Final Day at Collaborate’06, and Setting Up Siebel Analytics

Well that's it for me now at Collaborate'06. We did our last presentation yesterday and afterwards, I went along to the IOUG closing debate, on commercial Unix vs. Linux. As you would have expected, the argument came down to commoditisation of hardware and software, and the cost benefits accruing from this, vs. the tried and tested, safe route of sticking with commercial Unix.

In the end though, I have to say that it was delivering the presentations that was the low spot of the week for me. Due to the way the presentations had been divided up amongst the user groups, and the way they were scheduled, we ended up on the Quest track (Quest is the JD Edwards and PeopleSoft user group) and with our presentations being on BI Beans and Oracle OLAP, there were very few people within this user group who knew what the technology was about. If we ever do this in future, I'd work very hard to get onto the IOUG track instead, as that's where you'd normally look for OLAP and Oracle business intelligence presentations.

Still, on a bright note, we finished up around 2.00pm and I went back to my room and started to get Siebel Analytics up and running. After a few hours, I'd got the software installed and configured, brought in the Discoverer Videostore data, and the SH sample schema, and started playing around with Oracle Answers and Oracle Dashboard. First, a screenshot of the administration tool, with the physical, business and presentation elements of the semantic layer:

Then, creating a simple table and crosstab using Oracle Answers:

... and then publishing some reports as part of a dashboard:

First impressions are that there's a few things that'll catch you out when setting up data sources (I won't spoil the surprise by telling you what they are, yet) and Oracle Answers is quite a bit different from Discoverer, when you come to set up crosstabs, tables and so on. I still can't get it to display a crosstab properly (the axis display OK, but the measures are blank) and I'm having trouble getting new presentation layer items to display properly when logging in as anything other than administrator, but we're up and running and now I've proved to myself that it works, it's a case of reading the manuals.

Anyway, flights' at 6.00pm and then it's back to Heathrow, and then Brighton. Until next week then, that's it for now.