Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’ve somewhat disappeared off the blogosphere over the last couple of months,
with updates to this site pretty few and far between. In fact I’ve actually been
busier than ever and doing a lot of research and writing on Oracle BI&W, plus
there’s been quite a few developments work-wise that I can’t really go into now
but are going to have a big impact for me over the coming few years. Whilst I
can’t really talk about this now, I can talk about some of the articles and
publications I’ve been working on and recap on some bits of Oracle news that you
might not be aware of.

Looking at writing first of all, one big thing that I’ve been working on is
contributing a couple of chapters for the forthcoming Oracle Press "Oracle
Discoverer Handbook", on the OLAP support in the 10.1.2 release of Oracle
Business Intelligence Discoverer. If you’ve tried to find documentation on
Discoverer Plus OLAP you’d have noticed that there’s only a small section in the
online documentation, and so what I’ve done is go through all the common tasks
that you’ll need to coverer using D4O, and describe in more details some of the
tips and tricks that I’d previously published elsewhere, such as for example
drilling from OLAP to
relational or

building your first cube using Analytic Workspace Manager. The book is
primarily written by Michael and Darlene Armstrong-Smith (you’ll know Michael
from the
OTN Discoverer Forum) and will go out in their names, but it was interesting
contributing towards the book and gave me a better idea of the work involved in
doing something myself. From speaking to Michael, it should be out at the start
of 2006, and from what I’ve seen of Michael and Darlene’s chapters, it’s shaping
up to be pretty good.

Another big article I’ve been working on is a piece for DBAZine on Oracle 10g
OLAP Performance Tuning. Unlike "regular" data warehousing, there’s little
content or material out there for tuning the OLAP server within Oracle Database
10g, and this article seemed a good way for me to combine my interest in OLAP
with my other interest in Oracle performance tuning. What I’ve done is take a
methodical, "scientific" approach to tuning analytic workspaces, tried to back
up assertions with test cases and documented the effect of the various
techniques, and I’ve now passed the paper out to a few people on the OTN OLAP
Forum, plus others like Dan Vlamis, for technical review. With a bit of luck
this will be a first stab at producing an "authoritative" OLAP tuning paper, and
if I can get it tech reviewed by some of my peers, we can try and make sure it’s
correct and provable. I’m hoping to get it through review by the end of August,
with a publication date later in September.

On a personal level, I got the news through the other week that I’ve been
awarded the "Oracle Magazine Editor’s Choice" award for "Oracle ACE of the Year
2005", and I’ve just taken part in an interview that’ll appear in Oracle
Magazine in Nov/Dec 2005. I guess this is for work on the blog, and perhaps the
OTN articles, but I’ll be meeting up with the OTN and Oracle Magazine team at
Open World next month, so no doubt I’ll hear more then. Also, if you’re over at
Open World, I’ll be taking part in the "OTN Meet The Experts" BI session at the
OTN Lounge on September 21st between 11.30 and 12.00, a non-scripted, informal
Q&A session where I’ll try and answer questions on Oracle BI & data warehousing.

Whilst I’ve been away there’s been another spate of new Oracle blogs
arriving, including one by a member of the Oracle BI product team (Abhinav
Agarwal I think) called the "Oracle Business Intelligence Blog" (Abhinav, if
it’s you, drop me a line to get in touch). The blog starts off with a couple of
interesting postings, one on the

memory impact of hosting large Discoverer workbooks in portlets, and one on
the

install methods with the upcoming Phase 2 (10.1.2.0.2) release of Application
Server - this second posting was particularly interesting as it appears that
this next release will restore the option to install Discoverer and Portal in
the same Oracle home, which will reduce the total footprint if you want to get
both Portal and Discoverer installed on the same machine (and it’ll save you
needing to associate the Discoverer tier with the infrastructure tier). I’ll
keep an eye on this blog as it appears to be written by someone from within the
product team, so will hopefully be a good way to see what’s coming along with
new product releases. Other new blogs you might want to bookmark include
Andrew Clarke (fellow ACE,
Brit, and UKOUG SIG committee member),
Wim Coekaerts (OTN’s
Mr Linux) and Lisa Dobson (newbie
DBA based up in Newcastle).

Finally, if you keep an eye on the
OTN BI &
OLAP homepage (as you do), you might have noticed a new utility called

OX that’s available for download. It’s all a bit mysterious and unheralded
but from having a play around with it and reading the

readme.txt, I think OX stands for "OLAP Explorer" and it’s a
lightweight viewer/explorer for analytic workspace objects. Here’s a few
screenshots of it in action:

There’s also an entry in the toolbar menu for "Install OX
Protocol" which doesn’t work in the version I’ve downloaded, and there’s nothing
in the documentation to suggest what it does. Mysterious. The Help menu item
brings up an empty help dialog and there’s nothing about it on OTN or the OLAP
Forum so it’s a bit of a mystery as to what this tool is actually about, but
where it differs from AWM10g is that it doesn’t depend on their being a valid
"Model View" of the AW, so I guess it’s an IDE for working directly with OLAP
DML and "raw" OLAP objects. Perhaps if anyone knows more about it, in particular
the "OX Protocol", they can drop me a line?

Anyway, that’s it for now, back in a day or so.

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