Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’ve been back in the office for a few days this week, and so it’s a good
chance to catch up on what’s happened while I’ve been away.

The big news for all us Oracle OLAP users is that the 10.1.0.4 database patch
is now available for Windows (Patch No. 4163362 on
metalink) and AWM 10.1.0.4 should be
available on OTN from Thursday. Believe it or not, it’s only available on
Windows at the moment, which must be a first, and I’ve installed it now and got
myself up and ready for tomorrow. AWM and the Global sample schema should be
available on the OLAP homepage on OTN from tomorrow, and with a bit of luck
there should be some hands-on / Oracle-by-Example tutorials available around the
same time. I’m also putting another article together for OTN on Discoverer Plus
OLAP and AWM which should be published early in April.

On the Oracle news front, apart from the
Retek deal
the main news has been around Customer Data Hub and the launch of Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g. eWeek ran a couple of articles on Customer Data Hub ("Oracle
Customer Data Hubs Chief Defends CDH Model" and
"Oracle’s
Customer Data Hubs: The Emperor Does Indeed Have Clothes" that look
at what Oracle’s Data Hub technology really consists of, and IT Week in the UK
ran a short article on Oracle’s
new bundled BI offering, with a couple of quotes from yours truly about
product take-up.

The other big news from a BI perspective was

IBM’s purchase of Ascential Software. Ascential sell
Datastage, a
high-end (though not as high end as Ab Initio or Informatica) ETL tool that was
already resold by IBM, and Ascential itself was

spun-off from Informix when the Informix database was sold to IBM. With the
well
received purchase of Ascential,
IBM fills a
gap in its product offerings and has it’s own product now to compete with
Oracle Warehouse Builder and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services. What
this means for Informatica (who also had IBM as a reseller) and Ab Initio (who
presumably look vunerable themselves to a takeover) is the subject of
much speculation,
with talk of
Oracle themselves making a play for one of them, although personally I can’t
see what interest Oracle would have with these. Oracle’s in the business of
migrating other RDBMS data to Oracle, either using OWB or using Data Hubs, and
only provides the ability to move data to other RDBMS’s as a means to "tick
boxes" in product evaluations. If it’s going to buy anyone in the BI markeplace,
it’d make far more sense going after someone like Cognos or Business Objects, or
as speculated in the past, Hyperion. Anyway, back to Datastage, it’ll be
interesting to see how IBM integrate it in with their existing WebSphere
Integration Integrator, but it’s a good product and one that had an Express
Server integrator, when even Oracle (to this day) don’t have such a feature in
their ETL tool.

Finally, a couple of new blogs to check out.
Mike Ault has started a new site
and in his first postings reflects on

changes in tuning techniques and
techniques
for running successful training courses.
Jonathan Lewis doesn’t have a blog
as such, but his
Miscellaneous Items page is fairly regularly updated and contains some
interesting recent postings on
the nature of Oracle
scientists, why test
cases are important, the
Rumsfeld Box (!) and
a review of Don
Burleson’s Silver Bullets
article.

That’s it for now, back in a few days.

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