Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’m conscious that I haven’t updated the weblog much over the last few weeks
so I thought it worth posting a note of explanation. Funnily enough I have
actually still been working away on articles and presentations over the last
couple of weeks, but they’re all for other sites or publications and
consequently won’t be available for a couple of weeks or so. I’ve just finished
putting together an article on building BI dashboards using Discoverer Drake,
Oracle Portal and Oracle 10g for OTN which
hopefully should be published in a few weeks, and before that I’ve written
something on Oracle 10g OLAP, Analytic Workspace Manager and Discoverer Drake
which should be in the March edition of
Oracle Scene (the
UKOUG magazine). Other than that, if you’re coming along to the
UKOUG BIRT SIG on
Thursday I’m doing a presentation on
Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g and Oracle 10g OLAP, a kind of "best of" of the
weblog over the last few months where I’ll be reporting back from the first of
our OracleBI 10g implementations.

Other than that, like a few other

Oracle bloggers
I’ve been taking a look at the Beta version of
OWB
"Paris" and although not had as much time spare as I’d have hoped, what I’ve
seen so far (particularly the

data profiling feature, which is a completely new feature and worth the
license cost alone) is excellent.

Usability is much, much improved, to the point where there’s now a simplified
install process, that lets you either just get started quickly with a local OWB
user and repository, or carry out a traditional install where you create your
users and repositories on remote servers. Great for quickly installing OWB on
your laptop and getting up and running without loads of fuss.

Also there are some nice touches around the setting up of multiple user
access to the repository. In earlier versions of OWB, you could either have all
users logging directly into the design repository, or you could

with a bit of work authorise regular database users to access the design
repository through their oracle login. With Paris, you can authorise database
users to access the design repository  directly from within the GUI, or
create new users if accounts don’t exist already.

As part of the account creation process, you can easily then check a box to
install the OWB target tables and packages within the user schema, so that you
can deploy objects to it. A nice user-friendly touch.

It’s then a simple job to bring up the properties for a particular module

and individually set that user’s privileges (full control, edit,
compile, read) on that module.

Much easier to set up than before, and a much more granular
level of access control (permissions go down to individual mapping level if
needed). Like I say, it’s only early days yet and I’ve not yet had the chance to
put the tool through it’s paces, but it looks like it’s well worth the wait and
likely to live up to all the promises.

Anyway, I’ve got lots of ideas for articles and postings up my
sleeve and I should be able to write a bit more for the weblog over the next few
weeks. I’ve been meaning to put something together that looks at exactly what
extra you get when you use the OLAP option, analytic workspaces and Discoverer
Plus OLAP 10.1.2, as compared to regular EULs and Discoverer Plus 10.1.2, and
we’re starting our first
Enterprise Planning & Budgeting proof of concept in the next week or so so
I’ll have lots to write about around the realities of setting up an EPB system.
I’m conscious as well that I haven’t written much about pure database
development recently, but what I end up writing about generally reflects what
I’m doing with clients and recently all of the work I’ve been doing has been
around Oracle Business Intelligence 10g rather than PL/SQL development or
performance tuning. In fact due to the amount of project work I’m doing at
present, I had to cancel attending Jonathan Lewis’
"Optimizing
Oracle - Performance By Design" seminar that I’d booked myself on to earlier
this month, but with a bit of luck I should be able to go along to the next one
in May and get to hear about Oracle performance from the "master of the
cost-based optimizer" (who’s also just announced that he’s just finished writing
a

book out on the same subject out presumably later this year)

Before I go, just a quick reminder that the company I work for,
SolStonePlus, are
currently recruiting for people with Oracle Warehouse Builder or Oracle
Application Server skills. Take a look at the
advertisment on the
SolStonePlus website and feel free to drop me a line if you want any more
details. Other than that, if you’re coming along on Thursday do make a point of
saying hello and hopefully the
day’s agenda
should be interesting and useful.

Posted in Oracle Warehouse Builder |