Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

It’s traditional at this time to do a "review of the year", so here’s a look back at this blog
during 2004, starting today with January through to June.

January

January started
off with an article by Seth Grimes that compared XML/A and JOLAP, the two
competing standards for OLAP querying. According to Seth, "I believe that
JOLAP will prove a better bet for integrating analytics into Web services than
XML for Analysis because its capabilities will go far beyond the XML API’s. But
software using the XML API should hit the streets first and, given the
importance of the .Net strategy to Microsoft, the specification should see rapid
improvement. Although J2EE platforms support XML and related protocols and could
easily support both interfaces, on their own, the XML API and SOAP should do
much to broaden access to analytic capabilities."

A big part of my work during January was around database (and Discoverer)
tuning, with subsequent articles being published on
Useful Tuning Papers,
More Useful Tuning Papers,
Notes On Oracle 8i
Partitioning, Changing
The STATSPACK Statistics Level and
An Oracle Discoverer
Tuning Methodology. What’s interesting from a personal point of view here is
that I’d recently been on the OCP Database Tuning course that teaches you to
tune the database using instance-wide statistics, and in the end the statistics
that I gathered using STATSPACK didn’t really point to where the problem was -
if I’d have used event 10046 to trace the individual Discoverer sessions, I’d
probably have come across the answer sooner (which was around indexes not being
used due to DECODEs being used on table columns) rather than making educated
guesses based on ratios and instance-wide wait events. I didn’t really come
across event 10046 tracing, or really understand what the wait interface was all
about, until later in the
year, and subsequent
tuning sessions have been a lot more "to the point" and productive.

January was also when
Orablogs.com started, the Oracle blogs aggregation site put together by
Brian Duff. Orablogs.com is now
bringing together 56 Oracle blogs as of the time of writing, and you can
subscribe the the Orablogs
RSS feed and view posts as they happen using your favourite RSS reader.

Finishing up January was a series of postings I put together following a

comp.databases.oracle.server posting by Daniel Morgan, where Daniel posted a
typical bit of PL/SQL v7 code and invited people to suggest how it could be
improved using current PL/SQL features. The answer to the challenge was to use
collections, bulk bind and FORALL, and I looked at what this all involved in
three articles,
"Collections, Cursors, Bulk Binds and FORALL",
"Improving PL/SQL
Performance By Using Collections" and
"Using Bulk Binds And
FORALL". Putting the articles together was a useful exercise as it made me
work through these new techniques in some detail, and later on in the year the
collections article got rerun on the
Quest
Pipelines Newsletter which raised the stakes a bit as the articles were my
way of working out what all these new features were all about.

February

February started off with
Oracle Apps World in San
Diego, with announcements around Customer Data Hub, RFID, E-Business Suite
11.10i, and an apparent change in policy within Oracle to now integrate with
other ERP applications, rather than insist that e-Business Suite replaces them
all. Oracle 10g Release 1 became
available for download,
and TOra was bought by
Quest Software, owners of TOAD. I went off
on holiday to Penang,
and took

Matthew Symonds’ "Softwar" with me, which I
later concluded was
probably the best "History of Oracle" book I’d come across.

On a personal level, I
completed my Oracle 9i DBA OCP, and helped to put together my first
UKOUG Reporting Tools &
BIW Special Event, which was notable in that it had the first UK
demonstrations of Enterprise Planning & Budgeting and Discoverer "Drake".
Finally, I put together an article on
using inline views and
outer joins, which is always a bit dangerous as there’s always someone out
there who knows a better way of doing the same thing in SQL, and just to prove
this theory right about half an hour after I posted the article it got linked to
off of the OTN homepage, which brought a
deluge of
emails and comments correcting me and offering a better way to do it.

March

Early on in March I went to an Oracle Partner day which gave us an early look
at HTML DB, the new rapid application development tool for Oracle 9i and 10g.
After the event I wrote up
my observations around HTML DB, and subsequently got into a conversation
with Sergio who now actually runs his own blog, on HTML DB, over at
http://www.orablogs.com/sergio/ .

Speculation rose during March about a
possible Oracle bid for
BEA (surely this will happen in 2005?), and I wrote a number of extended
articles for the site, one on the
Top Ten New Data
Warehousing Features In Oracle Database 10g, another on
Previewing The Next
Generation Of Oracle Discoverer and one more on
Delivering Oracle
Discoverer Over The Web, two of which were rerun in Oracle Scene later on in
the year. Later on in the month, Oracle 10g R1 was released for Windows, and I
subsequently took a first
look and went on to
build an OLAP cube using the new Enterprise Manager DBConsole. Then, not
learning from my previous inline views/outer joins mistake, I went on and took
my life in my hands and wrote an article that
tried to explain what Bind
Variables are all about.

Lastly, I came across an
excellent Open World paper by Arup Nanda entitled
"A Multisource
Time-Variant Data Warehouse Case Study", which I was particularly impressed
by as it offered an alternate view on how data warehouses could be built - doing
away with ETL tools, and instead building a series of scripts that generated
other scripts that themselves directly loaded the data into the warehouse. As
I’d recently worked on a couple of OWB projects that got bogged down in working
with the tool, rather than solving the problem, this article particularly
resonated with me, and led to an article I subsequently wrote in April titled
"New Developments In
Oracle Data Warehousing", where I looked at the issues Arup raised, together
with general moves towards Agile development, real-time data warehousing and
moves within Oracle Corp. to "de-emphasise" separate data warehouses in favour
of their new Oracle Information Architecture.

April

Connor McDonald argued
that "Index rebuilds in most systems are almost never required",
Oracle released
Application Server 10g for Windows, and Anthony Waite made the first mention
of AWM10g and the AWXML
Java API. Getting into my stride now, my article
"The Role Of The RDBMS In
an Agile Development Project" which argued that the database should be
central to modern application design, and not be just considered a "persistence
layer", generated a
fair bit of
interest and brought me in to contact with a couple of people working with
agile methodologies who I still keep in contact with now. Another article, this
time entitled "Is The
Future Of Data Warehousing "Distributed Intelligence"?" which looked at a
recent article by Michael Carter again generated a few
interesting
comments, including one by Joshua Allen,  the guy behind
"Better Living Through Software",
which funnily enough inspired me to put this site together.

May

May was holiday
time again, this time off to Menorca, and when I got back there was
a number of interesting
news items that had come up, including more details on SQL Server 2005
"Yukon" Analysis Services, IBM DB2 Stinger’s support for the .NET CLR, and
Oracle’s announcements around Business Activity Monitoring. OWB10g was
released for Windows,
and things started to kick
off on comp.databases.oracle.server around the subject of index rebuilds.

Later on in May I took a look at
Web Services, BPEL and
Oracle Data Warehousing, concluding that "In the long term though, it’s
another pointer towards Oracle’s vision of pervasive, real-time business
intelligence, that merges current activity with historical data, and you can see
the Oracle Application Server being a more central part of this process, using
all the interconnect functionality within the application server platform to
bring the disparate data together.". Interestingly, Martin Cooper from
Oracle is giving a presentation on Customer Data Hub (to which the article
referenced) and Data Warehousing at the next UKOUG BIRT SIG, so we should get a
better idea of how all this stuff is likely to affect Oracle BI&W during his
presentation.

"Will BI Projects Go
Offshore?" asked Wayne W. Eckerson, whilst Michael J. Radwin proposed
mySQL As A Data
Warehousing Platform. May saw the start of the
Oracle OLAP Mailing List,
still going but with a level of activity pretty much reflecting the current
take-up of the OLAP Option, and Oracle announced that
All Their 9000 Programmers
Would Run Linux By 2005.

A piece of work I did later on in May lead me to come across Bert Scalzo’s
book

"Oracle DBA Guide To Data Warehousing An Star Schemas", which introduced to
me the new Oracle 9i ETL functions (pipelining, MERGE, table functions) and lead
to my subsequent article
"Streamlining Oracle 9i ETL With Pipelined Table Functions" which walked
through an example given in Bert’s book. What I hadn’t bargained on though was
that Bert’s code example had more than a few errors in it which were
subsequently
pointed out in the article comments, and although I managed to get the code
working in the end it’s a salutary lesson in that you need to test code examples
before reusing them in an article.

Finishing up May were articles on
Delivering Oracle Portal
Content Through Java Server Pages, 
Integrating Web
Services With Oracle BI Beans and Justin Lokitz’s
Integrating Mapping And
Spatial Data Into Your Oracle Data Warehouse, which later on in the year
lead on to a DBAZine article Justin and I collaborated on entitled
"GIS-Enabling Your Oracle Data
Warehouse".

June

June started with
Richard Byrom launching
his OracleAppsBlog, mySQL adding
clustering and stored
procedures, and I posted a review of
"In Search Of Stupidity :
20 Years Of High Tech Marketing Disasters". VentureBlog told us
Who Hates Who
In The Technology World and my second article for DBAZine looked at
Summary Management Improvements
In Oracle 10g.

Part of a new piece of work I was doing required me to look at scripting
OWB’s scripting language and support for Web Services, which lead to articles
titled "Scripting And
Refactoring Using OWB OMB*Plus" and
"Publishing OWB
Transformations As Web Services", and Joel Spolsky published his now famous
"How Microsoft Lost The
API War". Carrying on with OWB, I put together another article this time on
Loading XML Documents
Using OWB 10g, and Oracle launched
Oracle Data Miner, the
long awaited GUI for the Data Mining Option.

Whilst June also saw the
announcement of the new
two-exam Oracle 10g DBA OCP, the big news towards the end of the month was
Oracle’s purchase of
Collaxa, and the subsequent launch of Oracle Business Process Manager.
According to Ashlee Vance, "It could be a bit embarrassing for Sun
Microsystems when Oracle announces the news at Sun’s JavaOne show. Sun has been
trying for years to regain share against IBM and BEA in the app server market
and has so far failed to do so. Oracle, on the other hand, has made steady
gains. At last check, IDC showed Oracle holding 19 percent market share in app
server revenue behind IBM’s 29 percent share and BEA’s 26 percent share. Sun was
still in a holding pattern at 3.5 percent share."

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