According to Chris, “The new applications leverage the SOA capabilities and Oracle Business Intelligence Web Services available in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Pluss (OBIEE). The new apps will be available today for FREE from the Apple appstore. These applications will run on iPhone (original), iPhone 3G (available tomorrow) and iTouch using the new version 2.0 software.”

Sounds interesting, I wrote about the web services integration over at OTN if you’re interested in finding out a bit more around how this is done. I’ll have to download the new firmware tonight and see if I can get it up and running. Thanks Chris.

Step up VMWare Fusion – I have relatively rapidly built a Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 64-Bit VM guest OS to run on my Apple, cloned it as my base build, mastered how to change the name of the screen header for the VM machine so that I know which VM I am running and proceeded to install 11g database software and a small test database. This is great fun as before this week I had not touched Linux (let alone gnome) – true I could speak Solaris, Dynix and AIX, and it is so long since anyone allowed me a root password. So, now I have two linux servers, an empty one that I can base subsequent builds on and a working 11g database.

I suppose the next thing is to build a Windows VM for the stuff that needs Microsoft Windows (OBI SE-ONE, for example) – but why is Windows so expensive to license? If I do go with the clean ‘gold-build’ VM and clone it before adding the minimal software required for the purpose in hand I will need to watch out how I clone the machine – or else VMWare will change the MAC address of my virtual network adaptor and break the license key

I spent a couple of days working through some best practices for a group developing a new management information system on OBI SE-One and then spent the rest of the week trekking between home and hospital where my younger girl had her appendix removed.

I have also been setting up my new PC for VMWare virtual machines (running on VMWare Fusion 1.1) to allow me to swap quickly between various database versions and products both for research purposes and as examples in presentations. From what I read elsewhere this week, VMWare may not be the hottest virtualization platform, but it should suit the non-production tasks I have in mind. One of the first things I will be doing with it is looking in depth at Oracle 11g Materialized Cube Views – hopefully I will be writing on this later.

Before he flew off to OOW last weekend Mark Rittman advertised the fact that Rittman Mead Consulting does consulting – it is quite easy to lose sight of this as a lot of the training gets mentioned on the blog (especially in exotic locations) but the project work for clients often needs to remain confidential. But if you have a need for some quality Oracle BI and DW consulting or even just want to explore ways in which we might be able to help drop an email to Rittman Mead

“Bit of news here. Larry Ellison has been bugging his PR people for a while to let him start his own blog at Oracle. But they’re like, No friggin way are we letting you show the world how absolutely bonkers you are. So, fine. He comes to me and he says, Hey, in the summer, when it’s slow, how about I take a turn on your blog.”

Namaste, as Steve would say.

I suppose what I should really write about is the process of putting my book together. It’s actually quite interesting really; I signed the contract with Oracle Press just before Christmas, got my ISBN number (there’s actually a placeholder on Amazon.com now, which makes it all sort of official), and now I’m working on the initial set of chapters before the publishers appoint the technical editor and so on. This is sort of the “probationary period”, where they see if you can actually get yourself in gear and produce chapters in a reasonable time; at this point you’re looked after by an acquisitions editor who guides you through the first phases, works with you on style and formatting and just generally makes sure things are “on track” before hiring technical editors and copy editors.

So far I’ve produced the introductory chapter, and the first one on Oracle Warehouse Builder, the one on configuration and data modelling. A couple of aspects have been a challenge; first of all, keeping to the alloted number of pages for each chapter, for which it’s just as important you don’t overshoot as undershoot as the book’s projected sale price is budgeted on a certain number of pages – if you’re going to go well over, it’ll cost more to produce, and more often than not this is more down to you being too verbose rather than your initial estimate being wrong.

The other thing is settling on a style; I’m aiming more for the Tom Kyte “tell and show” approach rather than just rewriting the manual, but it’s tricky at least initially to settle on a style that’s appropriate for a technical book, but that isn’t realy boring. The approach I’ve ended up taking is spending the first third of the chapter setting out, at a high level, what each component does, with the remaining two-thirds being a walk-through of how the product is used in a typical scenario. I’ve created a set of example data that I’ll use consistently through the book, and whilst I won’t go through every step to build the warehouse and report against it, I’ll cover the key points and hopefully readers will be able to follow along. I don’t know if this is acceptable as an approach (or whether there is “an acceptable approach”) but I’ll know soon, as it’s with their editors at the moment to review before moving on to the next chapter.

Working out how much time to devote is also a challenge. My timetable says that I have a month to do each chapter, with ten more due over the next ten months. I’m currently spending at least two hours each day (in the evenings) on it, but I’m trying to discipline myself to spend at least half of the month working through examples, testing things out and so on rather then spending the whole time banging out words and only really covering what I knew beforehand. A major motivation for me was the chance to properly work through some things I’d only briefly covered before, and so for example in the ETL chapter I’m just about to work on, I’ll be using the multi-configuration feature, version control, scheduling, data auditors, experts and Discoverer integration, features I’ve only looked at briefly before but that I want to cover properly in the book. In a way, I’ve got a tough audience to cover in what I’m doing; for most people, many of the products I’ll be covering will be completely new to them (XML Publisher, BI EE, even OWB 10gR2) but there’ll also be people, probably attracted by the blog, who’ll be after “expert tips and tricks” as well. And all with a budget of about 30-60 pages per product in the suite.

Anyway, that’s it for author musings. Moving on a bit, how cool is this?

If you look. that’s the Windows version of Oracle Warehouse Builder running in Apple OS X – or at least it looks like it; what it actually is is OWB running in a Windows virtual machine using Parallels and the new “Coherence” feature (screencast here) in the latest beta release. What this does is let you start up a virtual machine as normal, then switch to this new coherence mode, with all the windows applications then appearing in their own application windows on your OS X desktop. This means you can have OWB, AWM, Microsoft Word, even Internet Explorer and Outlook all running on your apple desktop as if they’re OS X applications, you can drag and drop to them, and work with them just like any other applications.

The way it seems to work is to “lose” the virtual machine window container, plus the Windows desktop, and instead just show the windows applications directly on your apple desktop. At some point the effect breaks down – when you drag a Windows application across the screen, Parallels shows the Windows desktop under where the application originally sat until you stop dragging, and you have to move the taskbar to the top of the screen and put it on auto-hide to get it out of the way, otherwise it’ll display just like any other windows application. But it’s pretty cool though – when working with applications in place, they integrate completely in with your OS X applications and you can leave Outlook, or OWB or whatever just running in the corner and otherwise work entirely with your Mac applications. Not bad.

That’s it for me for now though. As I said, I’m doing a free seminar on the 17th up at Oracle City Office (places still available, I understand) and then it’s off for the BI Masterclass, organized by Oracle University, in Austria on the 22nd/23rd January, Slovenia on the 25th/26th and Sweden on the 30th/31st, and I think one’s also being organized for Spain at the end of February. Until then, it’ll be heads down and hopefully I won’t get too many edits back from the Oracle Press team.

I’ve been using something called
Parallels, which is functionally very similar to VMWare in that you create a
virtual machine, install your OS and then some "tools", and you can then run a
copy of Windows, or Linux, or BSD or whatever from within OS X. So far the
performance is excellent, much better than on my old single core 2Ghz Dell
laptop, which is probably down to the extra processor but of course could be
down to any number of things – Parallels could be faster than VMWare, OS X could
be a faster host OS than Windows, or whatever. Anyway, I’ve got 2GB of memory on
the Macbook now, it’s a Core Duo 2Ghz CPU and it’s running pretty well actually.
I’ve installed Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Business Intelligence 10g
Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition (including Actuate), XML Publisher 5.6.2
and BI Tools 10g, and the performance is pretty good, about as fast as my old
laptop running native. Once BI Suite Enterprise Edition is ported to Linux, I’ll
move it all over to Centos, but until then, it’s Windows I’m afraid.

I’m off on holiday on Wednesday, so I’ve been sorting things out for my trip
to ODTUG later this month. I’ve signed up as an ODTUG ambassador, and put my
name down for the talks I planned to attend anyway. Here’s my agenda for the
week, and if all turns out as planned I should be introducing each of these
presentations (the ones in bold are the talks I’m doing)

• Mon 11.00 – 12.00 Oracle XML Publisher —What’s It All About? (Mark Rittman)
• Tue 1.30 – 2.30 Oracle Business Intelligence in the Real World: Case
  Studies from the Trenches (Dan Vlamis)
• Mon 2.45 – 3.45 Successful Dimensional Modeling of Very Large Data
  Warehouses (Bert Scalzo)
• Mon 4.00 – 5.00 Advanced Dimensional Modeling (Vincent Chazhoor)
   
• Tue 8.30 – 9.30 Why Should You Consider Warehouse Builder for Data
  Modeling? (Jean-Pierre Dijcks)
• Tue 9.45 – 10.45 Siebel Business Analytics Platform Overview (Matt Bedin)
• Tue 11.00 – 12.00 Reporting Against the Warehouse Builder Repository
  (Keith Laker)
• Tue 1.30 – 2.30 Business Intelligence / DW Panel (I’m not chairing
  this BTW)
• Tue 4.00 – 5.00 Climb to the OLAP Summit with Oracle Warehouse Builder
  10gR2 (Keith Laker)
   
• Wed 9.45 – 10.45 Inside the Oracle 10g Cost-Based SQL Optimizer (Donald
  Burleson)
• Wed 11.00 – 12.00 The Oracle 10g Release 2 Rules Manager and Expression
  Filter—Events for Business Rules (Andre Beland)
• Wed 1.00 – 2.00 Building an Effective Data Warehousing Architecture
  Using OWB 10gR2 (Mark Rittman)
• Wed 2.15 – 3.15 Data Warehouse ETL For Developers (Michael Ault)

The Tuesday 4.00pm session with Keith Laker is a bit of a dilemma – England
are playing at 3.00pm local time, although I’m starting to think that I’m not
going to find anywhere to watch it anyway. Given that Keith’s a fellow Brit,
I’ll have to bring my laptop and tune in to Radio 5 Live and keep us both
informed of the score during the talk…

Finally – and this should be interesting. I’m sorting out a seminar series at
the moment with a large training organisation, where I’ll be going around
Europe, Middle East and Africa doing a two day business intelligence "masterclass"
on the new BI tools – OWB "Paris", BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Standard
Edition, and XML Publisher. Once things are signed up I’ll post more details,
but it sounds very interesting and apparently the first one’s going to be in
Holland in August. More news when it’s available…

I’ve always harboured guilty desires towards getting a Mac, but could never
justify the 50%+ price premium that they charged up until recently. The new
Macbook range, however, comes in at around £1000 with 1GB of RAM and a 100GB
hard disk, and given that it’s pretty compact – a 13" widescreen display, much
smaller than my work Dell laptop – the price is pretty good now and compares
well with the ultra-compacy Vaios you see at the airport duty free shops. For
me, the attraction with Macs is OS X – an excellent UI on top of a Unix kernel -
which seemed to give me the best of both worlds; a familiar command line
environment not too dissimilar to Linux, with all the "fit and finish" of an
Apple product. The clincher though was the fact that it now runs on an x86 CPU -
a 2Ghz Core Duo to be exact – which means I can
dual-boot into Windows, or run
Linux (and therefore Oracle) on a VM.

So far it’s been an interesting transition. Up until now I’ve been using a
mix of Windows XP (for admin stuff) and Centos 4.2 (for Oracle, development work
etc) with Centos either being hosted in a VM or running native on my home PC.
Certainly going from XP to Centos is a lot easier than going from XP to OS X; in
OS X, there’s no Start Menu listing out all the programs you can access, instead
you either find them using the finder, or they register icons of themselves in
the dock at the bottom of the page.

Although the dock is "prettier", it does have a scalability
problem, as you can’t just add more and more icons to it. Also, the lack of a
right mouse button is a bit strange; I’m using an Apple Wireless Keyboard and
Mouse (not the Mighty Mouse) and everything seems to take twice as long to do -
first select an icon, then go up to the menu bar and select the action, as
opposed to just right mouse clicking. I’m sure I’ll find a faster way soon, but
it’s a bit strange first of all.

What is impressive though is the attention to detail, and the
visual style. Part of the decision to buy a Mac was down to seeing the reviews
of Vista that are coming out, with the Aero Glass effects looking

particularly gaudy and User Account Protection making the system
pretty much
unusable if you want to run in anything other that Administrator mode. In contrast, OS X was here now, had the same sort of features (and
better ones to boot) as Vista, and was also based on a solid Unix core. Now I’ve
had a play around with it, the quality is certainly unmistakable, and I’m
certainly impressed so far.

As a contrast, I also took the opportunity to get a new phone
last week. I used to have an
Orange SPV C600,
a Windows Mobile 5.0-based phone that I was considering binning as it obviously
wasn’t going to sync with my new Mac. What was good about the phone was that it
had a terrific 65K colour screen with a 240×320 screen, but it wouldn’t sync
with the Mac and I was due for a free upgrade. I had a look around and got a new
Sony Ericsson W810i, with a 2 megapixel camera, MP3 player and an FM radio, plus
of course it’ll sync with a Mac (and with Evolution on Linux as well). Anyway,
the phone arrived last week, and you know what – I’ve ended up sending it back
and keeping the C600. Although the Sony Ericsson works with the Mac, the screen
resolution, and software, was rubbish, and as I mainly use it for picking up
emails (on Mobile Outlook) and reading RSS feeds (using
NewsBreak) I was
better off sticking with what I’ve got. I’ll save my free upgrade for later,
when I can get hold of a compatible phone that’s actually useful for something
other than games.

The only sticking point now with the Mac is that I can’t use my
Vodafone 3G card with it, as there’s no PCMCIA slot in this new model. There are
a couple of workarounds – you can get USB to PCMCIA adapters, but they’re pricey
($200 or so) or

not all that practical for me to take on the train, so I’ll probably have to
stick with WiFi if I’m on the move. Also, now I’ve got the Mac, I’ll have to
think about what I’ll do with my PC; it’s a dual core Athlon x64 with 2GB of RAM
- if I don’t end up using it for Windows XP much more, I’ll convert it to a
full-time Linux server and use it as an Oracle development and testbed.