November 10th, 2009 by Paul Scott • No Comments »
With Oracle’s acquisition of Golden Gate Software in July, yet another integration offering is available. Golden Gate’s strength (and why it garnered Oracle’s attention) lies in its ability to move transactional data between heterogeneous databases with sub-second latency, transaction integrity, and minimal overhead. Although Oracle says Streams will continue to be supported, Golden Gate is the strategic direction for real-time integration.
So for Business Intelligence systems, what does this mean? Historically, data warehouse applications have attempted to answer the question “what happened?”, “why did it happen?” or “what will happen?”. These are reporting, analytical and predictive type applications. However, companies want their data warehouse systems to become part of their operational decision making. They need to answer “what is happening?” — reacting immediately to a change in business. This is where Golden Gate shines. Whereas, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) are better suited for batch-oriented ETL, Golden Gate offers real-time (or near real-time) integration of data and can perform basic transformations. For more advanced transformation needs, Golden Gate can augment ODI allowing Golden Gate to perform the real-time extraction and ODI performing the transformations and loading.
More info on Golden Gate may be found at http://www.oracle.com/goldengate.
Tags: BI · Business Intelligence · Golden Gate
October 12th, 2009 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »
Last night I got a preview of a new BI product that Oracle is delivering early next year.
For those customers using Oracle’s Communication Billing and Revenue Management software this is definitely one product to consider.
The demonstration showed how one can build a robust data warehouse with BRM data (including CDR information) and then use over 120 sample reports to analyze the information.
The example we saw analyzed subscriber account churn. At each level of analysis the software provided a suggested next step. This “guided” analysis was very good. Within several minutes we were able to drill down using raw data and chart graphics to the primary reason for the highest level of churn. The root cause was a high level of dropped calls from several cell towers.
I came away very impressed with this soon-to-be announced product which uses Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).
SSG will stay in the loop on this and provide an update again in several months as more information is provided.
Tags: BI · BRM · Business Intelligence · CBRM · OPENWORLD · Oracle
October 7th, 2009 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »
This Sunday, Oracle OpenWorld will be kicking off in San Francisco. Five of us will be attending from SSG and several of us will be providing udpates via our blog. The event will continue through Thursday afternoon at the Moscone Center.
The five of us will be focusing on the general sessions and attending dozens of presentations on Service Oriented Architecture, Business Intelligence, Communications Billing and Revenue Management, and Business Process Management.
This year I’m hoping to include more pictures in the blog, so I encourage you to subscribe and get our updates from each day of the conference.
As a preview, Sunday we will be attending several Special Interest Groups (SIG’s) and the Oracle Partners Network meeting.
Tags: BI · BPM · Business Intelligence · Business Process Managment · CBRM · Open World · Oracle Open World · SOA
May 3rd, 2009 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »
At the Special Interest Group (SIG) for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing there was discussion about some changes affecting OBIEE. I haven’t confirmed yet but it was mentioned that Oracle has announced the ability to use Oracle Data Integrator (formerly Synopsis) as the ETL engine for OBIEE rather than Informatica.
Why is this of interest? The Informatica product(s) were considered much more expensive and more complex to manage than ODI for handling Extraction, Translation and Loading (ETL) data. With the ability to begin using ODI there is now another supported option when considering the backend for OBIEE.
In the announcement last week, only 4 or 5 of the 10 data warehouse modules are apparently supported by ODI, but the remaining are being developed. This limits what data can be loaded into the OBIEE data warehouse with ODI but the good news is that Oracle is working on the remaining features.
More information about ODI can be found here
I’ll dig up more information about this announcement and post it after the OAUG conference.
Tags: Business Intelligence · E-Business Suite · Oracle Data Integrator · Rob
January 23rd, 2009 by Jennifer Vilches • No Comments »
It’s practically impossible to make sound business decisions without access to quality, up-to-date data. In the past decade, Business Intelligence (BI) has become more and more important for companies of all sizes as they search for ways to increase their competitiveness.
Access to your data and the Oracle BI suite are all you need to set up one-stop report shopping.
- Executive-level dashboards? Check.
- Detailed template-driven reports? Check.
- Ad-hoc report analysis? Check.
So how does Oracle manage these feats of reporting? The BI server manages three layers of metadata. The first is the physical location of your data. The second is a simplified logical model built on top of the physical layer. The third is the presentation to the end user. Building a sound logical model allows all users to play by the same business rules – no more wondering if marketing is looking at the same calculations as accounting.
The Oracle BI Suite (Standard Edition One) includes three major elements:
The Oracle BI Server manages a consistent view of all your data, whether it resides in an Oracle database or not. This is a powerful tool to use to model your data into easy-to-use groupings.
Answers is the place to go for ad-hoc reporting and analysis. Drag and drop to create reports or graphs that you can then add to a Dashboard. Answers does not require technical skills to use; it’s a great way for business users to access their data. Access to Answers and the Dashboards is all web-based, so there’s no special client tool to install.
If you’re looking for highly formatted reports or documents, BI Publisher will meet those needs. Even the most complex files can be created starting with templates built in Microsoft Office tools.
The Oracle BI Suite is an easy-to-use, scalable way to get reliable answers about your data.
Tags: BI · Business Intelligence