Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Concluding my review of 2004, today going from July through to December.

July

July started with
an explanation of Oracle’s
new Information Architecture, "a model that describes how Oracle’s
products can be used to create a ‘modern, real-time enterprise’. It uses the new
10g server technology (database, application server) together with the
e-Business Suite and the new Customer Data Hub, with application development
being carried out using JDeveloper and ADF. Oracle Information Architecture is
Oracle’s way of bringing its different product strands together, and positioning
itself as the leading enterprise infrastructure software and business
applications vendor. What it boils down to is a unified data model, and two of
the hottest buzzwords in the industry at the moment, ‘grid computing’ and
’service-orientated applications’". Service-Orientated Architecture of
course went on to become one of the "big themes" within the Oracle world during
2005, and together with grid computing was the focus of many of the keynotes and
main presentations at Open World last month.

The Oracle Warehouse Builder theme continued with articles on
Householding Warehouse
Data Using OWB10g, an
In-Depth Introduction To Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g,
Version And Environment
Management Using OWB10g and
Comparing Informatica And
OWB. Oracle announced
Product Data Hub, and as part of the Peoplesoft antitrust trial Larry
Ellison said that "Oracle was continuing to consider three or four other
acquisitions, even with its bid for PeopleSoft still pending. He declined to
name the companies but said they were all publicly traded and included a
business applications company, a company involved in "business intelligence"
[my emphasis] and a software infrastructure provider. In a taped
deposition last week, Ellison listed BEA Systems, Siebel Systems and Lawson
Software as past takeover candidates."

Mid-way through July I went to the The UKOUG "10g Features For DBAs" Day at
Ascot and reported on a
number of presentations around the new features in Oracle 10g. I was
particularly interested in the new AWR, ASH and ADDM automatic tuning and
diagnostic features, about which I wrote "If you think of AWR and ASH as
where performance metrics are stored, the ADDM feature is the ‘artificial
intelligence’ part of 10g that takes these figures and comes up with performance
recommendations. ADDM uses a rules-based engine to review the performance data
collected, and suggest courses of action (’enable cursor sharing if bind
variables aren’t being used’ was a scenario mentioned) for the DBA to take. This
was all quite interesting, for a number of reasons. Firstly, AWR, ASH and ADDM
appear to be replacements for STATSPACK, in that they gather instance level
performance statistics on a regular basis, but with the improvement that they
store these figures in a dedicated repository rather than in the PERFSTAT
schema. In addition, the data collected is extended to include more information
on database waits, and is more granular, and with response timing as well as
just number of occurrences. More interestingly though, because of the
granualarity and coverage of the data being captured - specifically, the
information on waits and the new recording of response time - Oracle see this as
replacing the need for event 10046 extended trace as a way of tuning the
database. Oracle see AWR and ASH as collecting enough data of low granularity to
enable the equivalent of extended trace to be carried out, without the
requirement to later on interpret these trace files either by hand or using
tools such as Hotsos Profiler."

August

August was a quiet
month as I needed to take
a couple of weeks off from the site, and postings resumed later in the month
with a review of Oracle
Insights - Tales Of The Oaktable, still my favourite Oracle book and one you
should get hold of if you haven’t already.
More news came through
on AWM10g, AWXML and Oracle OLAP 10.1.0.3 (note - AWM10g and OLAP 10.1.0.4,
which it needs, are due out in Jan/Feb 2005) and
Joel Spolsky’s "Joel On
Software" book was published.

I came across an excellent set of articles by Eric Sink on
The Business Of Software
(…And Consulting), a bit of a diversion away from Oracle databases and
data warehousing but an interesting insight into the business aspects of running
a consulting or product company.An article for DBAZine.com I put together on
The Future Of Microsoft and
Oracle OLAP concluded that "For Microsoft, the emphasis on Analysis
Services 2005 is around making it easier to get data into analysis services
cubes, with a unified dimensional model that works against both relational and
multidimensional data, and proactive caching which moves and aggregates data
into multidimensional cubes without DBA intervention. For Oracle, the effort is
all around scalability and concurrency, and with the emphasis on moving OLAP
processing into the relational database, rather than moving relational data into
a separate OLAP server. The big difference though is around data access
languages, with Microsoft moving towards MDX, and XML/A, as their preferred
query language for all warehouse data, whilst Oracle are betting that SQL, with
analytic extensions, is the superior choice for both OLAP and relational
reporting." SQL Server 2005 should be out this year, so it’ll be interesting
to see how things actually pan out and what the implementation of Analysis
Services is actually like - I suspect it’ll be very good.

Enterprise Manager Grid
Control was released for Windows, a paper on
Analytic Functions for OWB
was released by the OWB product team, and I had my
first major problem with
comment spam (people posting spam links in comments) which has gone on to
affect most of the people writing Oracle blogs, to the point where most of us
either block comments completely or, in my case, only allow them for postings
made in the last few days.

If you were a regular reader of comp.databases.oracle.server or the Oracle-L
list you’ll have noticed the "colourful" debates going on around

tuning using ratios vs. tuning using extended trace,

sizing the buffer cache,

calibrating the cost-based optimizer, and

rebuilding indexes, and subsequent to this Don Burleson
answered his critics with
an article for DBAZine entitled "Busting The Oracle Myth Busters". This
debate rolled on during the rest of 2004, with another article by Don ("Oracle
Tuning Fallacies"), comments on Don’s original article by Jonathan Lewis ("Circular
References proof by restatement (updated)"), an article on Jonathan’s site
by "A Reader In New York" entitled
"That Was Then,
This Is Now" and

further rumblings on comp.databases.oracle.server.

September

September started with an Oracle Forums posting on
OWB Performance Tips
and Paul Narth gave a presentation at the
London Open World on
OWB "Paris" New Features.
Steven Feuernstein wrote about
Dispelling PL/SQL Coding
Myths and Oracle announced
Project Tsunami (the
name of which will presumably change now) and I
put together an article on
Oracle Powerbrowser, Oracle’s own web browser that was available back in the
late 90’s.

Pete Finnigan started
his Oracle Security Weblog, and the
New York Times wrote on
the PeopleSoft takeover ""May I buy your beloved pet dog, just so I can
take him around back and shoot him? That’s how the chief executive of
PeopleSoft, Craig Conway, described Oracle’s hostile bid for his company, which
Oracle intends to use to move PeopleSoft customers to its own software. Oracle’s
takeover tale has entered its 16th month, making it a drama of many acts. Conway
currently declares that he holds no personal animus against Larry Ellison,
Oracle’s chief executive. But in the past, the two rivals made remarks about
each other that were not customary politesse. A "sociopath" is the piquant way
Conway described Ellison last year. Returning the favor, Ellison appropriated
the image of Conway’s vulnerable pet: if Conway and the dog were standing next
to each other, he said, and "I had one bullet, trust me, it wouldn’t be for the
dog."

October

OTN ran an article at the start of
October on
Web Analytics Using Oracle
Application Server Discoverer, Peoplesoft
fired Craig Conway,
Enterprise Planning &
Budgeting was finally released, and I tried to explain how Oracle OLAP’s
data structures worked in
"Understanding Oracle OLAP Dimensions And Cubes". Craig Shallamar wrote that
"Oracle Tuning Is Like
War", John Garmany wrote about the
AS10g Backup & Recovery
Tool, whilst DMReview asked whether
Business Activity
Monitoring Is The Future Of Business Intelligence.

November

November was the
start of the conference season, with
SolStonePlus exhibiting at
the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition and myself
presenting on Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g and OLAP Analysis. The UKOUG Conference was a bit
of a nightmare for me actually as I had a pretty bad cold throughout the three
days, and whilst I was able to do my talk and introduce Jonathan Lewis’
Statistics talk, I had to bow out of introducing Tom Kyte and spent most
evenings going to bed early and missing out on most of the social events.

Shortly after the UKOUG event I went up to Glasgow to do some more database
and application tuning and subsequently
wrote up the methodology
and the results I came up with. This was a particularly interesting tuning
exercise as it raised many questions about application design and
database independence
and subsequent
comments raised a lot of interesting issues from both DBAs and Java
developers. A little while after this I wrote an article entitled
"Is Oracle A Legacy
Technology" that was prompted by a couple of articles by Mogens N rgaard and
drew a number
of comments including one my Mogens himself.

A question that came directly to me via email prompted a posting titled
"The History Of Oracle
Discoverer’s OLAP Support" in which I talked about the various incarnations
of MOLAP support with Oracle’s (up until now) relational ad-hoc query tool.
Nicholas Goodman posted another in his
OWB "Paris" Early Review
series, and Hyperion was raised as a
possible sleeper target
for Oracle, on which I commented "Now that would be an interesting
acquisition - Hyperion provide IBM’s OLAP Server as well as their own Essbase,
and are probably the only really viable competition to Microsoft’s Analysis
Services, certainly in terms of OLAP servers. Traditionally Essbase and Express
were close competitors (with Essbase at that point being owed by Arbor) but over
the past few years Essbase has managed to hold on to second place in the market
(by concentrating on high-end financial analysis and budgeting) whilst Express
and Oracle OLAP has fallen away; Hyperion also of course recently bought Brio,
whose products compete directly with Discoverer. An unlikely acquisition, but
interesting to speculate nonetheless.". Finally, towards the end of the
month the first bits of Enterprise Planning & Budgeting documentation started to
arrive, and I had an initial look at the underlying EPB database fundamentals in
"Under The Covers With
Enterprise Planning & Budgeting", and following on from another email I put
together a short article on
Understanding The Role Of
The OLAP Catalog

December

The start of December was my first ever visit to Oracle Open World in San
Francisco, but before I left there was time for an article on
Executive BI Dashboards
With XML, XQuery And XDS. I
arrived in San Francisco
on the Saturday afternoon and
took a look around the
City on the Sunday, then
went along to the first set of presentations, mainly keynotes and ones about
Business Intelligence 10g, on the Monday.
Tuesday was more about
database tuning and also gave me some time to go down to the exhibition, whilst
Wednesday was the day when
Larry Ellison, Chuck Rowzat and Scott McNealy gave their keynotes. The week
finished up for me on Thursday with my
Discoverer "Drake" and
AWM10g presentation, with the rest of the day spent in the Business
Intelligence CAB meeting and getting ready to fly back on the Friday.

Once I got back to the UK I was able to spend a bit more time looking at the
new product announcements and white papers, and looked in more detail at
Bud Endress and Anthony
Waite’s Oracle OLAP papers and presentations.
Oracle 10g Release 2 was
announced during Open World, with new features such as transparent
encryption, enhancements to ASM, support for the .NET CLR and support for XQuery,
and I took an in-depth look at the
new BI Dashboarding
features in Discoverer "Drake" and BI Beans.

Finishing up 2004 was a
look at Doug Burns’ paper on Tuning Parallel Execution, which I related back
to a recent database tuning exercise I’d carried out, and finally Lucas Jellema
reported on a private briefing session he’d had on EPB, in which he concluded
"The benefits an organisation will get from using EPB will be larger as the
organsation is bigger and more complex. One could almost say: only for real
enterprises with complex business models and distributed workflows around
planning and budgetting will EPB really pay off."

That’s it for me for 2004 - I hope you all have an excellent New Year, that
2005 goes well for you, and see you back in a few days.

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