There has been a lot going in the BI world and Oracle had a bevy of announcements in the last Oracle Openworld 2012. Its been 3 months since the events, but the trends and announcements would have lasting impact on the BI world. The BI specific topics that were covered in the event were about Data Warehousing, OBIEE, Endeca , Essbase integration, EPM and Oracle Analytics. Below is a brief overview of the some of the trends from the event.
Stronger OBIEE 11g and Essbase integration
OBIEE has made steady progress in strengthening integration between Essbase and Oracle 11g. The latest iteration of OBIEE improves the integration even further. Essbase as a data source did not play well with earlier releases and a lot of complex manual mapping was needed to get the functionality required. Essbase can be used a data source for OBIEE repository, and the Oracle Answers would be the front end for the reporting and dash boarding needs from HFM.
The new features allows bringing all the hierarchies (Parent-Child, Ragged and Skip level) from Essbase which was earlier not possible. The process of integration makes the multi dimensional view into a relational view and introduces new OLAP query capabilities. Now all the financial forecasting performed at Essbase can be integrated with other non-multidimensional data sources with Oracle Answers providing the front end.
Growth of Endeca Information Discovery.
Endeca was a very good acquisition by Oracle as it strengthens its ERP and E-commerce offerings. Endeca was well known for its “Facedted Search” which is search across various attributes delivering a unique web experience in information discovery. Endeca Latitude is a BI platform which adopts the “Search First” philosophy at its core. The product now has been rebranded as Endeca Information Discovery.
The EID tool backend is supported by Oracle Endeca Server and its databases. The database is a unique technology focussed on delivering search and analtyics making the data mapping with attributes stored as key/value pairs. The technology stack is different from the traditional BI approach in delivering a unique data exploration methods which combines Search, Contextual navigation and Visual Analysis.
Oracle Exalytics,Exadata and In-Memory Analytics
These high capacity machines now run 10 times faster than the previous iterations. These are mainly used in companies which have real time processing needs.
Exalytics as the Exa-Machine for BI
– BI layer on steroids with multiple core and 1TB server
– In memory analytics used to accelerate the BI capabilities.
– It works on the 80:20 rule, Exadata addressing 80 percentage of the needs and the other 20 is served by the Exalytics.
– Faster response time and higher concurrency
Oracle states : “The Exadata Database Machine X3-8 is designed for database deployments that require very large amounts of data, delivering extreme performance and scalability for all applications including Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Data Warehousing (DW) and consolidation of mixed workloads. It comes complete with two 8-socket database servers, 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, InfiniBand switches and more than 22 terabytes of Exadata Smart Flash Cache to support extremely fast transaction response times and high throughput.”
