Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

If you’re a user of Oracle 9i OLAP Web Agent or Express Web Agent and was
wondering whether the 9i version worked with 10g OLAP, you’ll be interested to
note that Oracle’s Aneel Shenker recently
posted a note on the OTN OLAP forum on this subject.

According to Aneel, the latest version of Oracle 9i OLAP Web Agent (version
9.2.1, downloadable as patch 3467263 from
metalink, which superseded the

version 9.2.0 still available on OTN) will work with Oracle 10g OLAP when an
additional patch, no. 3941853 from metalink, is applied.

If you’ve never heard of Web Agent before, it’s an interesting old Express
technology used for building OLAP web applications that was ported to Oracle 9i
OLAP. The closest analogy to Web Agent in the Oracle world is the PL/SQL Web
Toolkit, in that it allows you to build up web pages using in this case OLAP DML
and include within them data from your analytic workspace. What’s interesting is
that you can display your OLAP data either as regular HTML, or you can use a
Java applet OLAP client to provide a full set of drilling, rotating and querying
features with very little coding.

Note the java applet in the bottom right-hand corner, and the
top half of the screen, that shows how a completely custom interface can be
built up just by having your OLAP DML code output HTML

Web Agent came with a version of the Express "selector" that
isn’t a million miles away from the BI Beans query bean, which you can see being
used in the second screenshot.

Web Agent was particularly popular with Express customers, who
used it to not only build front ends for their Express cubes, but also to build
complete web applications, including data entry as anything you could code in
HTML and direct at a web server, you could code with web agent. Most Oracle 9i
OLAP Web Agent applications are ports of previous Express Web Agent applications
(the ported code runs pretty well straightaway with only a few modifications)
although given that 9i Web Agent runs directly against an analytic workspace,
without the need for an OLAP Catalog, it’s occasionally used as a quick and
functional way to web-enable analytic workspaces without all the "baggage" that
comes with the OLAP API.

Also, a quick trivia note : Rod LeDieu’s BestHQ Software (who are no longer
trading) produced a 9i OLAP Web Agent-based application for creating and loading
analytic workspaces, called HAWK (HTML Analytic Workspace Konstructor), a
screenshot of which is displayed below:

HAWK was available in the days before Analytic Workspace Manager was
available (which if you remember took a good couple of years to arrive after 9i
OLAP was first launched) and provided a web interface for building 9i OLAP
analytic workspaces and their associated programs. There was talk at the time
(end of 2002) about possible collaboration and investment by Oracle, but I’d
imagine that none of this actually transpired as little was heard of it
afterwards.

That being said, Web Agent is quite a nifty little technology and an
interesting way of displaying Oracle OLAP data on the web without the need for
BI Beans or the OLAP API. If you’re interested in reading more about it there’s
an old
powerpoint presentation available for download from a few years ago that
sets out how it works and how Express Web Agent applications can be upgraded.

Posted in Oracle OLAP |