Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) Weblog

Oracle's new Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One delivers an enterprise-class solution for small to medium businesses in need of Microsoft Windows-based data warehousing and BI.

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One (SE One) is a complete, integrated business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing system that is packaged and priced to meet the needs of small to medium sized organizations and workgroups of five to fifty users. SMB customers tempted by the built-in BI capabilities in SQL Server can now get a single, easy-to-install package of Oracle technologies for a Microsoft price.

Growing companies can be assured of an upgrade path when they exceed the fifty user limit. Paul Rodwick, Oracle Vice President Business Intelligence, says, "The software offers small to medium sized organizations a proper infrastructure that will serve their immediate BI needs, yet easily scale and grow with their needs over time."

Oracle Database and Oracle Warehouse Builder provide category-leading, scalable data warehousing and ETL platform today and into the future, while applications, reports and dashboards built for Oracle BI SE One can be migrated to Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

For more, see the following links:

• Oracle BI SE One Press Release
  
• OTN page for Oracle BI SE One
  
• Computer Reseller News (CRN) story about Oracle BI SE One.

The Oracle Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics Special Interest Group (BIWA SIG) is a resource for sharing expertise and vision among members dedicated to mutual success in leveraging Oracle business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytics features, options and products for the shared goal of  Better Information - Better Results.

The IOUG BIWA SIG invites you to its worldwide meeting October 2-3, 2007 in Reston, VA at the Oracle Conference Center.   The BIWA Summit will accelerate the success of  BIWA users by providing a forum for sharing best practices, useful information, discovering novel and innovative practices, and addressing issues concerning Oracle products. Summit Format: The BIWA Summit offers outstanding value in many different formats:

• Exciting keynote presentations from industry-renowned individuals and domain experts.


• 45-minute technical presentations selected to be of interest to data analysts, business analysts, ISVs, data miners,
  application developers, architects and DBAs.
  
• 90-minute hands-on technical workshops and discussions focused on topics of great interest.


• Panel discussions by leading experts.
  
• One-on-one meetings with Oracle experts (available through advance reservation).


• 5-minute Lightning Rounds and tabletop exhibits for Oracle partners to describe their latest offerings.

For more details, see the conference web site:

Here's a customer success story about using Warehouse Builder for near-real-time data warehousing.

    http://www.sys-con.com/read/417975.htm

As the industry's first "by-invitation-only" consumer opinion panel,
eRewards uses Oracle Database 10g to power its program which rewards
members for the time they spend answering online surveys that have been
selected to match their interests, demographics, and life
circumstances. Through this program, members earn e-Rewards currency,
which can be redeemed for a variety of rewards including dining,
entertainment, travel and retail rewards. To process its influx of
data, eRewards depends on Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application
Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Data Guard and
Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g.

At the heart of eRewards' Web site is a powerful OLTP system
supported by Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters
for online interaction with eRewards members. Complementing eRewards'
OLTP systems is a multi-terabyte data warehouse also running on Oracle
Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters. eRewards uses the
flexibility of Oracle Data Guard, traditionally a disaster recovery
feature, to keep its data warehouse up-to-date with the latest
information captured by the OLTP system. The data warehouse is used to
manage survey panels and provide valuable real-time analysis and
reporting captured from member response data. Additionally, eRewards
uses Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g to design, build and populate its
data warehouse and business intelligence systems.

"We evaluated competitive offerings and nothing could match the
combination of functionality, performance, manageability and the cost
structure offered by Oracle," said Joel Davis, Senior Vice President of
Technology, eRewards. "Near real-time synchronization of our data
warehouse with our OLTP system enables eRewards to more effectively
scale our environment to meet the needs of members, clients, and
employees."

It is ODTUG time again. No beach this time, but hey it will be a crawl
away from the Frensh Quarter, so get ready to have some fun. Of course
we have serious stuff going on as well...

I'm of course quite interested in OWB sessions or in topics that touch on it as like data warehousing, ETL and data quality. So here are some sessions that might be interesting:


A BI and Advanced Analytics Case Study (by Shyan Vran Nath, Citco Technology Management)

This presentation will look at the framework for developing a
data-driven planning application using business intelligence and
advanced analytics. Often the planning, budgeting, and forecasting
involves quantitative details that make the job of the approving
authorities harder. Here we take the domain of K-12 education and look
at how advanced analytics can be used to predict the students who are
"at-risk" of graduation versus those who are likely to succeed. This is
a major U.S. national challenge and the government's "No-Child Left
Behind" initiative addresses that. We look at how K-12 cross-subject
education related data such as attendance, enrollment, achievement,
discipline, etc. can be used to create an education datawarehouse and
can be used for data mining. We will look at the use of Oracle
Warehouse Builder, Oracle Data Mining, OBIEE, other BI tools, and the
development environment in the process. The outcome of the data mining
provides the "actionable" data to the education administrators and
decision-makers via the education dashboards. These in turn help to
initiate data-driven planning that can use the results of predictive
analytics to plan for current and future school years. This
presentation was developed using a real Department of Education BI
project from 2007.


A Next-Generation Oracle BI Architecture (by Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting)

With the recent acquisitions of Hyperion and Siebel, Oracle now has a
world-class set of BI tools to add to their own Oracle Database, Oracle
Discoverer and Oracle Warehouse Builder. For customers though, the
question now is how to build an effective BI architecture out of these
tools, built around the core of an Oracle database and using the
features of Oracle OLAP, Oracle BI Server, OWB and ODI, Oracle
Dashboards, Oracle Answers, and the performance management tools
provided by Hyperion. This presentation answers the questions around
Oracle's BI strategy, provides a BI development roadmap and sets out an
architecture that leverages the best elements of these tools,
explaining how best to use Oracle's BI and data warehousing for a
variety of customer scenarios.

Oracle BI, Oracle OLAP, Essbase: The Benefits and Cost of Openness (by Dan Vlamis Vlamis Software Solutions)

Companies with heterogeneous environments need to analyze data from
multiple sources, through multiple application servers, in multiple
presentation environments. The "hot pluggable" products work well for
this need: Oracle Data Integrator, Essbase, Real-time Decisions, Oracle
Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, and BI Applications. But what
if these needs are not paramount in your organization? You can use
Oracle's traditional products: Oracle Warehouse Builder, the OLAP, Data
Mining options to the Oracle Database, Oracle Business Intelligence
Standard Edition, and Daily Business Intelligence. Come and learn which
products are appropriate for your situation, how Oracle's acquisition
strategy led to this situation, and how Oracle's product management
structure propagates this situation. The session will especially focus
on the differences between Essbase and the Oracle OLAP option�both very
capable multi-dimensional databases, but with different goals.

For OWB we will be doing 4 development sessions on the following topics:

Development's Bag of Tricks for Oracle Warehouse Builder

You are using Oracle Warehouse Builder and you see many things you
could do or could do better. See how you can solve some common problems
by using the functionality that OWB provides in 11g.
We will be discussing a set of topics with hands-on examples which will
include, for example, using analytical SQL in OWB (hierarchical
queries, advanced aggregations), dealing with XML data sources and
targets, matching and merging information from different systems, and
extending the product using Experts. This session is intended to deepen
your knowledge about Warehouse Builder and make you, as a developer,
more productive.

Best Practices in Implementing Data Quality Process with Warehouse Builder

We all know it is there, we all know we need to do it, but how do we
apply this data quality stuff in real projects? In this session we go
through a set of examples showing how to implement data quality
policies in an organization using OWB. Topics to expect include
determining survivorship of your master records, householding, and
linking of records. In addition, we will discuss and show how to create
smart auditing and testing of data in a so-called data quality
firewall. This firewall prevents bad data from even entering the
systems being targeted. Last but not least, we will discuss how to
implement a quality assessment and reporting structure on your existing
systems.

Warehouse Builder Goes Heterogeneous: What That Means for You

With Warehouse Builder 11g
Release 2 you will get the best of both the OWB and the ODI world in
one tool. Yes, OWB is integrating the ODI heterogeneous concepts and
templates within the familiar OWB functionality. So you now have full
heterogeneous support for both sources and targets included with the
data profiling, data quality, and regular Oracle PL/SQL mappings. On
top of that you will see a unification of the metadata layer in the
database and a unification of the client tool user interfaces (OWB goes
JDev IDE!). In short, if you are interested in ETL and OWB, this
session shows the newest of the newest in OWB land, straight out of
development. See it all in action and ask questions about our direction
in ETL land.

The press release speaks for itself, for the most part. But the savings that must be associated with virtually eliminating unplanned downtime for an oil refinery must be hard to even calculate, given the current energy market. I'd love to see an ROI figure.

Piocon Wins Oracle Partner of the Year Award for Business Intelligence Solution Piocon was presented with Oracle PartnerNetwork's prestigious Titan Award for a second consecutive year.

Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) September 22, 2008 -- Piocon Technologies, Inc. was honored as one of the recipients of the fifth annual Oracle North America Titan Awards, at a ceremony held Sunday evening at the San Francisco Marriott at Oracle OpenWorld. This award, presented on behalf of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, recognizes Piocon's success in developing and implementing Business Intelligence Solutions based on the Oracle database and Business Intelligence technology.

Piocon's award winning solution provided their oil-and-gas industry customer with Reliability metrics and reporting on more than 100,000 pieces of equipment to hundreds of operations throughout a large refinery. At the time this nomination was submitted, the customer had experienced no unplanned shutdowns due to reliability-related incidents since the system's go-live date, a time span more than 6 times this refinery's historical average and 3 times the previous record.

Sometimes this blog is very into nitty-gritty, tactical technical suggestions, but sometimes (like when you’re coming up on the end of the week and tired of your to-do list) it’s useful to raise your head and look a few years out at changes in the industry that will probably eventually impact your day-to-day concerns. I tend to look at cloud computing at times like this and try to see how it will affect data integration and data quality.

Recently I ran across this blog post on cloud computing, BI and DI from the Open Group Cloud Computing summit:

A few observations around BI and cloud computing from the show in attending other talks, and just in the hallways over coffee.

First, cloud computing can't not progress forward without a clear data integration and business intelligence strategy, if you ask those in charge.   The core questions are:  How will my information get back into my enterprise when I need it, and better yet, how can I consider data stuck in the cloud in the context of my BI requirements?

Second, security.   Enough said.   

Finally, cultural issues around leveraging platforms we don't own.

Cloud computing is not evil, indeed it's an opportunity to leverage databases-as-a-service, and even information-as-service, at a price point unheard of.   However, you need to place all of this in the context of a cloud computing strategy that specially addresses data security, BI, MDM, and data integration.   

I would like to know how the OWB user community is thinking about such issues as cloud and SAAS become inescapable parts of our environment. I’d also like to shamelessly promote the LinkedIn group the OWB team started on data integration and data quality offerings from Oracle, and foster discussion there.

So:

• if you use OWB or just follow Oracle data integration offerings, come join the OWB LinkedIn group. It will put you in contact with hundreds of Oracle and outside people who work with or work on Oracle Warehouse Builder and our other data integration offerings. (There are also job listings and recruiters in the group, which may or may not interest you.)
• If you’re interested in these topics, come join our discussion over at LinkedIn.

Hope to see you there…

Handcoding may look cheaper and quicker sometimes, but OWB gets you greater flexibility and lower costs over the long term.  This news item from ZDNet down under showcases an OWB customer winning big in a quick migration of their data warehouse from Oracle Database 10.2 to Database 11.1:

Retail distributor Metcash, owner of IGA distribution and IGA Fresh, this week revealed it had migrated to Oracle's Database 11g from 10.2g earlier this year.

The upgrade decision came as part of a wider data warehouse hardware consolidation program in late 2008, according to Carl Young, Metcash's technical lead for the project, with the company ditching its HP Superdome Unix servers for IBM P6 servers running the AIX operating system.

"I thought it best to roll up the two testing cycles into one and move on to the latest Oracle software," Young said of Metcash's motivation to upgrade to Database 11g.

…

The migration to 11g took a total of 12 weeks, while testing in Metcash's production environment with the systems running in parallel took six weeks. Metcash's 11g went into production in February this year.

Metcash's use of Oracle's programming tool Warehouse Builder, which automatically regenerated code from the source 10.2g database to the target 11g database, meant programmers weren't required for the task… Benefits to Metcash included reducing batch report production time, cutting out the use of Excel spreadsheets, and the ability to store more data online. Other performance benefits came from query caching, which helped avoid duplicating retrieval as well as the ability to make structural changes to the database without having to rebuild the "materialised database view aggregate" — a process that used to take 24 hours.

So… the takeaway: OWB made it easy to build a faster, more flexible data warehouse that leveraged the 11g database on a short schedule, with minimal development costs, low overall migration costs, and low project risk.

Oracle Magazine’s feature story, “Lead with Intelligence”, documents the successful experience of Oracle Exadata at Allegra Group, the largest e-commerce company in Eastern Europe. Warehouse Builder was selected as the ETL tool for this multi-terabyte warehouse project on Oracle’s most advanced data warehouse architecture delivering extreme data warehouse performance.

The HP Oracle Database Machine, announced at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2008, is a grid of eight database servers with 64 Intel processor cores running Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle Enterprise Linux. This data warehouse solution also includes a storage grid of 14 HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers with 112 processor cores that’s connected to database servers over InfiniBand. …

In December 2008, Allegro Group deployed the HP Oracle Database Machine and began generating operational and statistical reports using Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition Plus. Allegro Group also created an interface to its existing systems using Oracle Warehouse Builder, a core component of Oracle Database 11g. Each day, Oracle Warehouse Builder automatically loads production data into Allegro Group’s Oracle data warehouse, which already holds more than 7TB of data on the HP Oracle Database Machine.

More at Oracle Magazine.

Great news, today Oracle released the Linux x86 and x86-64 versions of 11gR2 for the Oracle Database which includes Warehouse Builder (see Oracle Database 11gR2 here). Nice to finally see all the hard work eventually come to fruition. This has been an interesting few years, through acquisitions, the tough economic times, the release went on sure and steadfast, hats off to all the development group. The OWB 11gR2 release has some substantial changes all round - from the user interface to the open mapping framework to the OBIEE integration to name a few. I love pushing the envelope (common idiom, see here) with tools and seeing what can be done with them and this release of OWB lets you do LOTS!

So where is the collateral?

Keep an eye open for new collateral as it is completed there is a lot of really useful functionality from cool new stuff to basic mapping functionality people have wanted for years! For a brief write up of new OWB functionality see the new Concepts manual here the OWB OTN page has some updates already here.

Where is the software?

Oracle database download (includes OWB):
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/index.html

OWB standalone download:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/warehouse/index.html

Watch out for new posts, fun training and active forums!

Open World 2009 is almost upon us. For those thinking about attending, there's a schedule of events and product demos around data integration on OTN, here:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oracle-data-integrator/events/data_integration_openworld-2009.html

This page will be updated on an ongoing basis as we get closer to the date of the conference. If you're planning to attend, join the Warehouse Builder/Data Integrator Linkedin Group and contact me, the group manager.

While the formal sessions at Oracle Open World provide a lot of valuable information, sometimes the choicest nuggets turn up at the Unconference sessions, where Oracle employees, customers and partners can delve into the topics that interest them most in an interactive forum.

For OWB customers the best chance to see OWB 11.2 at OpenWorld will be an Unconference session conducted jointly by Oracle DW and BI guru Mark Rittman and data integration product manager Antonio Romero.

The real treat, though, will be the special guest appearance by OWB architect David Allan! Through this blog, David has become one of the public faces of OWB and his knowledge of how to get the most out of the tool has been invaluable to internal and external users.

Planned topics include:

• ODI-based code template mapping capabilities
• Integration of Warehouse Builder with OBI-EE
• Right-time Data Warehousing: CDC, Trickle-feed mappings

...but since we're in Unconference mode, we can do a little off-roading, time permitting, as the audience demands it.

Schedule details: Wednesday, October 14, Moscone West, Third Floor, Overlook II.

While this is a bit unstructured, it helps to have a preliminary headcount. To register, you'll need to take a second to join our LinkedIn Group if you haven't already. Click here to register!