Phil Bates Answers Your Questions

A few weeks ago I ran a two-part interview (here and here) on the blog with Phil Bates, Architect for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Phil kindly invited questions at the end and sent me his replies the other day. Here they are...

[David Aldridge] "To what extent do you see Essbase and Oracle’s OLAP technologies merging at some time in the future? Are there particular technical features of each one that you see “cross-pollinating” into the other as a precusor to that?"

[Phil Bates] "We don't plan to merge Essbase and Oracle OLAP as these technologies have distinct advantages and use cases. BI EE today integrates with Essbase and Oracle OLAP (as well as other OLAP technologies such as Microsoft Analysis Services and SAP B/W). The strategy with respect to OLAP integration is one where we recognize the underlying capabilities of the OLAP engine to generate the most performant access mechanism (typically MDX based), so that we can leverage the performance and analytic capabilities of the underlying OLAP engine. At the same time, since we access the OLAP engines via the BI EE semantic model we can federate and join data from Essbase and Oracle OLAP with data from any of the other data sources we support, and deliver the data via the BI EE delivery channels (Dashboards, Answers, BI Publisher, Delivers etc). This capability can be used to make Essbase data accessible to a much wider audience. Essbase can also use the BI Server to access data via the BI EE semantic model, enabling Essbase to leverage the common senantic model and federated query capabilities of the BI server and providing access to all the data sources BI EE supports."

[Chris Webb] ""Making business intelligence more accessible and actionable through a greater number of delivery vehicles and channels” - could you ask Phil what Oracle’s position on the MDX language is?"

[Phil Bates] "We see MDX as a key mechanism for accessing OLAP data, and support the use of MDX to access Essbase. The BI Server also optimizes access to, for example Essbase and SAP B/W using MDX."

[Rodney Weinstein] "1. Can Oracle share the recommended approach and best ways to build a new Essbase application from scratch with the assumption that a) We want to implement on an OBI Interactive dashboard with global filters and b) We want to also put on the same dashboards Answers content from other relational data sources? Special attention to the use of Essbase outline for hierarchies and alternates and how best to structure them so that they can be used with flexibility with relational.

2. Will Oracle reverse Hyperion’s undocumented strategy for making it almost impossible to get data out of Essbase successfully? Or, will Oracle open up Essbase to full SQL query similar to 11g cube organized materialized views?"

[Phil Bates] "Since the BI EE server accesses Essbase via the BI EE semantic model, it is straightforward to build dashboards containing data from Essbase and from other sources. Also the good news here is that the BI EE server has an ODBC interface - which means you can now access Essbase via SQL where the SQL is expressed using the presentation layer of the BI EE semantic model.

Our product management team puts together best practices papers for how to get the most out of BI EE, Essbase, BI Apps and Performance Management applications. These are typically published on the Oracle Technology Network - OTN. I've forwarded your questions on to the team so we can incorporate these examples into best practice papers for using BI EE and Essbase together."

[Dan Gerema] "Hyperion licenses a product (Visual Explorer) which is actualy a tool from Tableau Software. Are there any plans to make Tableau’s toolset more prevalent, or for Oracle to develop a similar means of users easily analyzing data? It is much more effective means of analyzing data than the Oracle toolsets, thus I find our need is to license both, but I would hesitate to roll out 2 separate toolsets to users."

[Phil Bates] "The strategy here is to enable customers to use a single tool-set - BI EE - with state of the art visualization capabilities. Consolidating the functional capabilities around BI EE enables us to ensure advanced visualization capabilities can be supported consistently across the BI EE enterprise semantic layer and hence across a wide variety of heterogeneous data sources. To achieve this we are aggressively developing enhanced visualization capabilities in for the next major release of BI EE. Expect these capabilities to surpass Visual Explorer (Tableau) features over time. "

Thanks Phil, and David, Chris, Rodney and Dan for the questions. In a week or so's time we'll be running a similar interview with Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Product Manager for Oracle Warehouse Builder.