BI Suite first impression

Last week I downloaded and installed the Enterprise Edition BI suite from Oracle’s e-delivery website.

Installation of the components that I wanted to try was a breeze and getting the admin tool up a running and pointing at a real database was straight forward. I had decided to go with one of our development databases (around 1 TB in size) and with a snowflake design. I decided to use OC4J as a container for the client web app - after all I am only playing - and after a couple hours (and a hint from Mark Rittman) I got the web pages up in my browser. The next challenge was to see the data from a couple of simple tables. And then the errors hit – after much head scratching I found a typo in my OCI connect string; interestingly the admin tool uses ODBC to initially fetch the database design but the analytic server uses OCI to talk to Oracle databases. That resolved, success.

I decided to stretch myself by creating denormalised logical tables from the 3NF dimensional hierarchies. This was surprisingly simple except for editing of the inter-table joins. Get this aspect wrong and drill-down fails with a somewhat cryptic error message.

Tomorrow I will join in a couple of fact tables and test out MV rewrite and also create a few simple reports

But so far I am impressed with the speed both to set things up and to drill down hierarchies