Technical

Back Home, and Reflections on Open World

Mark Rittman

Oct 29, 2006 • 4 min read

Well I'm back in the UK now, and I've had yesterday and this morning to myself before the family gets back from Ireland. We're all back at work tomorrow (well school and nursery for the kids, we haven't got them working as chimney sweeps yet) so I've been earning a few brownie-points giving the house a bit of a clean before things all kick off again. Now I'm back, although it's a shame to leave SF it's nice to actually get a proper cup of tea, plus there's the Observer to read and a few programmes on Sky Plus to catch up on before the kids take over.

I'm actually in the UK for the next few weeks, and mostly working from home/the local office apart from two days running the BI Masterclass at Oracle City Office, London. I'm quite looking forward to this one - a bit like taking a tour around the world, then playing at home at the end - and as usual I'll be adding a bit more content, this time around the slight difference in dimension and cube creation in OWB when you're working against a multi-dimensional dataset. The seminar in the UK actually sold out a few weeks ago, and Oracle are therefore running a second event on November 23rd/24th which you can still book up for. Once the seminar is done, I'm preparing a one-day course for one of our University clients on building effective data warehouses using Oracle 10g, delivering it and then getting things sorted out for the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham the week after. The good thing is that this all means I'll be UK-based for a few weeks, but it's going to be a busy time and all very client-focused.

Now that I'm back it's possible to reflect a bit on the announcements and general "vibe" coming out of Open World last week. For me, there were three main things that particularly caught my attention:

The extent to which SOA, Fusion Middleware and the new Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) are going to affect us working in the Oracle BI&W arena,
The degree to which the Sunopisis purchase is going to affect how we do ETL,
The slight disappointment that was the Oracle Database 11g announcement

Starting off with SOA, Fusion Middleware and OBI EE, going to all the talks and speaking to various people brought home firstly, how much the new Enterprise Edition is going to dominate mindshare and product development going forward, and secondly how much this technology is going to embrace the word of SOA, process orchestration, identity management and so on. OBI EE is certainly where the action is going to happen, and whilst Discoverer will be enhanced going forward (XML Publisher integration, JSR168-compliant portlets, OLAP enhancements) it's clear that Enterprise Edition has the momentum behind it, product features that play nicely with all the latest architectural moves, very clued-up product managers and a very sexy user interface that puts it up there with the latest and greatest from the pure-play vendors.

In the same vein, it was a real eye-opener to hear of our business intelligence technology being spoken of in the same breath as Service-Orientated Architecture, indentity management and all the other Web 2.0-style technologies. Probably like most people, I thought BI was bundled in with Fusion Middleware through it being a sort of "catch-all" technology bucket that contained everything that wasn't a database or an application; from looking at it in more detail, and speaking to people, BI will play a central part in this middleware architecture and as developers, we're going to have to get our heads around concepts such as SOA, indentity, Enterprise Service Bus and so on; crosstabs, OLAP cubes and platform-specific ETL tools aren't going to cut it for much longer.

On a similar theme, I was struck by the features and possibilities that came up when I looked in more detail at the Sunopsis products. You'll probably recall that Oracle bought Sunopsis, a rival ETL vendor, earlier this month and at the time Oracle were very keen to stress that OWB wasn't on it's way out, and in fact some of the technologies from Sunopsis were going to make their way into OWB (support for heterogeneous sources, for example). That's as maybe, but I think the real role for Sunopsis isn't to supplant OWB, but it's to be the ETL technology that works alongside OBI EE in this new Fusion Middleware environment. OWB will be the ETL tool for use with the Oracle database and Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition, where you're generally working with data in an Oracle environment, but for OBI EE, where you're working in a heterogenous, loosely-coupled environment, where your database, application server, BI platform are all standards-based and hot-pluggable, you need an ETL tools that's designed from the ground-up to be database-independent, and service-orientated, and that's where Sunopsis will come in. OWB will still be important, just as Discoverer is, but if you're looking to move into the wider SOA world, just as you're going to want to take advantage of the features of the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, hand-in-hand with that you'll want to get up to speed with Sunopsis, in a way the "Enterprise Edition" of Oracle Warehouse Builder.

Whilst the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Sunopsis were all very exciting, I couldn't help feeling underwhelmed by the news of Oracle Database 11g. the "Change Assurance" release .... hmmm. I know when 10g was first announced, it seemed more like 9i Release 3, and there do seem to be some nice new features around caching, partitioning and so on, but 11g doesn't exactly seem groundbreaking so far, nothing in there particularly to get you all excited. What I can tell so far is that some of the new BI features, such as the "Next-Generation OLAP" mentioned in Andy Mendelsohn's talk, aren't even in the beta yet and will probably start to become apparent later in 2007, but so far, it's the dog that didn't bark in my view.

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