News Update, and A First Look At OWB “Paris”

I'm conscious that I haven't updated the weblog much over the last few weeks so I thought it worth posting a note of explanation. Funnily enough I have actually still been working away on articles and presentations over the last couple of weeks, but they're all for other sites or publications and consequently won't be available for a couple of weeks or so. I've just finished putting together an article on building BI dashboards using Discoverer Drake, Oracle Portal and Oracle 10g for OTN which hopefully should be published in a few weeks, and before that I've written something on Oracle 10g OLAP, Analytic Workspace Manager and Discoverer Drake which should be in the March edition of Oracle Scene (the UKOUG magazine). Other than that, if you're coming along to the UKOUG BIRT SIG on Thursday I'm doing a presentation on Oracle Business Intelligence 10g and Oracle 10g OLAP, a kind of "best of" of the weblog over the last few months where I'll be reporting back from the first of our OracleBI 10g implementations.

Other than that, like a few other Oracle bloggers I've been taking a look at the Beta version of OWB "Paris" and although not had as much time spare as I'd have hoped, what I've seen so far (particularly the data profiling feature, which is a completely new feature and worth the license cost alone) is excellent.

Usability is much, much improved, to the point where there's now a simplified install process, that lets you either just get started quickly with a local OWB user and repository, or carry out a traditional install where you create your users and repositories on remote servers. Great for quickly installing OWB on your laptop and getting up and running without loads of fuss.

Also there are some nice touches around the setting up of multiple user access to the repository. In earlier versions of OWB, you could either have all users logging directly into the design repository, or you could with a bit of work authorise regular database users to access the design repository through their oracle login. With Paris, you can authorise database users to access the design repository  directly from within the GUI, or create new users if accounts don't exist already.

As part of the account creation process, you can easily then check a box to install the OWB target tables and packages within the user schema, so that you can deploy objects to it. A nice user-friendly touch.

It's then a simple job to bring up the properties for a particular module

and individually set that user's privileges (full control, edit, compile, read) on that module.

Much easier to set up than before, and a much more granular level of access control (permissions go down to individual mapping level if needed). Like I say, it's only early days yet and I've not yet had the chance to put the tool through it's paces, but it looks like it's well worth the wait and likely to live up to all the promises.

Anyway, I've got lots of ideas for articles and postings up my sleeve and I should be able to write a bit more for the weblog over the next few weeks. I've been meaning to put something together that looks at exactly what extra you get when you use the OLAP option, analytic workspaces and Discoverer Plus OLAP 10.1.2, as compared to regular EULs and Discoverer Plus 10.1.2, and we're starting our first Enterprise Planning & Budgeting proof of concept in the next week or so so I'll have lots to write about around the realities of setting up an EPB system. I'm conscious as well that I haven't written much about pure database development recently, but what I end up writing about generally reflects what I'm doing with clients and recently all of the work I've been doing has been around Oracle Business Intelligence 10g rather than PL/SQL development or performance tuning. In fact due to the amount of project work I'm doing at present, I had to cancel attending Jonathan Lewis' "Optimizing Oracle - Performance By Design" seminar that I'd booked myself on to earlier this month, but with a bit of luck I should be able to go along to the next one in May and get to hear about Oracle performance from the "master of the cost-based optimizer" (who's also just announced that he's just finished writing a book out on the same subject out presumably later this year)

Before I go, just a quick reminder that the company I work for, SolStonePlus, are currently recruiting for people with Oracle Warehouse Builder or Oracle Application Server skills. Take a look at the advertisment on the SolStonePlus website and feel free to drop me a line if you want any more details. Other than that, if you're coming along on Thursday do make a point of saying hello and hopefully the day's agenda should be interesting and useful.