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Want to learn how to connect multiple BI clients such as SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Cognos and Microsoft Excel to Oracle OLAP, quickly and easily, using the XMLA version of the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP?  Check out the Oracle webcast on February 5 at 9:00 AM PST.

You will see how it works and how customers in different industries are using this solution.

Just sign up here and join us on February 5th.

When:  Thursday, Dec 13, 2012 at 9:00am PST / 12:00pm EST / 6:00pm CET.

To attend:    Sign up here.
 
 
If you use a business intelligence tool such as IBM Cognos, Microstrategy or SPA BusinessObjects Analysis that uses XMLA to connect to multidimensional data sources, check out a free webinar by Simba Technologies which offers a "sneak peak" of the Simba XMLA Provider for Oracle OLAP.  The Simba XMLA Provider for Oracle OLAP is an XMLA version for the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP, the gold standard in MDX connectivity to Oracle OLAP.   (more...)

Beginning with Oracle BI 11.1.1.5, the Oracle BI Administration tool has the ability to import Oracle cubes, dimensions and hierarchies into the Physical layer of the Oracle BI repository.  This provides an alternative to the Oracle BI plug-in for Analytic Workspace Manager.  Each method works somewhat differently and each has certain advantages that might make it the best choice for different situations.

The Oracle BI plug-in for Analytic Workspace Manager pushes metadata into the  Oracle BI repository using UDML code.  The result is a ready to use subject area with the Physical, Business Model (more...)

I've posted a series of three videos introducing Oracle OLAP.  This is a great series for people how are interested in learning about what Oracle OLAP is and what it's used for.  I suggest starting viewing these in order.  Here are the links:

Oracle OLAP Overview:  Part 1 - Architecture
Oracle OLAP Overview:  Part 2 - Key Features
Oracle OLAP Overview:  Part 3 - Use Cases

If you have ever wanted to report on the total of two or more dimension members you have probably done so using in SQL using SUM ... GROUP BY. 

Let's look at an example using the OLAPTRAIN schema.  Suppose you want the total of the states in the northeastern United States.  In OLAPTRAIN, that would include Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Pennsylvania..

If you did this with SQL, it might look something like this.

If you are like most people, you probably use the LOAD_AND_AGGREGATE cube script that is automatically created by Analytic Workspace Manager. Fine tuning the update process simply involves filtering the fact table for new or changed rows.

With a little bit of effort, you can improve update times by writing your own cube processing script. You can also use MV log tables to automatically captured changes made to the fact table and use them as the data sources to cube updates.

AWM defines and makes the LOAD_AND_AGGREGATE script the default script of the cube. If you don’t specify a different (more...)

A question that I often get is "what is the difference between using ODBC and the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (from Simba Technologies) to query Oracle cubes"? Given that the Oracle cube is easily queried with SQL, it's a reasonable question.
The answer really boils down to leveraging meta data and automatic query generation.
With ODBC, it's up to the Excel user to write a SQL query to fetch data from the cube. Data can be returned in tabular format or a pivot table. When the data is viewed in a pivot table Excel will aggregate data, sometimes with (more...)

For a great paper on Oracle OLAP running on Exadata, see:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/olap/olap-exadata-x2-2-performance-1429042.pdf

The Executive Overview section of this paper provides an introduction:

This paper describes a performance demonstration of the OLAP Option to the Oracle Database running on an X2-2 Exadata Database Machine half rack. It shows how Oracle OLAP cubes can be used to enhance the performance and analytic content of the data warehouse and business intelligence solutions, supporting a demanding user community with ultrafast query and rich analytic content.

The demonstration represents users of a business intelligence application using SQL to query an Oracle OLAP (more...)

Note - This blog post was updated on Nov. 14, 2012 with a new script.  This as been simplified a bit and includes half year.

One of the more common requests I get is a script for creating time dimension tables for Oracle OLAP. The following script will create a time dimension table for a standard calendar. It starts by creating a table with dimension members and labels. The second part of the script fills in end date and time span attributes. The section that creates end date and time span can be easily adapted for completing other calendars (more...)

One of the more common questions I get is about how cubes are processed, in particular how and when Oracle cubes are processed incrementally. Here is a short summary of how the cube refresh process works, a few scenarios and some suggestions on being smart about solutions.

- The cube will load all data from the source table.

- You can limit the data loaded into the cube by a) presenting new/changed data only via a staging table or filtered view or b) making the cube refreshable using the materialized view refresh system and using a materialized view log table.

(more...)

I recently returned from a trip to Germany where visted a Bissantz, a relatively small company in Nürnburg that develops and markets an interesting reporting and data visualization tool named DeltaMaster that works with Oracle OLAP (and other data sources). I was very impressed with this tool. There are few things that I really liked about it:

• It's very good at displaying a lot of information within a single report. One of the ways that it does this is by mixing graphical representations of data with numerical representation (they are very big on something called 'Sparklines'). This makes it very (more...)

I was working on an application last week that required time series analysis at Hour, Day, Month, Quarter and Year levels. Two interesting things came out of this application.

First, a little implementation detail. The data was supplied in the fact and dimension tables at the Hour level with a TIMESTAMP data type. As you might expect then, there were time periods at the hour level such as:

02-JAN-10 10.00.00.000000000 AM
02-JAN-10 11.00.00.000000000 AM
02-JAN-10 12.00.00.000000000 PM
02-JAN-10 01.00.00.000000000 PM
02-JAN-10 02.00.00.000000000 PM

In my (more...)

While I was teaching a workshop in Moscow recently a student asked about parallel execution of OLAP DML. Their cube processing included the usual loading and aggregation, which are automatically parallelized, but they also have some assignments into the cube which are done using an OLAP DML program. They noted that this was slow because it was single threaded on one CPU. I told the student that Oracle OLAP supports a multi-write attach mode that can be used to update multiple objects in parallel using separate sessions. I checked the documentation, but didn't find a clear explanation of how this (more...)

I've run into this a few times recently, so here's a quick tip related to using Excel with Oracle OLAP (via the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP, of course).

Here's a situation that's been reported as a bug, but you really just need to know the right Excel Pivot Table option to choose. Consider a cube that has measures that do not aggregate but is dimensioned by a dimension with a hierarchy. In this case, there is a cube with a Store dimension with levels Store > Store Type > All Stores. The stores are located in different countries (more...)