Tuesday and Wednesday at Collaborate’06

It's been a busy couple of days at Collaborate, hence the lack of updates since Monday. We've been giving presentations over the last couple of days, and coupled with trying to attend a few of the sessions, there's been little time for blogging.

Most of the evenings have been taken up with events and meals. On Monday night, I met up with Peter Robson, James, Rachel and Gemma from the UKOUG for a quick drink, and then Tuesday night was a BI&W reception held by Oracle in the Old Hickory Steakhouse. A good chance to catch up with people such as Michael Armstrong Smith and Dan Vlamis, plus quite a few of Oracle's BI&W and data warehousing team were there, including Mike Durran, a really nice guy from Bristol who's one of the PM's for Discoverer. I met up with most of the Oracle people again on Wednesday night, plus David Furston, Andreas Kugelmeier and Laura Mckechnie. It was a good opportunity to put faces to names, plus discuss data warehousing architectures and how the new Siebel tools fit into the picture. In all honesty, it was the meet-ups like this that have made the conference for me, an excellent chance to discuss stuff face to face and to meet some of the people you come across in the Oracle BI&W world.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday, when not in talks, going to the Oracle demogrounds and having a play around with the new Siebel Analytics tools, in particular Oracle Dashboards, Oracle Answers and Oracle Delivers. The main questions I wanted to answer were to what extent the new Siebel Oracle Analytic Server is an OLAP server, where it fits in with Oracle OLAP, and where Oracle Answers (the ad-hoc query tool) and Oracle Delivers (the scheduling and alerting tools) fit in. From what I can tell, the Oracle Analytic Server isn't an OLAP server as we'd know it, with a multi-dimensional cache, OLAP query language and so on, but it's got OLAP-style features and provides an end-user experience that supports drilling, crosstabs, page items and so on.

I think one of Oracle's priorities over the next few months is to take more of the OLAP capabilities of Discoverer and add them into the BI Suite Enterprise Edition product stack, with Oracle OLAP still being around as an OLAP datasource for the Analytic Server cache. I also had a play around with the Dashboard element of BI Suite EE, it looks very slick, a vast improvement over Portal, but quite tricky and complicated for an untrained user to work with - it certainly makes Discoverer look very useable, very easy to pick up, I can still see a very important role for Discoverer as an easy to learn, very "obvious" way of reporting on your data. That said, the Siebel technology looks very, very impressive, with the semantic layer in particular being a step on from the EULs that we've worked with previously. One note of caution though is over price - from speaking to people, the per-CPU license fee for the whole BI Enterprise Edition stack, including the analytic server (which could remove the need for an Oracle database + OLAP Option), Answers, Delivers, Dashboards and so on, is an eye-watering $225k per CPU. Wow. I said at the time that we'd have to buy one copy per country, and share it amongst ourselves, but if you compare it to buying the database + options + app server stack, plus all the new features you're getting, and in addition compare that to a typical Business Objects or Cognos implementation, which again can reach up into the $1m mark, it's not too unreasonalble a price.

I went along to a few of the "keynotes" as well, including the database one on Tuesday morning, and the BI product direction one in the afternoon. I was suprised at the low numbers at each one - at Open World, people are queuing for an hour beforehand, the rooms are all full, but there must have been less than 50 people in each one. It's been like that throughout the conference - there's thousands of people here but not many seem to be in each talk, although that could be partly because most of them are here for JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Oracle e-Business Suite content. Anyway, the database one was useful, looking at new features and products released since 10gR2 (Data Vault, Oracle Secure Backup and so on) whilst the BI one looked at the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition.

The latter was based on a combination of the recent New York announcement coupled with the Discoverer Statement of Direction, and I was able to ask a few good questions about where the Analytic Server sat in regard to the OLAP Option. More on that at a later date when I start looking at the Analytic Server in more detail. One other point at this meeting was that Oracle Warehouse Builder, when 10g R2 is released (the "Paris" release), will be packaged along with the database, not the BI Suite Standard Edition. I asked whether this meant that OWB would be installed along with the database, with OWB appearing as a start menu entry when you installed the Client CD, but at this point it looks like it'll be a standalone installation still. Also, it looks like OWB pricing is under review, as presumably it's moving from the IDS toolset bundle ($5k per named user), and there'll be more announcements when the product is launched in a few weeks time.

Whilst I'm here, one thing I forgot to mention in my last post was the presentation on "Controlled Flights into Terrain : Avoiding Database Design Disasters" by Kevin Loney. I just wanted to say that this was the best presentation, or more specifically the best presenter, I'd come across at the event. Really engaged with the audience, very interesting and humourous to listen to, really knew his stuff, got some good technical points across in an easy to listen to manner. I'm a big Kevin Loney fan now.

Just to wrap up, I'm finally getting used to the hotel. For the first couple of days, I couldn't get over how all nine acres of the hotel grounds was under glass, but now I've been here for a few days (and ventured outside as well, either really cold or too humid) you can appreciate why they've done it. It's all still a bit mad, if you know what I mean, but it's actually a really nice venue and the climate control makes a real difference. Wouldn't like to see their electricity bills though.

That's it for now. The last of our talks is in half an hour, I'll report back on how they went afterwards.