by the masses via interactive dashboards etc, as well as used by the analyst users) in an easy to install, pre-configured, balanced hardware platform is very compelling.
Exciting times for Oracle BI and Data Warehousing.
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