Oracle Open World : Day 3 : Thoughts on Fusion

Today was the day where I actually had to do some work, with an appearance down at the OTN Lounge and a podcast to record with Tom Parrish from DBAZine. Thankfully I didn't wake up with a hangover, but for the first time since I've been here I actually slept in past 8.00am and therefore I ended up missing Chuck Rozwat's technology keynote over at Moscone North. Given that the themes this year have mostly been around Fusion and Middleware (more on this later) I took a lie-in rather than queuing at 8.00am for a seat, but I was keen to hear about any database developments (and to see a demo of Raptor) so I'll try and watch it on the Open World Online service.

The first thing I had to do was the "Ask The Experts" session over at the OTN Lounge, and when I arrived there was a white board with a written-on sign saying "Mark Rittman / Business Intelligence", with a big arrow on it pointing to a (deserted) sofa. Now even though I volunteered for this I always get really stressed out about it as (a) there's no way I'd go about describing myself as an expert, that's just asking for trouble and (b) chances are no-one will turn up, there'll just be me on a sofa with an arrow pointing to me and tumbleweed blowing across the room, but in the end three really nice people came over and we ended up chatting about server stuff and BI for over an hour, which wasn't nearly as traumatic as I thought it would be. Of course Tom then said that he had twenty people at his (I should have said mine had all just gone) but I got my book signed and went back to the hotel for the podcast.

The way these things work is that you agree the questions in advance, and then talk through them with the interviewer as if you were just having a conversation. Of course having the questions in advance means that you are under even more pressure to come up with something insightful, witty and perceptive and so I ended up trawling through the keynotes and presentation slides to try and come up with a perspective on what I'd seen this week. In a way this wasn't a bad exercise, and certainly from a BI & data warehousing perspective there is quite a bit that's been announced this week that's going to have an impact on what we do.

From a simple product angle, the Report Center product I mentioned the other day is going to give a bit of a boost to Discoverer and Oracle BI in general - Report Center is a dashboard application that takes Discoverer worksheets and presents them as portlets, but without the Portal framework/overhead and (in the demo at least) in a more visually appealing way than we've seen with Discoverer portlets; the bit that was particularly interesting though was the toolbar and menu that came with it (making it like a Windows application rather than a website), the support for alerting, the task-based menu, and the way that you could build your own report using the components that Discoverer was built with. The only caveat I'd make with this is that, going on previous product launches, if this Open World is the first we're hearing of it, then the next one will probably be where it's being regularly demo'd, and the one after that will be when it's available for production release, which means we could be talking about two years from now before the product is available; from a commercial perspective, this could mean trouble as it may end up raising expectations in customers' minds, and may end up causing dissatisfaction with what's currently there (Portal and Discoverer portlets). We'll have to wait and see.

Apart from Report Center though, there were no significant new products launched at Open World that affect BI and data warehousing - indeed, we were told this week that OWB Paris won't be out until calendar year 2006 (that's over two years late by my estimation) so there probably won't be much new going on for a while now. From what I could see though, the big news from a business intelligence perspective was not around products, but it was more to do with the central position BI will have in Project Fusion. From the presentation that Chuck Phillips gave on Monday, BI and analytics were positioned at the top of the Fusion technology stack and were described as being the "extra value" that Oracle could offer in the ERP space, and Oracle have already begun certifying products such as Discoverer to work with new acquisitions such as PeopleSoft EPM. If you look at where the new features are being added with products such as Warehouse Builder, much of the work is being done around integration with Peoplesoft and JDE, and it was announced this week that Oracle's BI components (BI Beans) will be integrated into the Fusion ERP products to embed analytic capabilities into all the applications. Of course for partners who major on Oracle BI&W this is both a threat and an opportunity - a threat because BI is moving into the application, rather than being standalone, an opportunity because BI will have a much larger audience, and of course whilst BI will be central to Fusion there is always the concern that new BI product development will be held up or redirected to areas that don't directly benefit non-Fusion customers. Again, we'll have to wait and see.

I went along to a presentation later in the afternoon on Oracle Warehouse Builder and Spatial Analysis. If you read my DBAZine article last year on GIS and Data Warehousing, or Justin Lokitz's article for OTN on the same subject, you'll know that GIS is an area I'm interested in as I think it's an often under-utilized area within data warehousing. Most every data warehouse has spatial (geographic) data and yet most people think you need to license the Spatial Option to do geographic analysis, but infact most of the features people need (distance calculations and so forth) are available out-of-the-box through a feature called Locator that comes with the Enterprise Edition of Oracle 10g, and it was interesting to see a presentation where Paris was used to process a customer record, use the name and address cleansing feature to extract an address, then use new spatial transformation types that work on the SDO_GEOMETRY datatype to product a map reference for subsequent mapping using Oracle Map Viewer. Apart from the spatial transformations shown off within OWB "Paris" another new feature that was shown off was Oracle Map Builder, a GUI tool that replaces the Map Definition Tool - apparently Map Builder will be coming out with the 10.1.0.3 release of Application Server, which I've heard elsewhere is due in May 2006. I'm going to go down to the demogrounds tomorrow and see if I can see a copy, certainly the combination of Paris and these new tools seems like it should make it a simpler process to add mapping to an Oracle-only data warehousing setup.

Finally, I bumped into Dan Vlamis and Chris Claterbos down at the BI demogrounds in the exhibition hall. Dan and Chris also work in the OLAP arena and we had a bit of a discussion about the way that all the OLAP presentations at Open World were still going over the basics of "What is OLAP?" and "How Do You Build A Cube?" - still pretty much at the "rubbing sticks together" phase if you like. Certainly the presentation I saw that Bud Endress and Anthony Waite gave was pretty much a rerun of last year's "Why Use The OLAP Option" one, positioning OLAP as an alternative to star schemas, and if you were looking for anything that looked at a more advanced use of OLAP, perhaps something around best practices, use of OLAP DML and so forth there was nothing really there, certainly not from Product Management. In actual fact, Dan Vlamis did end up doing something on OLAP case studies earlier today, but it was scheduled against something the OLAP product team did on how to build an OLAP cube (the only two OLAP presentations in the day, both at the same time), and so Dan only got a handful of attendees with the rest going to the "official one".

The thing is though, I'm pretty sure there is an audience out there at Open World who would want to see something more than a basic introduction to OLAP - certainly at the UKOUG I always end up with a fair percentage of the audience wanting to go beyond the basics (often quite a few of them know more than me, particularly the old Express hands) so I can't help thinking that there'd be an audience for this at Open World. What do you think? Would you like the product team to do something on "advanced" OLAP, or maybe get myself or Dan/Chris to do something? Let me know and if there's interest we'll lobby for something next year.

Anyway, tomorrows the last day and there's an OLAP presentation (Chris Claterbos, OWB and Oracle OLAP - What's New?), one on OLAP and Data Mining (maybe I'll be proved wrong), "Oracle's Advanced Analytics In the Database" (but not OLAP) and something on Discoverer Best Practices, which should be good. Oh, and I also want to get down to the demogrounds and see XML Publisher. Until then, Larry's presentations' just downloaded, so I'm going to skip through that and see what he's got to say on Fusion and BI.