Rittman Mead Blog - Technical Insights

ODI11g in the Enterprise Part 2 : Data Integration using Essbase, Messaging, and Big Data Sources and Targets

In this five part series over the Christmas break, I'm taking a look at some of the lesser-known features in Oracle Data Integrator 11g, focusing on "enterprise" features such as build automation, scripting, data quality and middleware integration. If you've arrived at this post

Technical

ODI11g in the Enterprise Part 1: Beyond Data Warehouse Table Loading

Most developers who've used Oracle Data Integrator [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/data-integrator/overview/index.html] in the past have used it to load data warehouse tables, typically from an Oracle or other relational source into a set of dimensional Oracle target tables. Some source data might

Technical

Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 4: Complex Dimensions

You guessed it... more on transactional schemas. For a quick recap, here are the posts to date: Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 1: Introduction [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/06/using-obiee-against-transactional-schemas-part-1-introduction/] Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 2: Aliases [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/08/using-obiee-against-transactional-schemas-part-2-aliases/] Using

Technical

OEID and RTD Events

Just wanted to mention two events we're running in conjunction with Oracle on Thursday 6th December that may be of interest. These events will allow you to learn more about Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID) and Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD). Providing a great opportunity to learn how OEID

Technical

Update on my OBIEE / Exalytics Books

Just a quick update on my two recently published books, "Oracle Business Intelligence Developers Guide" and "Oracle Exalytics Revealed", both of which are now published and available to purchase around the world in printed and electronic format. Here are some links to the two books on

Technical

Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 3: Simple Dimensions and Facts

This could be the longest series of blog posts in Rittman Mead history... not in number of posts (this is only the third), but in length of time from start to finish. I don't think that's a record anyone is actively pursuing, nor am I proud

Technical

Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour 2012 : Venues and BI Presentations

Next week I'm honoured to be taking part in the Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour, taking in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki over four days. Organized by Heli Helskyaho (Finnish Oracle Users Group) and Sten Vesterli (Danish Oracle Users Group) along with the leaders of the Norwegian and

Technical

Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca Part 3 : Flight Delays Analysis using OBIEE, Endeca and Oracle R Enterprise on Exalytics

So far in this series we've looked at Oracle's BI, Big Data and Advanced Analytics strategy and seen how Exalytics can benefit both Endeca Information Discovery and Oracle R Enterprise through its 40 CPU cores and 1TB of RAM. For a recap on the two earlier

Technical

Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca Part 2 : Oracle Endeca, the Advanced Analytics Option and Oracle Exalytics

In this week of postings we're going to look at Oracle Exalytics and how it enables "big data" and unstructured data analytics, using Oracle Endeca, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Big Data Appliance and the Oracle Database Advanced Analytics option. In case you've arrived via a

Technical

Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca Part 1 : Oracle's Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy

One of the presentations Rittman Mead gave at last week's Oracle Openworld [http://www.rittmanmead.com/openworld2012/] was entitled "High Speed, Big Data Analysis using Oracle Exalytics" [http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/oow2012_rittman_exalytics_big_data.pdf][PDF]. Although it was the last of my

Technical

Oracle BI Developers Guide, and Oracle Exalytics Revealed, Now Available to Buy!

After what has been around five years of development, including two years of waiting for OBIEE11g and then three of desperately keeping up with 11g point releases, the Oracle Business Intelligence Developers Guide [http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0071798749.html] has now been published by Oracle Press / McGraw Hill

Technical

BI, Data Warehousing and Data Integration News from Oracle Openworld 2012

This week is Oracle Openworld week in San Francisco, USA [http://www.oracle.com/openworld], with around 50,000 attendees attending Openworld itself, Java One and fringe events such as Oaktable world. Rittman Mead have had ten sessions during the week, covering topics such as OBIEE, Endeca, data warehousing, Essbase

Technical

OOW2012 so far...

It's now half way through Oracle Open World 2012 [http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html] and I thought I would write up a brief update of what has happened so far. Last year saw the announcements of both Exalytics [http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/business-intelligence/

Technical

Alternatives to the Summary Advisor for Refreshing Exalytics Aggregates

One of the several elements of Exalytics' power comes from it holding pre-calculated (aggregated) data in the TimesTen for Exalytics In-Memory Database. Exalytics comes with a tool called the Summary Advisor (which Mark Rittman has written about previously here) [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/03/oracle-exalytics-week-the-summary-advisor/] which suggests

Technical

Improvements to Essbase Integration in OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 : ASO Aggregate Persistence, Combined Install & Systems Management

The recent 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 patchset for OBIEE 11g provided a bunch of new features including trellis charts, Oracle BI Mobile and the repository Model Checker [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/07/obiee-11-1-1-6-2-bp1-new-features-oracle-bi-mobile-hd-and-patching-upgrade-considerations/] , but it also sneaked in another set of new features that will be

Technical

Advanced monitoring of OBIEE with Nagios

Introduction In the previous articles in this series, I described an overview of monitoring OBIEE [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/09/automated-monitoring-of-obiee-in-the-enterprise-an-overview] , and then a hands-on tutorial for setting up Nagios to monitor OBIEE [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/09/an-introduction-to-monitoring-obiee-with-nagios]. Nagios is an Enterprise Systems Management tool

Technical

An introduction to monitoring OBIEE with Nagios

Introduction This is the second post in a mini-series on monitoring OBIEE. The previous post, Automated Monitoring of OBIEE in the Enterprise – an overview [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/09/automated-monitoring-of-obiee-in-the-enterprise-an-overview] , looked at the overview and theory to why and what we should be monitoring. In this post I

Technical

Automated Monitoring of OBIEE in the Enterprise - an overview

A lot of time is given to the planning, development and testing of OBIEE solutions. Well, hopefully it is. Yet sometimes, the resulting deployment is marked Job Done and chucked over the wall to the Operations team, with little thought given to how it is looked after once it is

Technical

Integrating Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BI EE Part 3 : Adding BI Content to Custom Portal Applications

In the previous two postings in this series I looked at Oracle's WebCenter Portal application at a high-level [http://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/09/integrating-oracle-webcenter-and-oracle-bi-ee-part-1-introducing-oracle-webcenter-portal-11g/] , and then explained how analyses and other BI content from OBIEE 11g could be added to WebCenter Portal : Spaces applications [http://www.

Technical

The PIVOT Clause is Only for Aggregates

We briefly interrupt the transactional schemas [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/06/using-obiee-against-transactional-schemas-part-1-introduction/] series for this important message: the PIVOT clause of SELECT is only for aggregates! When Oracle added the PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators in Database 11g, at first, I was hopeful. It certainly scratched an itch that

Technical

Integrating OBIEE11g with Hyperion Shared Services Security - An Example Workaround using the HSS Security API and BISQLGroupProvider

One of our customers in the UK recently asked us to help them upgrade an existing OBIEE 10g system to the 11g release, to take advantage of the enhanced visualisations, scorecards and KPIs, iPhone and iPad clients and so on. What made this upgrade interesting is that their OBIEE 10g

Technical

Introducing Oracle Enterprise Data Quality

Visually, BI dashboards and analyses can be impressive and appear to meet the user’s needs, but if the data displayed on the dashboards isn't reliable or correct then those same users can quickly lose faith in what they contain. Therefore, it’s important that assessing and managing

Technical

OBIEE / AD integration - [OBI-SEC-00022] Identity found ... but could not be authenticated

A quick blog post to record for future Googlers a problem I encountered today. I was configuring OBIEE 11.1.1.6 to use Microsoft Active Directory (MSAD) as an Authentication Provider, following the instruction's in Mark's blog post [http://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/03/

Technical

Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 2: Aliases

It seems like a different life when I posted the introduction to reporting against transactional schemas [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2012/06/using-obiee-against-transactional-schemas-part-1-introduction/] . Since that time, we've had some exciting new customers come aboard, which has required a lot of my time (and which I have been

Technical

Advanced Presentation Services settings for OBIEE testing & development

As John Minkjan pointed out [http://obiee101.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/obiee-obipsconfigbasexsd.html] a while ago, the XSD (XML Schema) for the OBIEE configuration files can yield some interesting things. I've been looking at obips_config_base.xsd and found the following bits of information which I