A Day of Product Releases
July 11th, 2007 by Mark Rittman
Today was the official launch of Oracle Database 11g in New York City, whilst another event, the Oracle Fusion IT Conference, was being held at the Emirates Stadium in London. I couldn’t make it to either as I was onsite with a customer, but the New York event marked the public launch of Oracle’s new major database release with a number of papers and articles going up on OTN providing technical details of the new version. In particular, the papers on the OLAP Option (still short on specific details though), partitioning, compression, performance and Warehouse Builder will be of interest to data warehouse developers.
The other product launch (at least in the UK) was for Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus. This, I believe, replaces OBIEE, costs a bit more, but includes the reporting elements of the Hyperion product suite (i.e. not Essbase or the financial planning tools). Reports back from the Emirates event suggest that Oracle are positioning the Hyperion-derived tools at the “start” and the “end” of the enterprise business intelligence process, with these new tools providing the means to do financial planning and budgeting for the organization, and with the Siebel (and now Hyperion)-derived Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus tools providing operational business intelligence. Obviously one step towards this is folding the operational BI tools that Hyperion had (through the Brio acquisition) into Oracle’s operational BI toolset, the next step is making Essbase compatible with the remaining (Siebel-derived) BI tools which is what I understand they’re working on now. For the time being, you can get Essbase to extract data from the BI Server (via the ODBC client), and support for Essbase as a BI Server data source (native, via MDX I understand) is pretty close – it may even be possible via XML/A now, although I don’t think this is the case.
Looking through the new OBIEE components, the first one that jumps out at me is Hyperion Web Analysis, what is presumably the front-end to Essbase, Hyperion’s OLAP server.
Look at the tool, it reminds me in a way of Express Web Agent, a similar look and feel, presumably flexibility, and use of an OLAP server as the datasource. Hyperion Interactive Reporting (the old Brio, I think) has a similar slightly retro look, although as I’ve said before Brio developers swear by it due to it’s programmability, direct database access and flexibility.
The remaining two tools, Hyperion Interactive Reporting and in particular, Hyperion SQR Production reporting, are interesting ones. On the face of it, together they’re BI Publisher with a few more years development under their belt, but I doubt they’ve got the same next-gen architecture under the covers, which makes you wonder which of all these publishing and reporting tools Oracle will settle on as their strategic direction. Here’s Hyperion Financial Reporting:
and here’s Hyperion SQR Production Reporting:
which looks a lot like a cross between Oracle Reports and Oracle BI Publisher – which is what you’d expect as up until a few months ago, Hyperion were an Oracle competitor looking to have much the same set of reporting tools as their competitors.
My take on this is that existing Oracle customers aren’t going to move en-masse from Reports or BI Publisher to SQR or Interactive Reporting; these tools are coming into the flagship Oracle product line to bring the Hyperion customers into the mainstream Oracle operational BI fold, and they’ll still mainly appeal to legacy Hyperion/Brio users who’ll keep on using them to report on their systems. One or two frustrated Discoverer (particularly Discoverer for OLAP) customers might adopt Hyperion Web Analysis and by extension Essbase, and the Hyperion Financial Reporting tool might pick up a few customers looking for a leg-up with their P&L and balance sheet reporting.
For now though, I think this is more of a placement and tidy-up exercise, bringing Hyperion’s operational BI tools into the main Oracle BI product line, making Oracle BI EE a bit more attractive (and getting a bit more revenue), and positioning things in all the right places for when the main launch of Oracle’s vision of integrated CPM, BI and performance management (a sort of “Grand Unified BI” theory, and one that Oracle are uniquely placed to deliver following the Hyperion aquisition) takes place later this year. It also marks the emergence of Essbase as Oracle’s strategic direction for OLAP analysis, and whilst at the moment Essbase and the Essbase-based tools look a bit out on their own, my bet is that Essbase will become more and more important as the OLAP engine behind (and in front of) Oracle BI, and it probably won’t be a bad idea to get yourself on an Essbase bootcamp sooner rather than later – and as all the Hyperion software has just gone up on http://edelivery.oracle.com, now’s as good a time as any to download it all and start taking a look.
UPDATE: I almost forgot about Jean-Pierre Djicks’s webcast and presentation on the new features in OWB11gR1 and R2. Take a look at the slides (including screenshots of early alpha versions of OWB11gR2 featuring the JDeveloper Fusion IDE as the framework) and listen to the webcast for details on what I first reported on from the ODTUG conference last month.
July 12th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
[...] It’s been an especially entertaining 24 hours. :) For one, Doug pointed out a thread on Oracle forums that I hadn’t seen before. Also, yesterday I mentioned the name change from “Secure Files” to “Fast Files” and Kevin picked up on this too. And of course, lots of posts about 11g. [...]
July 12th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
I wonder whether OWB 11g will stick to Paris release timetables?
;-)
July 12th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Jeff,
OWB11gR1 will be out with the database, so I hear, there aren’t any major new features that will lead to delays. The big one will be OWB11gR2 – the IDE’s being changed to the JDeveloper/SQL Developer framework, mappings will be able to run real-time or batch, there’ll be Knowledge Module integration and so on – if any release will slip, it’ll be this one, there’s a fairly ambitious set of new features in there and I’d be suprised personally if it’s in our hands by the end of CY2008.
regards
Mark
July 19th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
The statement that Essbase is emerging as the strategic direction for OLAP analysis is inaccurate. Clearly, Essbase is (and will be) an important part of Oracle’s EPM strategy – and Oracle is committed to enhancing the product and providing first class support to Hyperion customers into the future.
Similarly, Oracle OLAP (and Partitioning, Data Mining, Warehouse Builder) is strategic for Oracle’s analytic data warehouse. Oracle data warehousing is ranked #1 by every measurement (i.e. market share, scalability, etc.). Our goal is to make Oracle OLAP an integral part of *every* Oracle data warehousing implementation.
This is exemplified by the Oracle Database 11g release – where the embedded OLAP technology has been enhanced to make it leveraged more easily by the 250,000 Oracle Database customers and *all* business intelligence vendors running on Oracle. In 11g, Oracle OLAP cubes can be used as a storage mechanism for materialized views. To be clear, OLAP cubes are seamlessly embedded in the Orace Database materialized view infrastructure (for query rewrite and MV refresh). This can accelerate query performance for BI tools – without requiring the tools to make any changes to their applications.
But that is just about performance. Don’t forget the world class calculation engine that is central to the Oracle Database OLAP cubes. The cubes are automatically represented as a star schema in Oracle Database 11g. This delivers rich analytic content – quickly – to any SQL-based tool; advanced analytic calculations are exposed using very simple SQL. Star joins are optimized in the OLAP engine thanks to tight integration with the Oracle optimizer.
And, of course, key database functionality extends to Oracle OLAP. This includes: 1) Security: Object and data security, 2) Scalability: Real Application Clusters, 3) Availability: Backup-Recovery, Disaster Recovery, RAC, 4) Administration: Enterprise Manager and 5) Portability: All major platforms.
You will be hearing a lot more about Oracle OLAP in the coming weeks/months. Stay tuned.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
I couldn’t help but notice “It also marks the emergence of Essbase as Oracle’s strategic direction for OLAP analysis, …”
It should be undestood that both Essbase and the OLAP Option have roles within Oracle. Essbase is the obvious choice for
OLAP support behind Hyperion EPM applications and should play well in finance and LoB where end users want direct control over servers and data.
The OLAP Option is Oracle’s strategic direction for OLAP in the data warehouse, with it’s primary role being to improve the query performance and add analytic content SQL based business intelligence applications (a far large market than traditional OLAP). Note that Oracle OLAP, particulary cube-organized materialized views, was a very prominate part of Chuck Rozwat’s session in the 11g launch event (see http://www.oracle.com/events/index.html). Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise offered a nice write of up Oracle OLAP in his reveal of the 11g launch event (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/07/oracles_11g_lau.html).
July 19th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Hi Bud, Marty, good to hear from you. I would have replied earlier but your comments were awaiting approval, I was out of the country for a few days.
Thanks for the feedback on the posting, of course the two of you more than anyone would know what is and what isn’t the strategic direction and so on, thanks for this. I guess my comment was based on the following observation:
- from what I’ve seen and heard of the functionality coming in 11g OLAP, it seems to me that the focus for this release is on “supercharging star schemas” – i.e. making OLAP a transparent performance booster for relational data warehousing. Now I see this really as a data warehousing feature rather than a traditional OLAP feature, and whilst it’s going to make the Oracle Database even more attractive as a DW platform, it doesn’t really do much to address the other OLAP usability issues – the lack of functionality in D4O, no support for MDX and XML/A (hence no true OLAP third-party tools) and so on.
- With Essbase though, you’ve got a whole bunch of OLAP apps, an MDX and XML/A interface out, more developed Excel tools and so on, a wide developer ecosystem, a fair amount of customers, and it’s cross-platform with no dependency on an Oracle Database, which seems to be flavour of the month at the moment.
It seems to me then that, in the scheme of things, Oracle OLAP will be positioned as a DW performance booster, whilst Essbase will be positioned for customers who wish to do the more traditional OLAP analysis – lots of ragged hierarchy reports, Balance sheet and P&L reporting, so on and so on, if only because Essbase has the front-end tools and I can’t see Oracle spending an awful lot of time enhancing D4O now. In particular, seeing as Essbase is starting to crop up in architecture diagrams for BIEE as a data source and data consumer, and as BIEE itself is the strategic BI direction, it seemed to me that Essbase, rather than Oracle OLAP, was going to get the attention in future.
That said – you’re obviously right, as you say both OLAP servers will be supported and maintained and developed into the future, and they’ve both got complementary roles – it’s just the message I’ve been hearing is that Oracle OLAP is going to be positioned more to enhance Oracle data warehouses, Essbase will be the recommended OLAP server for use in BIEE.
Anyway, as I said, thanks for the feedback, it’s certainly interesting to see how the products are panning out since the acquistions and release of new versions. I’m keen to download and have a play around with 11g when it’s finally released, I’ll be going through a similar exercise with Essbase once I get a bit of spare time.
– regards, Mark
July 19th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Hi Mark (and readers) – You need to be careful to separate tools from servers. From a server point of view, the ability to use cubes as a generalized summary management solution is the data warehouse it a key feature to the 11g release. It getting lots of attention. That, however, does not mean that the OLAP Options role is limited to a performance enhancement to the warehouse.
The OLAP Option is much more. It is a full featured calculation engine based on the dimensional model, it has the full dimensional model in the Oracle data dictionary and it continues to have a dimensional query API. The calculation model is fully capable of servicing financial reporting (about 1/3 of OLAP Option applications are in the financial reporting space). The calculation model was enhanced in 11g with calculation expressions that are dimensionally aware but are also based the basic grammar of SQL analytic functions. These expressions will appeal to a very broad audience of SQL literate developers and DBAs (unlike MDX).
The real point of the 11g OLAP release is that it brings the performance (both query and incremental update), analytic content and dimensional computation model to the much broader audience of SQL based business intelligence applications and application developers. 11g OLAP also centralizes the management of metadata (business model, calculations and the relational representation of the cube) in the Oracle data dictionary where it can be leveraged by a very wide variety of tools.
About tools …
The OLAP Option doesn’t need to rely on a specific set of tools built for it (with languages such as MDX). Any SQL based BI tool can query OLAP cubes and get the full value of OLAP performance and calculations. That’s a big world.
And, because dimensional concepts are revealed to SQL applications (e.g., value based hierarchies/parent child relationships, ancestors and descendants, etc.), they can easily issue SQL queries that leverage dimensional concepts. Also, it’s worth noting that SQL now has a PIVOT command with SELECT.
The point is that with 11g OLAP you don’t need tools that specifically support it – SQL based applications just work.
If we think about tools within Oracle, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition is a perfect example. It can easily query OLAP 11g cubes, it can leverage hierarchical structures (e.g., WHERE product_parent = ‘FOO’, or WHERE product_brand = ‘TIDE’ AND product_level = ‘UPC’ and it can access any calculation within the cube. It can do this out of the box, without modification. That’s the whole point.
You need to take a look. We’ll be doing some public webcasts in the near future or I can give you a private demo.
July 20th, 2007 at 5:28 am
Hi Bud,
Thanks again for the input. You’re right about separating servers and tools, it’s just that with Oracle OLAP, a server decision (not to support MDX and XML/A) has a big impact on what tools can be used.
To take an example, I was at a customer site yesterday who very much wanted to use Oracle OLAP because of all the architectural reasons – single OLAP/RDBMS database, scalability, familiar Oracle environment and so on – but they chose not to in the end because they couldn’t find a query tool that still let them do all the financial analysis using ragged hierarchies, selecting dimension members based on their position in a hieraerchy and so on. I know D40 can do this, but the functionality of the tool just wasn’t enough for what they were looking for.
Whilst an SQL tool in the surface might have been enough (i.e. they can make selections based on attribute values and dimension member names), they just couldn’t work effectively with flattened, level-based hierarchies and accessing their cubes via SQL just wouldn’t cut it. For example, if their ragged hierarchy was seperated out into, say, 10 or 20 different levels, there’s no way of knowing in which level a dimension member may be placed, and so realistically they need a selector-style UI where they can pick dimension members based on a hierarchy. Now I’m willing to accept that this type of use case is far less prevalent than your normal “select dimension members based on attribute values” – I guess this is why Oracle went for SQL as the preferred OLAP query language – it does leave the more traditional OLAP users with few options, a situation made more difficult by the lack of any third-party OLAP tools support.
Anyway, as you say, it’d be good to see 11g OLAP and I sincerely hope it’s as good as the advance documentation suggests – I’m keen to see usage of the OLAP Option increase if only for personal reasons, as it’s something I’ve spent the last five or so years working on ;-) Let me know when webcasts and so on are scheduled for.
– regards, Mark