Review Of 2004, Part Two

Concluding my review of 2004, today going from July through to December.

July

July started with an explanation of Oracle's new Information Architecture, "a model that describes how Oracle's products can be used to create a 'modern, real-time enterprise'. It uses the new 10g server technology (database, application server) together with the e-Business Suite and the new Customer Data Hub, with application development being carried out using JDeveloper and ADF. Oracle Information Architecture is Oracle's way of bringing its different product strands together, and positioning itself as the leading enterprise infrastructure software and business applications vendor. What it boils down to is a unified data model, and two of the hottest buzzwords in the industry at the moment, 'grid computing' and 'service-orientated applications'". Service-Orientated Architecture of course went on to become one of the "big themes" within the Oracle world during 2005, and together with grid computing was the focus of many of the keynotes and main presentations at Open World last month.

The Oracle Warehouse Builder theme continued with articles on Householding Warehouse Data Using OWB10g, an In-Depth Introduction To Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g, Version And Environment Management Using OWB10g and Comparing Informatica And OWB. Oracle announced Product Data Hub, and as part of the Peoplesoft antitrust trial Larry Ellison said that "Oracle was continuing to consider three or four other acquisitions, even with its bid for PeopleSoft still pending. He declined to name the companies but said they were all publicly traded and included a business applications company, a company involved in "business intelligence" [my emphasis] and a software infrastructure provider. In a taped deposition last week, Ellison listed BEA Systems, Siebel Systems and Lawson Software as past takeover candidates."

Mid-way through July I went to the The UKOUG "10g Features For DBAs" Day at Ascot and reported on a number of presentations around the new features in Oracle 10g. I was particularly interested in the new AWR, ASH and ADDM automatic tuning and diagnostic features, about which I wrote "If you think of AWR and ASH as where performance metrics are stored, the ADDM feature is the 'artificial intelligence' part of 10g that takes these figures and comes up with performance recommendations. ADDM uses a rules-based engine to review the performance data collected, and suggest courses of action ('enable cursor sharing if bind variables aren't being used' was a scenario mentioned) for the DBA to take. This was all quite interesting, for a number of reasons. Firstly, AWR, ASH and ADDM appear to be replacements for STATSPACK, in that they gather instance level performance statistics on a regular basis, but with the improvement that they store these figures in a dedicated repository rather than in the PERFSTAT schema. In addition, the data collected is extended to include more information on database waits, and is more granular, and with response timing as well as just number of occurrences. More interestingly though, because of the granualarity and coverage of the data being captured - specifically, the information on waits and the new recording of response time - Oracle see this as replacing the need for event 10046 extended trace as a way of tuning the database. Oracle see AWR and ASH as collecting enough data of low granularity to enable the equivalent of extended trace to be carried out, without the requirement to later on interpret these trace files either by hand or using tools such as Hotsos Profiler."

August

August was a quiet month as I needed to take a couple of weeks off from the site, and postings resumed later in the month with a review of Oracle Insights - Tales Of The Oaktable, still my favourite Oracle book and one you should get hold of if you haven't already. More news came through on AWM10g, AWXML and Oracle OLAP 10.1.0.3 (note - AWM10g and OLAP 10.1.0.4, which it needs, are due out in Jan/Feb 2005) and Joel Spolsky's "Joel On Software" book was published.

I came across an excellent set of articles by Eric Sink on The Business Of Software (...And Consulting), a bit of a diversion away from Oracle databases and data warehousing but an interesting insight into the business aspects of running a consulting or product company.An article for DBAZine.com I put together on The Future Of Microsoft and Oracle OLAP concluded that "For Microsoft, the emphasis on Analysis Services 2005 is around making it easier to get data into analysis services cubes, with a unified dimensional model that works against both relational and multidimensional data, and proactive caching which moves and aggregates data into multidimensional cubes without DBA intervention. For Oracle, the effort is all around scalability and concurrency, and with the emphasis on moving OLAP processing into the relational database, rather than moving relational data into a separate OLAP server. The big difference though is around data access languages, with Microsoft moving towards MDX, and XML/A, as their preferred query language for all warehouse data, whilst Oracle are betting that SQL, with analytic extensions, is the superior choice for both OLAP and relational reporting." SQL Server 2005 should be out this year, so it'll be interesting to see how things actually pan out and what the implementation of Analysis Services is actually like - I suspect it'll be very good.

Enterprise Manager Grid Control was released for Windows, a paper on Analytic Functions for OWB was released by the OWB product team, and I had my first major problem with comment spam (people posting spam links in comments) which has gone on to affect most of the people writing Oracle blogs, to the point where most of us either block comments completely or, in my case, only allow them for postings made in the last few days.

If you were a regular reader of comp.databases.oracle.server or the Oracle-L list you'll have noticed the "colourful" debates going on around tuning using ratios vs. tuning using extended trace, sizing the buffer cache, calibrating the cost-based optimizer, and rebuilding indexes, and subsequent to this Don Burleson answered his critics with an article for DBAZine entitled "Busting The Oracle Myth Busters". This debate rolled on during the rest of 2004, with another article by Don ("Oracle Tuning Fallacies"), comments on Don's original article by Jonathan Lewis ("Circular References proof by restatement (updated)"), an article on Jonathan's site by "A Reader In New York" entitled "That Was Then, This Is Now" and further rumblings on comp.databases.oracle.server.

September

September started with an Oracle Forums posting on OWB Performance Tips and Paul Narth gave a presentation at the London Open World on OWB "Paris" New Features. Steven Feuernstein wrote about Dispelling PL/SQL Coding Myths and Oracle announced Project Tsunami (the name of which will presumably change now) and I put together an article on Oracle Powerbrowser, Oracle's own web browser that was available back in the late 90's.

Pete Finnigan started his Oracle Security Weblog, and the New York Times wrote on the PeopleSoft takeover ""May I buy your beloved pet dog, just so I can take him around back and shoot him? That's how the chief executive of PeopleSoft, Craig Conway, described Oracle's hostile bid for his company, which Oracle intends to use to move PeopleSoft customers to its own software. Oracle's takeover tale has entered its 16th month, making it a drama of many acts. Conway currently declares that he holds no personal animus against Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive. But in the past, the two rivals made remarks about each other that were not customary politesse. A "sociopath" is the piquant way Conway described Ellison last year. Returning the favor, Ellison appropriated the image of Conway's vulnerable pet: if Conway and the dog were standing next to each other, he said, and "I had one bullet, trust me, it wouldn't be for the dog."

October

OTN ran an article at the start of October on Web Analytics Using Oracle Application Server Discoverer, Peoplesoft fired Craig Conway, Enterprise Planning & Budgeting was finally released, and I tried to explain how Oracle OLAP's data structures worked in "Understanding Oracle OLAP Dimensions And Cubes". Craig Shallamar wrote that "Oracle Tuning Is Like War", John Garmany wrote about the AS10g Backup & Recovery Tool, whilst DMReview asked whether Business Activity Monitoring Is The Future Of Business Intelligence.

November

November was the start of the conference season, with SolStonePlus exhibiting at the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition and myself presenting on Oracle Business Intelligence 10g and OLAP Analysis. The UKOUG Conference was a bit of a nightmare for me actually as I had a pretty bad cold throughout the three days, and whilst I was able to do my talk and introduce Jonathan Lewis' Statistics talk, I had to bow out of introducing Tom Kyte and spent most evenings going to bed early and missing out on most of the social events.

Shortly after the UKOUG event I went up to Glasgow to do some more database and application tuning and subsequently wrote up the methodology and the results I came up with. This was a particularly interesting tuning exercise as it raised many questions about application design and database independence and subsequent comments raised a lot of interesting issues from both DBAs and Java developers. A little while after this I wrote an article entitled "Is Oracle A Legacy Technology" that was prompted by a couple of articles by Mogens N rgaard and drew a number of comments including one my Mogens himself.

A question that came directly to me via email prompted a posting titled "The History Of Oracle Discoverer's OLAP Support" in which I talked about the various incarnations of MOLAP support with Oracle's (up until now) relational ad-hoc query tool. Nicholas Goodman posted another in his OWB "Paris" Early Review series, and Hyperion was raised as a possible sleeper target for Oracle, on which I commented "Now that would be an interesting acquisition - Hyperion provide IBM's OLAP Server as well as their own Essbase, and are probably the only really viable competition to Microsoft's Analysis Services, certainly in terms of OLAP servers. Traditionally Essbase and Express were close competitors (with Essbase at that point being owed by Arbor) but over the past few years Essbase has managed to hold on to second place in the market (by concentrating on high-end financial analysis and budgeting) whilst Express and Oracle OLAP has fallen away; Hyperion also of course recently bought Brio, whose products compete directly with Discoverer. An unlikely acquisition, but interesting to speculate nonetheless.". Finally, towards the end of the month the first bits of Enterprise Planning & Budgeting documentation started to arrive, and I had an initial look at the underlying EPB database fundamentals in "Under The Covers With Enterprise Planning & Budgeting", and following on from another email I put together a short article on Understanding The Role Of The OLAP Catalog

December

The start of December was my first ever visit to Oracle Open World in San Francisco, but before I left there was time for an article on Executive BI Dashboards With XML, XQuery And XDS. I arrived in San Francisco on the Saturday afternoon and took a look around the City on the Sunday, then went along to the first set of presentations, mainly keynotes and ones about Business Intelligence 10g, on the Monday. Tuesday was more about database tuning and also gave me some time to go down to the exhibition, whilst Wednesday was the day when Larry Ellison, Chuck Rowzat and Scott McNealy gave their keynotes. The week finished up for me on Thursday with my Discoverer "Drake" and AWM10g presentation, with the rest of the day spent in the Business Intelligence CAB meeting and getting ready to fly back on the Friday.

Once I got back to the UK I was able to spend a bit more time looking at the new product announcements and white papers, and looked in more detail at Bud Endress and Anthony Waite's Oracle OLAP papers and presentations. Oracle 10g Release 2 was announced during Open World, with new features such as transparent encryption, enhancements to ASM, support for the .NET CLR and support for XQuery, and I took an in-depth look at the new BI Dashboarding features in Discoverer "Drake" and BI Beans.

Finishing up 2004 was a look at Doug Burns' paper on Tuning Parallel Execution, which I related back to a recent database tuning exercise I'd carried out, and finally Lucas Jellema reported on a private briefing session he'd had on EPB, in which he concluded "The benefits an organisation will get from using EPB will be larger as the organsation is bigger and more complex. One could almost say: only for real enterprises with complex business models and distributed workflows around planning and budgetting will EPB really pay off."

That's it for me for 2004 - I hope you all have an excellent New Year, that 2005 goes well for you, and see you back in a few days.