Informatica World 2010 – A Quick Recap

November 18th, 2010 by Robert McMillen • No Comments

Paul Scott and I recently attended the Informatica World Conference in Washington DC.   Here are some highlights from the event.

This is the first World conference  since 2008.  There were about 1300 attendees and 48 countries represented.

The keynote speaker was Richard Clarke.  He is the former White House Counterterrorism Czar, serving under three different presidents.  He spoke about Cyber War, Cyber Crime and Cyber Espionage.  The last, espionage, is the biggest threat  and most undetected.  About 70% of espionage is undetected.

Clarke also mentioned the stuxnet worm and its implications.  Since that time there has also been a news story about Cyber Espionage which makes his points even more relevant!

There were dozens of great sessions offered at the conference by both Informatica, partners and customers.  Some of my favorites were:

  • Master Your Data and Master Your Business using MDM
  • Informatica Data Quality v9
  • What’s New in PowerCenter and PowerExchange v9
  • Lean Integration
  • Velocity Methodology: Best Practices
  • Top 10 Implementation Best Practices for MDM

My unscientific poll indicates that the most popular acronyms were MDM, ILM, DQ, B2B,CEP, SaaS, EDM, SOA, ERP and CRM.

I also learned some new terms at the conference, click on the following links to find out more.  HADOOP.  CEP. Lean Integration. Ultra Messaging.

Several new products and topics were popular at the conference!

We both took advantage of the Hands-On-Labs that were offered for new products.  And lastly, we were also able to meet with several key members of Informatica’s executives and were invited to participate in an Informatica event scheduled for January.

To wrap up, here’s  a nice graphic showing Informatica’s Platform as it stands now.

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Our Focus on Data Management and Data Integration

November 18th, 2010 by Robert McMillen • No Comments

Many of you know that SSG is an Oracle partner and that we support many clients who rely on Oracle’s Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) product.  We have worked with BRM for over 13 years and have some of the most knowledgeable BRM experts in the industry.

What you may not know is that we are also an Informatica partner and that we have a growing Data Integration and Data Management practice based on years of experience with Enterprise data.  Our focus is a different from the typical Business Intelligence (BI) services that are common in the marketplace.  Even at SSG we’ve struggled to define what our overall focus is, in this area, since BI is only a portion of what we do.

The term “BI” focuses on building and managing Data Warehouses or Data Marts.  We can do BI, of course, but there are many other data management needs that we focus on, and which are just as strategic.  All of them have been driven by challenges that our clients have  faced.

Some of those challenges have been driven by these questions.  How well are we:

  • Sharing data between our systems in a timely manner? (Data Integration)
  • Ensuring we have all the information about Customer/Vendors/Products/Accounts in one place? (Master Data Management)
  • Monitoring the quality of our business data so it can be trusted? (Data Quality)
  • Sharing the right data with the right permissions with partners, vendors and customers? (Data Federation)
  • Having an Enterprise Strategy for managing our data more cost effectively? (Data Governance)
  • Managing the growing volume of historical data? (Information Life Cycle Management)

For almost 20 years, our staff has worked with client data in all of these situations.  Even before the acronyms and buzzwords, we were providing organizations with solutions to help them better manage their critical data to grow their businesses and reduce costs.

With that in mind we have now strategically partnered with Informatica to extend our capabilities.  (Ironically, we have leverage Informatica in the past to implement solutions but never taken the next step to partner with them…)

We are excited about this because Informatica helps us better serve our clients who want to get the most from their data and control costs.  Companies spend more than they realize managing their data (or suffering from the lack of data management) and their are great solutions to remedy that.

Informatica is laser-focused on Data Management and all of its complexities.  Regardless of where your data resides, they help streamline the discovery, assessment, cleanup, organization and distribution of your information using the KISS principle.

In my next few posts I’ll review the data management challenges, listed above, along with how SSG can address them more effectively with Informatica solutions.

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OOW 2010

September 20th, 2010 by Paul Scott • No Comments

Wow! There are 41,000 attendees at Oracle OpenWorld this year. And I think they’re all trying to attend my sessions.

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Steve and “Duke”

September 20th, 2010 by Paul Scott • 1 Comment

Steve with Duke at JavaOne/Oracle OpenWorld Conference

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Understanding the Oracle BRM Table Structure

September 10th, 2010 by Janell Edwards • 6 Comments

The Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) database structure can be confusing at first glance.  Rather than following a typical relational design, BRM was designed to support an object-oriented approach for extensibility.

This post describes the logical relationships that exist between tables so you can get started.

First, a  table is either a Parent table or a Child table.  The Parent tables are usually one word table names with “_t” on the end.  For example:

  • Account_t
  • Bill_t
  • Item_t
  • Event_t
  • Service_t
  • Profile_t
  • Payinfo_t

The Child tables’ names always start with their Parent table’s name.  For example:

  • Account_nameinfo_t (child of account_t)
  • Account_products_t (child of account_t)
  • Event_billing_products_t (child of event_t)
  • Payinfo_cc_t (child of payinfo_t)

Parent tables are logically joined to their Children tables by the poid_id0 (please note that’s a zero at the end of the poid_id string) column in the parent and the obj_id0 column in the Child table.  Here’s a sample select statement:

Parent_table.poid_id0 = child_table.obj_id0

For example, account_t.poid_id0 = account_nameinfo_t.obj_id0

Some Child tables will join back to other Parent tables.  For example account_products_t joins to the service_t table by account_products_t.obj_id0 = service_t.account_obj_id0 and account_products_t.service_obj_id0 = service_t.poid_id0.  These are bi-directionally joined.

===================================================

That above paragraph addresses parent/child table relationships in BRM.  But how do parent tables relate to other parent tables?

Parent tables are joined together by their poid_id0 columns.

Not all parent tables join to each other but when they do it will always be parent_table.poid_id0 = joined_parent_table.<parent_table>_obj_id0.

For example, account_t and service_t are joined by account_t.poid_id0 = service_t.account_obj_id0

It is always easy to see the relationship in the tables by looking at the columns.  Poid_id0, obj_id0, and anything that ends in obj_id0 (like account_obj_id0, service_obj_id0, etc) are the joined columns.

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Informatica Power Center – A Quick Introduction

August 9th, 2010 by Robert McMillen • 1 Comment

PowerCenter is a collection of software tools to support extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of data between multiple applications.  Most companies prefer to use Informatica Power Center to populate their data warehouses with operational data.  However, Power Center also simplifies the process of integrating data between different applications in either a batch or near-real-time manner.

A common problem in most companies is that information exists in silos and it can be difficult to custom design and implement ways to keep data synchronized between applications.  The options are to write custom integrations or use tools to automate and simplify the process.  Since such integrations invariably change as applications are updated, there are regular needs to revisit the integration and update it.  The point-and-click capabilities of PowerCenter Designer along with it’s WorkFlow Manager dramatically simplify and speed up the creation and maintenance of these data integrations.

PowerCenter has the ability to work with data in just about any situation.  It can access data in Excel spreadsheets, any relational database (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Sybase), web applications (SalesForce) and even flat files (CSV).

PowerCenter consist of several related applications as shown here.

PowerCenter Components

PowerCenter relies on Mappings and Workflow.  Mappings describe the inputs, transformations and outputs of the data.  Transformations can eliminate data, enrich the data, organize organize the data in different ways.  If you have ever worked with SQL or Microsoft Excel you are probably familiar with the many functions that PowerCenter uses to transform data.  In addition the software supports sophisticated Joins, Unions, Sorts, Aggregations, Routing and Look-ups which are simple to define and implement.

A Workflow process is then created and used to organize one or more mappings.  Within a workflow, the developer can check for error conditions, issue email updates, synchronize processes so they execute in the right order and schedule how and when a mapping process is executed.

All of the PowerCenter information is stored in a database repository (such as Oracle) where multiple developers can access the information and collaborate on new integrations.  The repository can also be used to secure the integration information and support the reuse of mappings, transformations and even workflows.  The focus on “reuse” allows very complex processes to be built, over time, by grouping simpler mappings that have been previously tested and approved.

The client tools that come with Power Center are top-notch.  They provide a very intuitive interface for designing and debugging integration processes quickly.  Several sample screens are shown below.  They allow you to drag-n-drop the data components and data flow on the screen and then quickly test the results using test data.  The PowerCenter debugger supports step-by-step review of a complex mapping by showing the states of variables and data elements.

Here is a PowerCenter Designer screen example.

PowerCenter Designer

Here is a portion of a Mapping that has been defined for data integration.  It was created using drag-n-drop components.

Sample Mapping

When you are finished with the mapping, you can then create complex workflows with many different mappings and steps.

Simple Workflow

Here at SSG, we use PowerCenter to help our clients quickly integrate applications so that they can share data or create the ETL to load their data warehouses quickly and efficiently.  By leveraging PowerCenter’s capabilities we are able to provide faster and more robust solutions compared to a traditional custom programming solution.

For more information about Informatica, you can visit their website here.

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Oracle APEX and BI Publisher

August 9th, 2010 by Robert McMillen • 2 Comments

I recently worked on a project that involved an Oracle APEX application.  If you aren’t familiar with APEX, it’s  a database-centric rapid application development product that is included with the Oracle 10g and 11g databases.   Using APEX you can generate web-based applications, interact with database tables/views, leverage PL/SQL stored procedures and even integrate it with Oracle BI Publisher.  BI Publisher is an easy-to-use report generation product.

One of our requirements was to generate reports from the application in a PDF format.  I looked at several options and decided for the moment that Oracle BI Publisher was the fastest and simplest solution.  Fortunately the client was happy with that as well.

What I found out was that generating a report from APEX and having it printed as a PDF via BI Publisher is a very elegant solution.  Beyond installing BI Publisher on a server, the following steps were what I need to do.  BTW, we installed BI Publisher in both the windows and Linux environments with no issues.

We had an existing application screen and wanted to generate the PDF using the same underlying SQL queries.  First I logged into the APEX application, went to SHARED COMPONENTS and defined multiple SQL select statements using the REPORT QUERIES option.  I was able to reference some existing session variables to customize the SELECT statements.  In APEX I was able to define a REPORT LAYOUT template under the SHARED COMPONENTS.  Then I downloaded the BI Publisher plug-in for Microsoft Word 2007 and created a report template.  There’s more detail in that process than I can cover here, but it didn’t take long for me to learn how to create more and more complex templates.

I was then able to upload the template to APEX (and download it later for editing).  Since the templates are MS Word documents, it’s pretty straight-forward.

Back in APEX I modified the logic on one of the application web pages to add a button.  This button was linked to a BRANCH statement which called BI Publisher and generated the PDF Report.  Within a few seconds my browser had a download of the PDF file which I could open and browse!

Within several weeks we had created about a dozen reports, each with 5 or 6 SQL queries.  Some executed directly out APEX and others were scheduled to run directly from BI Publisher on an automated schedule.  If you want to learn more about the link between APEX and BI Publisher, here are some examples.  Happy Report Writing!

Defining a PDF Report in APEX

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Premier Support Extended for Fusion Middleware 10gR2 (10.1.2)

April 29th, 2010 by Robert McMillen • No Comments

Just noticed that Oracle has decided to extend Premier support for Fusion Middleware for an additional year. 

For those who want the basics, Oracle is extending Premier support for one additional year. 

Are you confused about when Premier, Extended and Sustaining support dates occur for your Oracle Software? 

It’s easy to end that confusion.  You can find out more about Oracle’s support policies for Fusion Middleware and other products by visiting this page Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Fusion Middleware Products and viewing the available pdf files.

With this change, Extended Support for Fusion Middleware  10gR2 is no longer needed or available.  When this year of support ends, the choices are to upgrade to a newer version or move to Sustaining support, which is available indefinitely.

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Collaborate ’10: Best Practices for DW on Oracle

April 22nd, 2010 by Paul Scott • No Comments

I attended an excellent presentation give by Maria Colgan, Sr. Product Manager at Oracle. The title was ‘Best Practices for a Data Warehouse on Oracle’.

Great tuning tips encompassing the entire architecture of a DW — hardware, network, storage, and of course, Oracle DB.

A whitepaper version of the presentation may be found on the OTN website:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/11g/pdf/twp_dw_best_practies_11g11_2008_09.pdf 

I highly recommend.

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Collaborate ’10: Oracle Data Warehouse updates

April 20th, 2010 by Paul Scott • No Comments

At Collaborate 2010, I attended a presentation given by Ray Roccaforte, VP of Data Warehouse Development at Oracle.

The focus of presentation was on three areas:

  • The Exadata machine
  • In Database Analytics
  • Industry Analytics Solutions Sets

My key take away is that Oracle is committed to be a solution provider rather than just a software products company.

The Exadata machine is all about delivering a packaged solution for data warehouse environments. Hardware and software bundled together ready to go. What’s interesting is that Oracle is now pushing down a lot of the performance improvements to the storage level and not trying to do everything in the Oracle database.

Also, Oracle has rewritten the optimizer to take advantage of the 5TB of flash (yes … 5 terabytes!).

In addition to the “data warehouse machine”, Oracle is also building data models for specific industries.

Retail and Telco are the first to to roll out. They include multi-dimensional data models and prebuilt reports to jump start any BI initiative within that industry.

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