Installing the BI extension is very simple. After walking through the simple Open Office Install, open up any Open Office tool. Select Tools -> Extensions Manager. Click Add and select the Oracle BI extension (Available under oracle-openoffice-3_3_0-enterprise-tools-ent-kit\extensions\oracle-office-bi-server as a part of the Open Office Enterprise Tools download).

Once  the extension is added, a new menu for Oracle BI is now visible across the tools.  You can setup access to all your Oracle BI instances, by adding them in the extension options.

Once this is done, use the Oracle BI menu to Login and presto! The web catalog is available at your disposal. Select Presentation Catalog from the Oracle BI menu to look at the reports at your disposal.

Double clicking any chart on the list will insert it with the default Open Office formatting. Unlike the Excel Add-in this extension does not feature the ability to insert BI chart as images containing the default Answers formatting. One can change the chart types and formatting using the standard chart options.

The Open Office extension has a modify link that will let you modify the report from a web browser if needed. The Refresh option under the Oracle BI menu allows you to keep the Impress Presentation up to date with the latest data from the BI system. You might need to reimport the chart using the Edit Prompts and Levels menu option if your source report has changed in structure.

You might recall the BI Plug-in for Ms Office was only applicable to Excel and Powerpoint. The Open Office extension however works with OO Writer as well. It features exactly the same functionality as with OO Impress.

The Open Office extension for OO Calc has the ability to import tables and pivot tables apart from the charts. You will notice the Table view and  Pivot table objects are now visible from the presentation catalog. Double clicking on any object adds it to the spreadsheet. Inserting the complete request data as a pivot invokes the DataPilot where you can chose the columns that make up the rows, columns and parameters of the pivot.

The resultant pivot can be pivoted freely using drag-drop methods or by using the context menu. You can add multiple such reports into single spreadsheet and add your own calculations to the mix.

Apart form adding calculations, you can also add conditional formatting and column text formatting on columns using Open Office styles and formatting tools.

The Open Office extension for BI Server is also available on other platforms including the mac. Other Connectors apart from the Oracle BI extensions like the JDeveloper plugin, MS Sharepoint extension and E-Business suite are also available with this release. For more information on these products, visit the official Oracle.com page.

These days, Hyperroll focused more on aggregating relational data sources, and branched out in to complementary areas such as real-time loading of financial management applications. From looking at the various press releases and FAQs, it looks like Oracle plan to position Hyperroll in the BI Foundation Layer within their EPM product stack, speeding up relational and OLAP queries and presumably supporting trickle-feed updates to their EPM applications.

This looks like quite a neat fit, and if they can sell it as some kind of “BI Server” aggregation layer you’ve got the potential for MOLAP-style query and rollup speeds across the whole range of OBIEE and EPM data sources. Given Hyperroll’s position in the market, their past support for Oracle OLAP/Express and Essbase and the relational nature of the BI Server this seems quite a clever acquisition on Oracle’s part, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see high-level mentions of it at Open World as part of the 11g BI and EPM stack. In terms of integration, I’d expect it to follow a similar pattern to TimesTen, where it’s initially offered as a stand-alone option to Oracle BI Enterprise Edition initially, with full integration coming a few years later on perhaps as part of the integrated BI/EPM stack that Oracle are working on.

More details can be found in the press release, FAQ and in this set of slides.

I’m surprised that this wasn’t held over until Open World, but the twitter- and blogo-sphere has been alive over the past few weeks about a possible “Exadata 2″, so the product itself isn’t unexpected. So, speculating here, what’s this product likely to contain?

Well like the HP Oracle Database Machine, presumably it’s going to contain a balanced set of database servers, storage units and switches but based around Sun, rather than HP hardware. My instinct says that it’ll be x64 rather than Sparc processors powering the servers (if only to harness the commodity hardware cost benefits) and Exadata Storage Servers will presumably be used for the storage hardware, though whether these are HP units or new Sun units that also use the same branding (and presumably, the same SmartScan technology) we’ll have to wait and see.

The interesting bits bit for me is the OLTP focus, and the “FlashFire” Sun technology. Doing a quick Google search brings up nothing on “FlashFire” which means that it must be something new for Sun as well, but taking the requirements of OLTP (lots of concurrent access, lots of small random retrievals and writes of data, compared to small amounts of full table scans), it’s probable that this is a flash disk (RAM) storage technology.

Exadata Storage Server doesn’t use flash memory at the moment, something that was dismissed as being irrelevant at the time by Oracle but that may now be more relevant for OLTP, as opposed to DSS, workloads, and something that Oracle may be forced in to by the fact that the speed of the new Nehalem chips coming along from Intel would otherwise make their balanced architecture unbalanced (in favour of CPUs).

Still, we’ll have to wait and see, and of course afterwards wait further to see if the more traditional, HP-based data warehousing Database Machine gets an update at Open World a few weeks later. More news later in the week after the announcement is made.

Well, to be honest it’s not all that clear, especially seeing as Oracle’s favoured hardware partners and operating system seem to be HP and Linux rather than Sun and Solaris. Sun weren’t an especially big player, directly, in the BI&DW market, although their hardware used to power most cutting-edge data warehouses back in the late 90′s and even today, those customers who’ve not gone down the RAC route tend to use Solaris and SPARC hardware to host their large-scale data warehouses. I’ve not personally perceived Sun as being so relevant these days, with the architectural advantages of SPARC chips being less pronounced these days, and a general move amongst the industry towards Linux and commodity blade hardware. Sun do in fact have their own DW appliance initiative, in conjunction with Greenplum and PostgreSQL, which presumably won’t be around for much longer, and in fact it’s in this area that I can see Sun’s hardware business having its focus in the future – as a means for Oracle to build off of what they’ve done with Exadata and Database Machine to create highly-tuned, highly-optimized appliances for the running of Oracle databases, application servers and Fusion applications.

I guess also part of the move was defensive in that Oracle wanted to firstly, make sure whoever bought Sun had the same commitment to Java (on which most of Oracle’s products are based), and secondly make sure someone like IBM didn’t get Java and therefore place much of Oracle’s architectural underpinnings in the hands of a major competitor. Oracle’s own BI products are a mix of pure Java (the legacy BI tools like Discoverer), bits of C++, Java and .NET (from the Siebel side) and a mish-mash of lots of technologies from the Hyperion side. Going forward, I would imagine this means Java will be even more central to Oracle’s (BI) tools strategy, we’ll have even more Java application servers (though presumably Weblogic will stay the strategic direction), and we’ll have even more focus on end-to-end BI and DW appliances; and maybe, we’ll see mySQL start to appear in entry-level BI products from Oracle, or even have Oracle BI support/ship mySQL in the BI SE One variant? We’ll have to wait and see.

So, it’s a takeover that’s obviously not got BI and DW as it’s rationale, but I think we’ll see spin-off benefits in the areas of DW appliances, more optimized storage solutions and perhaps optimization going through to the server, network and even the operating system level, especially if the engineers behind Solaris and ZFS start to contribute towards Oracle’s Linux, storage and hardware strategy. For the time being though we’ll have to wait and see what happens, one thing I do know though is that surely, they’ll either have to run a technology Open World and an apps Open World separately now, or maybe even move to Las Vegas in the future if Oracle want to run a single annual event for all their customers?

“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.

"the perfect temperament to be hackers–technically skilled, slightly
disrespectful of authority, and just a touch of criminal behavior."

That’s nice then. You’ll all have to watch your wallets when I come over to
ODTUG next month.

… Red Hat’s own acquisition last week of JBoss – another open source
company whose products compete with Oracle and IBM – could shake up alliances in
the Linux world and provide another reason to act, said Mr Ellison. “Now that
Red Hat . . . competes with us in middleware, we have to re-look at the
relationship – so does IBM,” he said. On Red Hat’s growing influence and its
ambitions to reach beyond the Linux operating system, he added: “I don’t think
Oracle and IBM want another Microsoft in Red Hat.”

To start off with, the big news sources are the following:

• 
  Webcast by Thomas Kurian on the specifics about Oracle’s future BI platform
  and analytics tools (63 minutes)
• 
  Webcast by Steve Miranda on how these technologies will be deployed in the
  various Oracle ERP applications (48 minutes)
• 
  Oracle.com page on Oracle Business Intelligence Solutions, outlines Oracle’s
  three BI areas – packaged BI apps, the new BI Suites and Oracle DW
• 
  Oracle Business Intelligence Suites homepage
• 
  Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, the edition
  derived from Siebel Analytics
• 
  Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition, what we now refer
  to as Oracle Business Intelligence 10g
• 
  Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition components
• "Next
  Oracle Fusion Milestone: An Enterprise-Wide, Hot-Pluggable BI Infrastructure
  that Combines Leadership in Applications, Databases and Middleware"
  press release

All of this has been made available following Oracle’s Business Intelligence
Strategy Briefing, in New York yesterday (March 22nd 2006). As most of you will
be aware, Oracle have been on a buying spree over the last couple of years, and
are integrating the technologies they’ve acquired from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards
and now Siebel with their existing E-Business Suite technologies into something
they’re calling Project Fusion. Up until now, there’s been little specific about
business intelligence in Project Fusion, but with the purchase of Siebel at the
start of 2006, Oracle suddenly had a best of breed BI platform called Siebel
Analytics (see this earlier posting) that they could build their Fusion BI
platform on. Pretty much for the last couple of months rumours have been
circulating that Siebel Analytics would form the centrepiece of Fusion BI and
this briefing was where they announced it. So what does it all mean in practice?

The big bit of product news is that going forward, there will be three
product editions for Oracle Business Intelligence. "Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition" will be based on the Siebel Analytics product set that
Oracle acquired as part of the Siebel purchase, and which
Siebel themselves
acquired from a company they bought called nQuire. "Oracle Business
Intelligence Standard Edition" is the new name for what is current Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g", whilst "Oracle Business Intelligence Standard
Edition One" will be a cut-down version of the Enterprise Edition for small to
medium-sized businesses.

On to the new

Enterprise Edition first though. As my

article from January explained, Siebel Analytics is based around a product
called Siebel Analytic Server and Oracle have now re-branded this as Oracle
Analytic Server. This product edition comes with a set of analytic products that
Siebel sold as "Siebel Analytics" and which, whilst delivered as part of Oracle
Fusion Middleware (more on this in a moment) is database agnostic and works
against both Oracle and non-Oracle datasources. The products within this suite
are:

• Oracle Analytic Server
• Oracle Query and Analysis
• Oracle Dashboards
• Oracle Reporting & Publishing
• Oracle Sense & Respond
• Oracle Offline Analytics
• Oracle MSFT Office Add-in
• Oracle Server Administration

From sitting through the presentation and reading elsewhere, Oracle Analytic
Server is a standalone analytic engine that brings in metadata from Oracle,
non-Oracle, SAP BW, MDX-compatible and other data sources, makes the data
available to the analytic applications, and fires through queries to the
underlying data sources as SQL, MDX and so on. There’s an offiline edition that
allows people to take their applications on a laptop and do analysis remotely
(something that’s been missing with Oracle’s current lineup of products) and a
tool called Oracle Answers (which I think is the "Oracle Query and Analysis"
mentioned in the list) which appears to be the ad-hoc query element of the
lineup. Apart from the analytic server though, the real jewel in the product
line-up is Oracle Dashboards, an Ajax / DHTML application that is differentiated
from Discoverer and Portal in that it’s Ajax (therefore behaves more like a
desktop app than an HTML page), is multi-framed, and you can perform analysis
within the dashboard – with Portal all you can do is launch out into Discoverer,
you can’t manipulate reports within the dashboard page. Here’s a screenshot from
Siebel Analytics:

Thomas Kurian’s presentation then went on to talk about the architecture of
the Enterprise Edition, which I can only assume at this point is ported "as is"
from Siebel Analytics, and he went on to talk about some of the features of the
product suite, which includes an "Enterprise Semantic Model", a layer of
abstraction above the actual data that describes it in terms of dimensions,
hierarchies, measures and so on – much as you get with the logical dimensional
model currently provided with Oracle OLAP, and something that Microsoft are also
attempting with their Unified Dimensional Model.

The platform also feature something called the "Enterprise
Service Bus", a real-time messaging-based alternative to traditional ETL that
moves data as it’s needed into the analytic engine; an open report format
editor, predictive analytics, and intelligent "bots" that give you something he
referred to as "information magnetism" – key information finds you, you don’t
need to go and hunt it out. Anyway, if you get a chance, sit through the
presentation, there’s tons of details about what’s in the Enterprise Edition,
the only difficult bit is working out what products are from Siebel (I assume
most of them) and what are Oracle’s own ones – Kurian refers to all the products
as Oracle ones and makes references to customers that must surely have been
Siebel Analytics ones. There is mention of a few Oracle products though – the
BPEL engine, Oracle Balanced Scorecard (which becomes part of a larger framework
and gets it data from Oracle Analytics Server).

Now while most of the presentation was about this new Enterprise
Edition, there was also talk about a

"Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition", which as I mentioned
earlier is what we currently refer to as Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, with
OracleBI Discoverer, Reports, Warehouse Builder, BI Beans and the Spreadsheet
Add-in, and "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One", which is
actually a cut down version of Enterprise Edition with just the analytics
engine, Oracle Warehouse Builder (which isn’t part of the Enterprise Edition,
but is part of the Standard Edition), Query & Analysis (aka "Oracle Answers"),
Dashboards, Oracle Standard Edition One database and Server Administration. So
what’s the upgrade path then between these various versions, and where we are
now?

To answer this question, it’s worth looking at a couple of
Kurian’s slides that were very interesting. The first one was on the product
packaging going on from today, which listed out the products per edition as I’ve
mentioned earlier:

The second was on the product roadmap going on from here:

Of course this is where it gets quite interesting. Both the current version
of Oracle Business Intelligence, and the new suite based on Siebel Analytics,
will be available as from now. By the summer of 2006, the next release of
Application Server (10.1.3.3) will be available, and it will include the new
Oracle BI Publisher (I assume this is XML Publisher 5.x Enterprise, as I’ve been
previewing earlier this month) and migration tools to migrate Oracle Reports
RDFs to BI Publisher. This version is also where Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2
"Paris" will be released.

At the end of Calendar Year 2006, Application Server 10.1.3.4 will be
available, which features "Discoverer unification with Oracle Analytic Server"
and a "New Analytics Solution". This bit seemed fairly key and so I made a note
of Thomas Kurian’s words around Discoverer’s future:

"10.1.3.4 integrates the analytic capability that Discoverer had with
the analytic engine from Siebel … Discoverer had a lot of sophistication
in how it did both relational analysis and OLAP analysis with the oracle
database. We’re [going to] make Discoverer basically a pluggable data source
under the analytic server so that your Discoverer End User Layer as well as
your underlying analytics, the things that you did against analytic
workspaces can be seamlessly migrated forward to this unified platform."

So what does this mean for Oracle Discoverer and the OLAP Option? Well,
reading between the lines and trying to interpret what he’s saying, firstly all
of the existing Business Intelligence 10g line-up will be available as now but
packaged as the BI Suite Standard Edition. Kurian made a point that there’s
still a key, relevant role for in-database analytics and this is where the OLAP
Option, analytic SQL and the Data Mining Option will be used. For customers
wishing to add business intelligence to their Oracle database, the Standard
Edition is the correct product suite. With the Enterprise Edition though, the
suite derived from Siebel Analytics, it seems that Oracle OLAP can be a data
source for Oracle Analytic Server (via an SQL OLAP_TABLE command), as can
Microsoft Analysis Services, SAP BW and any other RDBMS or MDX-compatible
datasource. Discoverer, depending on whether you go on the table above or what
Kurian then said, will either be a data source (presumably this is a Discoverer
EUL, not Discoverer Plus or the server element of Discoverer) or query tool that
can also now report against data in the Analytic Server. If it’s the latter, and
it can now report against both relational, Oracle OLAP and now Oracle Analytic
Server data, then it’ll be a pretty powerful tool. If it’s the former (a data
source) then what they’re talking about is providing a migration path to Oracle
Analytic Server and Oracle Query & Reporting / "Oracle Answers". In reality it’s
probably a bit of both but we’ll have to wait and find out what the specifics
are. Beyond this 10.1.3.4 release is the first 11g release of Application
Server, which I guess is where the next generation products will start to
appear, rather than re-badged Siebel ones with a degree of Oracle tools and
database integration.

In terms of futures for Oracle OLAP, the announcement means that there will
currently be two analytic engines with a degree of overlap but where each has
its advantages depending on your needs, and time will tell whether the features
and benefits of both will converge into a single engine. My take is that Oracle
OLAP is more probably powerful than the Siebel engine for doing
multi-dimensional OLAP analysis, doing multi-dimensional programming and doing
high-end OLAP things like forecasting and statistical analysis, and don’t of
course forget that Oracle OLAP is integrated with the database, with a single
security model, SQL access, multi-dimensional datatypes and all the other things
that made Oracle OLAP (and Express Server before that) a more functional and
performant engine than MS Analysis Services and Hyperion Essbase. What Oracle
Analytic Server will bring to the party though is integration with other MDX
OLAP engines like MS AS and SAP BW, real-time data integration, alerting and
other features that you don’t currently get with Oracle OLAP, plus it works with
all the Siebel Analytics prebuilt vertical applications.

So, some very exciting and interesting times are ahead of us. In my view this
is even more important than when Oracle bought IRI back in the mid-90′s and
integrated an OLAP server into their product line-up, and more important than
when Oracle made Discoverer a Web-based tool or when they launched Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g. One good thing is that the products are available
now, and are very respected in the market, so we’re not talking about vapourware
or also something that’s going to make the current product line-up redundant -
it’s add-on, additional functionality that extends what’s already possible with
Oracle’s BI tools. The news around Discoverer is particularly encouraging, with
a migration path to Oracle Analytics and support for Discoverer as an Oracle
Analytics Server ad-hoc query tool. Oracle Portal seems also to be part of the
future product line-up (the demo during the presentation used Portal as the
integration point for all the query tools) and there’s a definite continuing
role for the OLAP Option as an in-database OLAP engine for customers using the
Standard Edition to do their analytics – remember not all customers will want to
use the full next-generation suite of products and will want to continue using
Discoverer, Reports, Oracle OLAP and so on to provide their business
intelligence.

Going into the future, keep an eye on this site and also the one for the
company I work for, SolStonePlus, as
we’re going to be at the forefront of both making the most of what is now Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition, and spearheading the move into the
adoption of Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Enterprise Edition. In particular,
once we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology, we’re going to run a series
of workshops and seminars on adopting this new technology, so watch this space
for more news over the next few months. Until then, if anyone has any more news
or feedback, add a comment or let me know via email.

"At the start of most data warehouse projects, or even during a project, I
am sure you as customers try to find answers to the following questions to help
you plan and manage your environments:

• Where can I find trend and comparison information to help me plan for
  future growth of my data warehouse?
• How many cpu’s do other customers use per terabyte?
• How many partitions are typically used in large tables? How many
  indexes?
• How much should I allocate for memory for buffer cache?
• How does my warehouse compare to others of similar and larger scale?
  

The data warehouse development team, here at Oracle would like to help
provide answers to these questions. However, to do this we need your help. If
you have an existing data warehouse environment, we would like to obtain more
technical information about your environment(s) by running a simple measurement
script and returning the output files to us, here at Oracle. This will allow our
developers to provide comprehensive documents that explain best practices and
get a better understanding of which features our customers use the most. This
will also allow you as Customers, to benchmark your environments compared to
other customers’ environments.

From a Company perspective we are also interested to get feedback on features we
have added to the database, are these features used, how are they used etc. For
example we are keen to understand:

• Which initialization parameters are most frequently used at what
  values?
• How many Oracle data warehouses run on RAC? on single nodes?
• Is there a trend one-way or the other, especially as data volumes
  increase?
• Does this change with newer releases of the database?

All results from these scripts will be held confidential. No customers will
be mentioned by name; only summaries and trends will be reported (e.g., “X
percent of tables are partitioned and Y percent are indexed in data warehouses
that are Z terabytes and larger in size.” or “X percent of Oracle9i and Y
percent of Oracle10g data warehouses surveyed run RAC”). Results will be written
up as a summarized report. Every participating customer will receive a copy of
the report.

Terabyte and larger DW are the primary interest, but information on any data
warehouse environment is useful. We would like to have as many customers as
possible submit results, ideally by the end of this week. However, this will be
an on going process so regular feedback after this week is extremely useful.

To help our developers and product management team please download and run the
DW measurement script kit from OTN which is available from the following link:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/10g/dw_survey_0206.html

Please return the script outputs using the link shown on the above web page,
see the FAQ section, or alternatively mail them directly to me:

keith.laker@oracle.com.

Thank you and we look forward to your responses."