Rittman Mead Blog - Oracle Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Getting The Users' Trust - Part 1

Looking back over some of my truly ancient Rittman Mead blogs (so old in fact that they came with me when I joined the company soon after Rittman Mead was launched), I see recurrent themes on why people “do” BI and what makes for successful implementations. After all, why would

Oracle BI Suite EE

An Oracle BI "Blast from the Past": Ten Products from Oracle's BI History You May Not Have Heard Of...

With Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, the BI Apps and Hyperion EPM Suite, Oracle have a set of reporting and analysis tools that can be considered "best of breed" and compete with any other tool on the market. Coupled with the Oracle database, the engineered systems strategy and the Fusion Apps/

Technical

Report Flexibility, or Split-Second Performance : Pick One or the Other

Kevin McGinley wrote an interesting post the other week reflecting on Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID), and the role that it's come to play within Oracle's BI tools strategy. Kevin's view was that whilst Oracle positioned OEID originally as an "unstructured data", or even "big data" tool, where it's got

Oracle BI Suite EE

OBIEE 11.1.1.5 and Oracle OLAP Support

One of the welcome (but strangely unheralded) new features introduced with OBIEE 11.1.1.5 is support for Oracle OLAP as a data source. Earlier releases of OBIEE supported Oracle OLAP through SQL access, either directly through SQL views or through cube-organized materialized views, and there was even a

Technical

Oracle OLAP 11g - Reporting in Excel using Simba MDX OLE-DB Provider

If you had looked at my blog entry here, i would have shown a way of reporting on Oracle OLAP 11g using the newly introduced Essbase XOLAP. As mentioned there, one of the biggest advantages of using Essbase is its tight integration with Excel through Smart View. Unfortunately, in the

Technical

Oracle EPM 11.1.1.3 & Oracle OLAP 11g – Reporting on Oracle OLAP using Essbase Excel Add-in/Smartview - XOLAP

This is the week of Colloborate 2010 conference. Mark, myself, Pete and Stewart were scheduled to present this year but due to the European Airspace closure, myself and Pete haven’t been able to actually travel this year. Its a real shame as we all really looked forward to this

Technical

News on The BI Verdict, and an Interview with Nigel Pendse

Those of you who keep an eye on this blog, or have been in the BI and OLAP industry for many years, will of course know of Nigel Pendse. Nigel was behind the original "OLAP Report" that offered a vendor-neutral view of the OLAP market and had run

Technical

OLAP 10gR2 and Dense Looping

I'd like to take a moment to express my appreciation to several of the folks at the OLAP product team for their assistance with the project mentioned below, including A.A. Hopeman, Jameson White, Marty Gubar, and especially David Greenfield. The sky's the limit for Oracle OLAP in their capable

Technical

Book Review : "Oracle Essbase & Oracle OLAP: The Guide to Oracle's Multidimensional Solution (Osborne Oracle Press Series)"

I've been talking with Dan Vlamis about a new book that he, Chris Claterbos and some of the Essbase team from Oracle have been putting together on Oracle OLAP and Oracle Essbase. Oracle Press were kind enough to send over a review copy the other week, and so I've been

Technical

Ten Thoughts on Oracle BI&DW for 2008

Today is New Year's Eve, and a kind of review of the year, here's ten of my thoughts on what happened in Oracle B&DW in 2008. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. 2008 was the year that OBIEE went from early-adopter technology (at least for general Oracle customers) to

Technical

Cube Organized Materialized Views

Yesterday, Mark mentioned a new Oracle white paper on Cube Organized Materialized Views - now that is a bit of a mouthful and shouts out to be made COMV or something equally short and saving of typing. I say that because I have recently submitted the final version (in time

Technical

New White Paper on Cube Organized Materialized Views

I noticed on the Oracle OLAP blog the other day that a new white paper on Cube Organized Materialized Views has been uploaded to OTN. If you've followed Pete and my postings on this new feature in Oracle 11g the white paper goes into a bit more detail on how

Technical

OLAP and summary management

So, why is someone who normally writes about data warehouses going to talk about Oracle OLAP, and in particular, cube organized materialized views? I could run out the argument that I work in a BI consultancy and none of us here at Rittman Mead are 100% aligned to a specific

Technical

Almost started OLAP 11g...

The proposal deadline for the upcoming Collaborate 08 was shortly before I was to leave my old employer - it was already known that I would be leaving them to join Mark and Jon (and possibly, it was known before Rittman Mead Consulting existed!) so it came as no real

Technical

Some New Oracle OLAP and Essbase Blogs

Just a quick posting on Saturday morning to mention some new Oracle OLAP and Essbase blogs that I've come across. First up is an Oracle OLAP blog by some of the most well-known people behind the product. Kevin Lancaster (well known to us at the UK Oracle User Group), Keith

Technical

Five Oracle BI Trends for the Future

I gave a BI keynote (pdf copy of slides) at a couple of events last week (the Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics Summit in Reston, VA and the OUG Scotland Conference & Exhibition, Glasgow), and as it's been picked up on the Eye on Oracle blog site, I thought that it's

Technical

Final Day at Collaborate

Just a quick posting as I'm about to get my flight back to the UK (via San Francisco, unfortunately, so it'll be a long journey). Yesterday I went to talks on SOA and RAC, and went along to Cary Millsap's talk on why you often end up tuning the wrong

Technical

Oracle Open World Days 1,2 - Database Roadmaps

I'm sitting now in the Speaker Ready-room down in the Moscone South mezzanine, in between sessions on Oracle Database 11g and the BI Suite Enteprise Edition & Standard Edition presentations later this afternoon. The morning started off with the Chuck Rozwat keynote on Oracle's database technology, a run through of

Technical

New BI-Related Papers and Downloads On OTN

I noticed the other day that a number of new BI-related papers and downloads have gone up recently on OTN. "New Features and Performance Enhancements in Oracle OLAP 10g Release 2" goes into a bit more detail on new 10gR2 features such as measure compression, partitioning and new

Data Warehousing

Yet more on summaries

In addition to the conventional Select D1,D2,SUM(M1) from base group by D1,D2 type of summary Oracle offers two other approaches: Oracle OLAP cubes and the various extensions to GROUP BY. Oracle OLAP has it roots in the Oracle Express technology - that is the the stand

Technical

OLAP Modelling using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2

In one of last week's postings I looked at how relational data objects are defined using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2. In this posting, I'll look at how OLAP objects are defined and populated. To define OLAP objects, you don't need to have installed and licensed the OLAP Option to the

Data Warehousing

Debating

Earlier this year Mark Rittman and I briefly discussed the concept of a matching pair of conference papers on aggregation in Business Intelligence. Mark would look at the use of Oracle OLAP as an aggregation technique and I would do something similar on conventional (and maybe less conventional) relational techniques.

Data Warehousing

Going for OLAP

To be honest, I have never implemented a data warehouse using Oracle’s OLAP option. True, I used to dabble with Oracle Sales Analyzer and Express but that was a couple of years ago and the technology has moved on. In those days we used the ROLAP model to map

Data Warehousing

Modelling from JDeveloper

In a few idle moments I downloaded the CWD4ALL extension to JDeveloper – I guess it is the developer in me that wants to give modelling tools a trial and as the vendor web page mentioned words and phrases such as OLAP, multi-dimensional modelling and Oracle Analytical Workspaces. I thought I