OBIEE and Essbase Articles in OTN 2008 Top 10
Well there's a surprise. Justin Kestyln in his Best of 2008 : The Most Popular Tech Articles and How-To's Published This Year article has two of my articles in the top 10. Apart from it being nice that the two articles went down well, it's also pretty significant that there were two BI articles in what is traditionally a database and Java-dominated list. It just shows I guess how much interest there is around OBIEE and the new Hyperion (Essbase) tools.
Thinking back to when I wrote the articles, the BI and SOA one was particularly interesting as it was written in conjunction with OBIEE product development down in Bristol UK. who had developed the bit of custom code that we talk about in the article. Web Services on the current release of OBIEE were a bit tricky to use, and so Joel Crisp from Oracle wrote a bit of "wrapper" code that made accessing the BI Presentation Server via web service calls a lot easier. The article itself was good fun to write and I've had a lot of feedback from people over the past year who have downloaded the code and given it a go. From what I've seen in public demonstrations of OBIEE 11g, this functionality is taken to a whole new level with the "Action Framework", I'm looking forward to potentially updating the article some time next year when this all gets "productized".
I remember writing the Essbase article back in January 2008, whilst I was staying in a hotel room above a pub whilst working on-site with a client down in the Southwest of England. If I remember correctly the hotel room didn't have a desk and so I spent the best part of two weeks, with my laptop perched on the bed, trying to work through the examples and pull it all together. One of the tricky things with Essbase is knowing where to stop when writing a beginners article; Essbase is such a rich, full-featured environment that like the Oracle database, there are many ways to accomplish simple tasks, and the hard thing was deciding on a way of introducing the technology whilst keeping the walkthrough as simple as possible. In the end I decided to show the build process using Essbase Integration Services (Venkat has run a similar set of articles recently, using the more traditional SQL queries and rules file approach), and to leave out some of the more complex concepts such as aliases, UDAs, alternate hierarchies and so on. I also deliberately only loaded dimension member data that I could guarantee would be unique across the whole Essbase cube, again avoiding some of the more complex concepts around non-unique dimension members. Like the BI and SOA article, this one could also be updated now as the integration between OBIEE and Hyperion is now more complete, and you can also load data into cubes using the more fully-featured Essbase Studio application available from the 11.1.1 release onwards.
Anyway, it was good to see the two articles in the top 10, hopefully they were of use to a few people.