Update On Last Week’s Stories

I've had a couple of bits of useful feedback on two of last weeks stories.

First up is "Creating Database Standard Form Analytic Workspaces", where I talked about the new DB_CREATE_STDFORM utility that takes migrated Express databases that contain Express Objects metadata, and migrates them to database standard form so that they can be accessed by the Analytic Workspace Manager and BI Beans.

Jon Mead points out that Express Server 6.3.4 comes with the ability to convert existing Express EIS, Sales Analyzer and Financial Analyzer to Express Objects' compliant databases, with full details on what versions can be converted, and how the process is carried out, in the database administration guide.

Next, in the story "How Do I Combine Relational And Multidimensional Data In A Single OLAP Cube?", I talked about the possibilities for combining detail level relational data, and summary level multidimensional data, in a single Oracle OLAP cube, and came to the conclusion that, because of the way query rewrite worked with Oracle 9i, it would never be possible for Oracle to use the analytic workspace as a target for query rewrite when summing up against the base data. This would however be addresed with Oracle 10g through the 'query equivalence' feature.

Adam Wein however made the valid point that, if you use Discoverer as the query tool, you could register the analytic workspace summaries - exposed through the OLAP_TABLE function as SQL Views - as external summaries usable by the Discoverer Query Engine.

In this case, Discoverer would rewrite the query to use the summary, rather than relying on the Oracle query rewrite mechanism, even though the SQL that defines the SQL view doesn't match the SQL used to summarise the relational base data. I haven't tried this myself, but it sounds a valid approach; when I get a chance next i'll give this a go.