Updates on the SQL Model Clause and XML Publisher

If you read my article a couple of weeks ago about the SQL Model clause you'll probably be interested in a follow-up email I received yesterday from John Haydu, Product Manager within Oracle with responsibility for the Model clause. John clarifies a couple of points in the article which were a bit vague at the time.

"I'm the Oracle product manager handling the SQL MODEL clause, and a colleague showed me your excellent article of June 30, "Using The SQL MODEL Clause To Generate Financial Statements" (http://www.rittman.net/archives/001280.html). It's great to see a detailed discussion like yours about this powerful feature of Oracle 10g. The article and comments had a few points related to OLAP and error messages that deserve clarification, so I have some notes below.

Each bullet item includes a reference to the spot where the topic appeared.

* MODEL clause does not create analytic workspaces:

Your article comment of 7/1 mentioned that "MODEL clause creates a temporary AW to perform the model." In fact, MODEL clauses creates their own in-memory hash tables, and these are not dependent on analytic workspaces. (If you have an analytic workspace presented as a table via a table function and view, MODEL clause is optimized to use the analytic workspace data very efficiently.)

* MODEL clause does not require OLAP installation or licensing:

Since MODEL does not create analytic workspaces, there is no need for OLAP installation or licensing. The article's paragraph headed "UPDATE 1/7/05," plus a reader comment, mention that it seems necessary to install OLAP. Users performing a DBCA-based installation using
default settings will not encounter any problem. However, creating a custom database with DBCA and explicitly deselecting OLAP can raise the issue, and that is a bug. The problem is fixed in the next patch set for 10g Release 1 (10.1.0.5), likely available in the fourth quarter of 2005. The fix is also in 10g Release 2. (Many thanks to Chris Chiappa for his research on the issue.)

* MODEL clause is available on both EE and SE:

Availability of MODEL in SE was not mentioned explicitly in the text, but the statements about installing OLAP might lead readers to think EE is required. Since MODEL does not depend on the OLAP option, it is available in Standard Edition as well as Enterprise Edition.

* MODEL clause with inline view issue is fixed:

Near the end of the article (4 SQL statements from the bottom) you mentioned an ORA-600 encountered using an inline view which contains MODEL. This bug has also been fixed in 10.1.0.5 and 10g Rel. 2."

Thanks John for this one, good to get these points clarified. The "Model clause creates and analytic workspace" issue is obviously a bit of an Oracle myth (I've been told this by a couple of Oracle employees) and I think is down to (a) the Model clause syntax being based on the equivalent Express / Oracle OLAP model syntax and (b) the fact that it breaks when in some circumstances the OLAP Option isn't installed in the database.

On the same day I got a comment on the "Oracle Preps Major BI Revamp" posting from Tim Dexter, this time on XML Publisher. I've reproduced it here as it's quite important:

"XML Publisher has recently been listed as a separate standalone item. So it now becomes available to non-Apps customers. It is currently being packaged for release very soon. It will include the XMLP Engine and sample server side applications. There will also be a client side component to help build templates in MSWord with samples and demos. There will be a fully featured Document Management Solution coming late on this year.

You are correct on it being embedded into Oracle E-Business suite, there are ongoing projects to embed it into the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards suites. You'll also find XMLP under the covers in the most recent releases of Discoverer being used to format high fidelity output such as PDF. As XMLP can accept any well formed XML as an input and its written in java, so the world is your oyster as to where you want to integrate it.

Regards, Tim"

Thanks Tim.