Tuesday and Wednesday at Collaborate’06
April 27th, 2006 by Mark Rittman
It’s been a busy couple of days at Collaborate, hence the lack of updates
since Monday. We’ve been giving presentations over the last couple of days, and
coupled with trying to attend a few of the sessions, there’s been little time
for blogging.
Most of the evenings have been taken up with events and meals. On Monday
night, I met up with Peter Robson, James, Rachel and Gemma from the UKOUG for a
quick drink, and then Tuesday night was a BI&W reception held by Oracle in the
Old Hickory Steakhouse. A good chance to catch up with people such as Michael
Armstrong Smith and Dan Vlamis, plus quite a few of Oracle’s BI&W and data
warehousing team were there, including Mike Durran, a really nice guy from
Bristol who’s one of the PM’s for Discoverer. I met up with most of the Oracle
people again on Wednesday night, plus David Furston, Andreas Kugelmeier and
Laura Mckechnie. It was a good opportunity to put faces to names, plus discuss
data warehousing architectures and how the new Siebel tools fit into the
picture. In all honesty, it was the meet-ups like this that have made the
conference for me, an excellent chance to discuss stuff face to face and to meet
some of the people you come across in the Oracle BI&W world.
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday, when not in talks, going to the Oracle
demogrounds and having a play around with the new Siebel Analytics tools, in
particular Oracle Dashboards, Oracle Answers and Oracle Delivers. The main
questions I wanted to answer were to what extent the new Siebel
Oracle Analytic Server is an OLAP server, where it fits in with Oracle OLAP, and
where Oracle Answers (the ad-hoc query tool) and Oracle Delivers (the scheduling
and alerting tools) fit in. From what I can tell, the Oracle Analytic Server
isn’t an OLAP server as we’d know it, with a multi-dimensional cache, OLAP query
language and so on, but it’s got OLAP-style features and provides an end-user
experience that supports drilling, crosstabs, page items and so on.
I think one of Oracle’s priorities over the next few months is to take more
of the OLAP capabilities of Discoverer and add them into the BI Suite Enterprise
Edition product stack, with Oracle OLAP still being around as an OLAP datasource
for the Analytic Server cache. I also had a play around with the Dashboard
element of BI Suite EE, it looks very slick, a vast improvement over Portal, but
quite tricky and complicated for an untrained user to work with – it certainly
makes Discoverer look very useable, very easy to pick up, I can still see a very
important role for Discoverer as an easy to learn, very "obvious" way of
reporting on your data. That said, the Siebel technology looks very, very
impressive, with the semantic layer in particular being a step on from the EULs
that we’ve worked with previously. One note of caution though is over price -
from speaking to people, the per-CPU license fee for the whole BI Enterprise
Edition stack, including the analytic server (which could remove the need for an
Oracle database + OLAP Option), Answers, Delivers, Dashboards and so on, is an
eye-watering $225k per CPU. Wow. I said at the time that we’d have to buy one
copy per country, and share it amongst ourselves, but if you compare it to
buying the database + options + app server stack, plus all the new features
you’re getting, and in addition compare that to a typical Business Objects or
Cognos implementation, which again can reach up into the $1m mark, it’s not too
unreasonalble a price.
I went along to a few of the "keynotes" as well, including the database one
on Tuesday morning, and the BI product direction one in the afternoon. I was
suprised at the low numbers at each one – at Open World, people are queuing for
an hour beforehand, the rooms are all full, but there must have been less than
50 people in each one. It’s been like that throughout the conference – there’s
thousands of people here but not many seem to be in each talk, although that
could be partly because most of them are here for JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and
Oracle e-Business Suite content. Anyway, the database one was useful, looking at
new features and products released since 10gR2 (Data Vault, Oracle Secure Backup
and so on) whilst the BI one looked at the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition.
The latter was based on a combination of the recent New York announcement
coupled with the Discoverer Statement of Direction, and I was able to ask a few
good questions about where the Analytic Server sat in regard to the OLAP Option.
More on that at a later date when I start looking at the Analytic Server in more
detail. One other point at this meeting was that Oracle Warehouse Builder, when
10g R2 is released (the "Paris" release), will be packaged along with the
database, not the BI Suite Standard Edition. I asked whether this meant that OWB
would be installed along with the database, with OWB appearing as a start menu
entry when you installed the Client CD, but at this point it looks like it’ll be
a standalone installation still. Also, it looks like OWB pricing is under
review, as presumably it’s moving from the IDS toolset bundle ($5k per named
user), and there’ll be more announcements when the product is launched in a few
weeks time.
Whilst I’m here, one thing I forgot to mention in my last post was the
presentation on "Controlled Flights into Terrain : Avoiding Database Design
Disasters" by Kevin Loney. I just wanted to say that this was the best
presentation, or more specifically the best presenter, I’d come across at the
event. Really engaged with the audience, very interesting and humourous to
listen to, really knew his stuff, got some good technical points across in an
easy to listen to manner. I’m a big Kevin Loney fan now.
Just to wrap up, I’m finally getting used to the hotel. For the first couple
of days, I couldn’t get over how all nine acres of the hotel grounds was under
glass, but now I’ve been here for a few days (and ventured outside as well,
either really cold or too humid) you can appreciate why they’ve done it. It’s
all still a bit mad, if you know what I mean, but it’s actually a really nice
venue and the climate control makes a real difference. Wouldn’t like to see
their electricity bills though.
That’s it for now. The last of our talks is in half an hour, I’ll report back
on how they went afterwards.
April 27th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
At first I thought 1/4 million per cpu sounded expensive.. but the price stacks well against other tools – and the SE-1 price of $25,000 for upto 50 users and including database and OWB, well!
April 30th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Hi Pete
I’m still trying to come to terms with the EE pricetag – $225k per CPU, which means $1m for a reasonable, 4 CPU deployment, is certainly not a mass market proposition. It also significantly reduces the amount of potential customers for a consulting practice such as ours (and yours I presume).
As you say, the $25k per CPU for the SE-1 offering is good, but it lacks the alerting and delivery options of the EE, which doesn’t really leave you with much more than you get with the standard, Standard edition. Certainly I think the SE-One edition is the one we’ll come into contact with most, in realistic terms it’ll be the only version most small to medium size organisations in the UK will be able to afford.
May 3rd, 2006 at 3:05 am
Mark,
Can you comment on why you stated “(which could remove the need for an Oracle database + OLAP Option)” I don’t think the analytical server would remove the need for a database.
I would love to understand your thoughts in more depth.
Thanks,
Brian
May 3rd, 2006 at 7:48 am
Hi Brian
Where I was coming from, was that I was trying to think up ways to justify the BI EE Suite pricetag, i.e. what existing parts of the architecture can it replace. My thinking was that, in a traditional BI / reporting project, one of the first things you think you need is a database, into which you’ll copy all the data you wish to report on. Now, the Siebel Analytic Server does away for the need for this integration layer, you can point it direct to your data sources, and it gives you an OLAP-style analysis capability, hence conceivably you could do away with the DB+OLAP Option.
In reality though, you’re right, you’re still going to want an Oracle database – either again, to do some integration and data cleansing (the latter being the key part), and to just provide your data. Also, given my talks with the SA people last week, realistically you’re still going to want access to an OLAP server (Oracle OLAP, MS AS) as the SA analytic engine isn’t a MOLAP server as we know it, it’s more akin to a ROLAP engine, so for your true high-end forecasting, OLAP calculations, even access to pre-aggregated data, you’ll still want the OLAP Option.
I’m working through a presentation and paper on this very subject actually, once I’ve done it, i’ll post it to the blog and get some feedback. It’ll be along the lines of “How the Oracle BI Analytic Engine fits into a traditional Oracle DW architecture”.