Final Day at Collaborate’06, and Setting Up Siebel Analytics
April 28th, 2006 by Mark Rittman
Well that’s it for me now at Collaborate’06. We did our last presentation
yesterday and afterwards, I went along to the IOUG closing debate, on commercial
Unix vs. Linux. As you would have expected, the argument came down to
commoditisation of hardware and software, and the cost benefits accruing from
this, vs. the tried and tested, safe route of sticking with commercial Unix.
In the end though, I have to say that it was delivering the
presentations that was the low spot of the week for me. Due to the way the
presentations had been divided up amongst the user groups, and the way they were
scheduled, we ended up on the Quest track (Quest is the JD Edwards and
PeopleSoft user group) and with our presentations being on BI Beans and Oracle
OLAP, there were very few people within this user group who knew what the
technology was about. If we ever do this in future, I’d work very hard to get
onto the IOUG track instead, as that’s where you’d normally look for OLAP and
Oracle business intelligence presentations.
Still, on a bright note, we finished up around 2.00pm and I went
back to my room and started to get Siebel Analytics up and running. After a few
hours, I’d got the software installed and configured, brought in the Discoverer
Videostore data, and the SH sample schema, and started playing around with
Oracle Answers and Oracle Dashboard. First, a screenshot of the administration
tool, with the physical, business and presentation elements of the semantic
layer:
Then, creating a simple table and crosstab using Oracle Answers:
… and then publishing some reports as part of a dashboard:
First impressions are that there’s a few things that’ll catch
you out when setting up data sources (I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you
what they are, yet) and Oracle Answers is quite a bit different from Discoverer,
when you come to set up crosstabs, tables and so on. I still can’t get it to
display a crosstab properly (the axis display OK, but the measures are blank)
and I’m having trouble getting new presentation layer items to display properly
when logging in as anything other than administrator, but we’re up and running
and now I’ve proved to myself that it works, it’s a case of reading the manuals.
Anyway, flights’ at 6.00pm and then it’s back to Heathrow, and
then Brighton. Until next week then, that’s it for now.
May 1st, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Hi Mark,
What do you think about the papers in data warehousing area this year?. I got a feeling that the focus of most of the papers are on discoverer and analytic tools rather than the database side. Oracle is mainly used as a database for data warehouse and the anlytical side is not very ‘mature’. I can understand if this happens in the Oracle Open world. But it was rather strange to see it in IOUG. Could use please comment on the papers on the non-analytical area and why there are not any papers on that area this year.
May 3rd, 2006 at 7:42 am
Hi there,
To be honest, I didn’t really get to see many papers, or go to many talks, other than the ones I reported on. Doing three presentations myself, much of the time between presentations was taken up by practicing, going through slides and so on. So I didn’t really get to see if there were any other talks on data warehousing.
One talk I did got to was George Lumpkin’s one on data warehousing architectures. I’d read the slides from the previous time he’d run it at Open World, and I was curious to know what his rationale was, how he was doing away with the ODS and so forth. But no, I can’t really comment on why there were so few DW papers (if indeed there were) as I didn’t get a chance to go to many talks other than my ones or the BI tools ones.
May 12th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
I agree the general focus of the BI area this year was on the Oracle BI tools. But there were a few very good presentations on the data warehouse design, modeling, ETL and tuning areas and the attendees were more interested on those presentations than the ones on BI tools. I saw more than 250 people in the conference rooms for the presentations by Ian Abramson, Vincent Chazhoor and Ben Bor. I attended a few presentations on the discoverer/tools side also and there were not many people in those rooms in most of the cases.