Oracle Business Intelligence & DW Forum
June 1st, 2006 by Mark Rittman
One or two of you might be aware that I’ve been hosting an
Oracle Business Intelligence & Data
Warehousing Forum on this site for the last six months (you can access it
from the "Forum" tab at the top of each page). The idea behind it was to put
together a place where we could discuss the specifics of Oracle’s BI tools
(Discoverer, Reports, Portal etc) together with the related server technologies
(OLAP, Oracle RDBMS, Application Server and so on). Obviously the risk with any
new forum is that you end up "forking" the ones that are already there, but I
thought that we might end up creating a kind of Oracle BI&W community, in the
same way that say Howard has around the
Dizwell forum or Tom does around AskTom.
Looking back at it after six months, I guess it’s kind of worked, in
that there’s about three pages of topics and a couple of hundred registered
users, but what’s happened is that it’s pretty much been myself and a couple of
others (Peter Scott mostly, with a couple of replies from people like David
Aldridge and Mark Malakanov) who have done the replies, with most postings being
people just looking for help with a particular tool problem. Anyway, what with
the amount of time I’m away, and the fact I’ve got a young family, I’ve not had
the chance to answer many questions myself recently and I started to think about
shutting it down and directing people to the OTN forums instead. I
posted something to
this effect on the forum, and in fact a couple of people,
Peter Scott again
and
Doug Burns, picked up on this and suggested people take a look and see if
they can contribute something. Thanks Pete and Doug, that’s a nice thing to to.
Doug did
make an interesting point later on actually, that the Oracle BI world is a
bit different to Oracle server, where you’re all using one product as opposed to
Oracle BI, where everyone’s using a different tool and the questions are very
tool-specific. So maybe a "general" BI forum will never work? We’ll have to wait
and see.
One thing Doug’s intervention did do though was point out that the new
account activation process wasn’t working. I originally had it set up so that
you could activate your own account but the process got hijacked by spammers,
who started creating accounts for themselves and then posted spam topics and
replies. I changed it around so that the forum software sent me an activation
email, but they’ve never come through, hence if you’re still waiting for your
account to be activated, drop me an email and I’ll sort it out. Sorry. For now,
I’ve set it back to user activation, but if it gets abused again, I’ll have to
consider something else.
So, the state of play now is that the forum is still running, and it’s still
the place for you to post questions about Oracle’s BI&W tools, or to discuss any
aspect of Oracle business intelligence & data warehousing. If it takes off, I’ll
keep it going, but if it doesn’t, well that’s life and I’ll try something else.
In the meantime though, surely someone’s got an opinion about Oracle BI&W – what
do you think of the new Siebel Analytics tools? Where do you think this leaves
Discoverer? What about the new OWB pricing and packaging? Any tried out XML
Publisher on a BI&W project yet? Come on over to the forum and
let us know your opinion.
