Rittman Mead Blog - Technical Insights

Book Review : "Oracle Essbase & Oracle OLAP: The Guide to Oracle's Multidimensional Solution (Osborne Oracle Press Series)"

I've been talking with Dan Vlamis about a new book that he, Chris Claterbos and some of the Essbase team from Oracle have been putting together on Oracle OLAP and Oracle Essbase. Oracle Press were kind enough to send over a review copy the other week, and so

Technical

Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 – Drill-through to BI EE from Smart View – Using Essbase Studio - HOLAP

One of the nice little advantages of using Oracle Essbase Studio is the fact that it manages the relational drill through much better than the Essbase Integration Services. With the advent of Essbase studio, all the metadata for relational drill through is pushed back to the Studio server. So, when

Technical

Code Templates in OWB11gR2 Part 3 : Hybrid Code Template Mappings

If you've read my previous postings on how OWB11gR2 support access to non-Oracle databases [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/09/21/code-templates-in-owb11gr2-part-1-introduction-and-support-for-heterogeneous-databases/] , and allows you to create mappings that use non-Oracle sources and targets [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/09/21/code-templates-in-owb11gr2-part-2-introduction-to-code-template-mappings/] , you may we wondering

Technical

Code Templates in OWB11gR2 Part 2 : Introduction to Code Template Mappings

In the first posting in this series [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/09/21/code-templates-in-owb11gr2-part-1-introduction-and-support-for-heterogeneous-databases/] on code templates in OWB11gR2, I went through the background to the feature and showed how it provided access to both Oracle, and non-Oracle sources. In this posting I'm going to look

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Enforcing and Non-Enforcing Outer Joins

One of the flexibilities of the BI Server is its ability to fine-tune certain sql queries being fired back to the database. One such example is its ability to enforce certain outer joins when required. For example, lets consider a simple example containing the Customer dimension and the Sales fact

Technical

Code Templates in OWB11gR2 Part 1 : Introduction and Support for Heterogeneous Databases

One of the new features introduced with Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2 [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/09/09/a-look-at-the-new-features-in-owb11gr2/] is "Code Templates". This new feature allows you to develop mappings that use the "Knowledge Module" feature of Oracle Data Integrator (referred to in OWB11gR2 as

Technical

OWB 11gR2 and BI EE - Creating a Business Model - Part 2

In the last blog entry here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/09/10/owb-11gr2-and-bi-ee-deriving-the-business-model-part-1/] , i had covered the automatic derivation of BI EE business model from OWB 11gR2. Though it works out of the box, in most cases, users will like to have more control on the business model

Technical

Oracle to Announce New "OLTP"-Focused Database Machine

Oracle released details over the weekend of a news conference they are running on September 15th 2009, to announce a new OLTP-focused database machine this time based on Sun hardware [http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=101483]. I'm surprised that this wasn't

Technical

OWB 11gR2 and BI EE – Deriving the Business Model – Part 1

One of the most anticipated features(atleast for all BI EE users) of the recently released OWB 11gR2 is its ability to create a BI EE repository directly from its table/view/dimensional objects. This feature to derive BI specific objects was one of the very popular ones when a

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – BI Server Query Parameters - Driving Tables and Parameterized Sub-Queries

Whenever BI Server is used for creating reports containing data from multiple databases, BI Server acts like a mini-database engine. It does a lot of operations itself like joins, sorts, group bys etc, everything in its own memory space. Since it acts like a database engine, it has to have

Technical

Thoughts on the New DW Features in Oracle Database 11gR2

Well it's been about a week since Oracle Database 11gR2 [http://www.oracledatabase11g.com/] became available for download on Linux, and we've since had a chance to play around with it and see what's new. The Linux release on 32 and 64-bits is available

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – OLTP Reporting – Conforming Dimensions and Multi-Grain Fact measures

In the last blog entry here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/21/oracle-bi-ee-10-1-3-4-1-oltp-reporting-switching-tables-based-on-chosen-dimensions-use-case-1/] , i had shown a very simple transactional reporting use case wherein i made the BI Server to switch tables based on the measures chosen. Basically switching of tables would result in hitting a specific table

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – OLTP Reporting – Switching Tables based on chosen dimensions – Use Case 1

Though BI EE is well known for reporting on Stars, Facts and Dimensions, one of the lesser known or lesser advertised features is its extensive transactional or OLTP modeling capabilities. Steve Devine (our guest author last week) documents his experience well here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/17/

Technical

Oracle EPM 11.1.1.3 – Hyperion Shared Services integration with external Applications – Java API – Part 1 - Introduction

One of the major enhancements that came in the Hyperion EPM 11 release is the availability of Java APIs to access shared services from external applications. In the prior releases, SDK’s were available but those have been enhanced completely now in this release to accommodate new features. Also with

Technical

A Quik Look at QlikView

Outside the world of Oracle, one of the rising stars of the BI world has been Qliktech, the Swedish software company behind QlikView [http://www.qlikview.com/]. QlikView is one of a new breed of desktop, in-memory BI tools [http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_InMemBI.htm] (see also the forthcoming

Technical

Slightly Fuzzy Lookups

Recently I had a requirement to selectively "translate" the data in one column of a table before loading into a data warehouse. In this case we had to "standardise" a list of countries. Normally, this is classic use of an outer join to a table containing

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Sub-Totals during Drills – Conforming Dimensions

I saw a peculiar requirement being discussed in a pentaho forum(i was actually browsing for some unique Pentaho features and stumbled upon the requirement) this week wherein end users wanted to get the sub-totals automatically while drilling on a dimension. In normal cases, i would have left it as

Technical

A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 4: Customization

In the first three parts of this series, I gave an overview of the new 7.9.5.2 release of the Oracle BI Applications [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/07/31/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-1-general-new-features/] , went through how the technology differs [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/01/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-2-technology-changes-between-odi-and-informatica/] now

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Reporting on Non-Transactional Dimension values – Equivalence of Outer Joins

As with any reporting tool BI EE works on the premise of converting the front-end column selection to the corresponding physical queries. But one of the advantages that makes BI EE stand apart from other reporting toolsets is its ability to do certain joins/sorting etc in-memory without pushing them

Technical

A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 3: Performing a Data Load

In the past couple of postings (here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/07/31/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-1-general-new-features/] , here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/01/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-2-technology-changes-between-odi-and-informatica/] ), I've gone through an introduction to the new BI Apps 7.9.5.2 release and talked about how the introduction of

Technical

A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 2: Technology Changes Between ODI and Informatica

So at the end of last week I posted an overview of the new 7.9.5.2 release of the Oracle BI Applications [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/07/31/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-1-general-new-features/] , which replaces Informatica and the DAC with Oracle Data Integrator and Configuration Manager. I said at the

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Modeling Parent-Child Hierarchies – Using Federation

One common issue that gets highlighted when someone uses BI EE is its inability to leverage Parent Child Hierarchies out of the box. 11g release scheduled sometime later next year is supposed to address this seamlessly. Having said that, being consultants ourselves most of the times we find ourselves in

Technical

A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 1: General New Features

If you've been wondering why I've not been posting to the blog recently, it's because I've been grappling with the new release of the Oracle BI Applications that uses Oracle Data Integrator as the ETL engine. This is an interesting release as

Technical

Announcing Rittman Mead Training Days 2009, London

I'm very pleased to announce details of our second-ever Training Days [http://www.rittmanmead.com/trainingdays2009] event, to be held at the Bloomsbury Hotel [http://www.doylecollection.com/locations/london_city_hotels/the_bloomsbury_hotel.aspx] in London on October 27th - 29th 2009. This year I'

Technical

Using a Process Flow to loop through Months in a Table

I hate having to maintain the same ETL logic in two different places; it violates everything I know about good coding practices. When using Java, PL/SQL, or even shell script, a good developer will modularize particular bits of his or her code to make sure distinct business logic is