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One of the interesting options of Endeca is its integration with text mining software Lexalytics (licensed separately). Lexalytics offers many text analysis functions such as sentiment analysis, document collection analysis, named entity extraction, theme and context extraction, summarization, document classification etc. Endeca exposes some of this functionality via its text (more...)

A couple of days ago I have started to look at Endeca. So far it looks like a great tool and I believe we will see and hear a lot more from it over the next couple of months and years.

I am currently still learning a lot and in (more...)

The annual Oracle User Group meeting in Dublin is this year on a special day. 12th of March. That’s my birthday.

The agenda is live now. Unfortunately, there is only one data warehouse/business intelligence stream this year. A lot of interesting presentations had to be left out.

I will present with Maciek Kocon on “Oracle Data Integrator 11g Best Practices. Busting your performance, deployment, and scheduling headaches”.

Other presentations include Mark Rittman on deploying OBIEE in the enterprise. Peak Indicators will be there to present on the concept and case study of a BI Competency Centre (BICC), and there will (more...)

Another Christmas and a second baby under my belt it’s time to get back to blogging.

There were recently some good posts by David Allan and Gurcan Orhan on the power of ODI functions. David mentions correctly that ODI functions are the most underrated feature in ODI. Whenever you think of re-usability in ODI think of user functions. Functions can be used anywhere in ODI where you need to write something once and apply it many times. This is not limited to using functions inside interfaces to load columns or the use of wrapping and parameterizing common functionality. You could (more...)

ODI and Jetty

The ODI 11g standalone agent now ships with its own lightweight application server (Jetty). The main reason this was included is to make it easier to execute scenarios via web service calls. In the past this was quite painful as you needed a separate application server (OC4J). The other limitation was that it was difficult (read work around) to implement asynchronous web service calls. Luckily, this has all changed with ODI 11g and Jetty. However, I don’t believe that you can run the ODI console in Jetty, which is unfortunate.

Asynchronous web service calls

The (more...)

Recently there has been a lot of noise around in memory databases and how Exadata, Exalytics and SAP HANA compare to each other. Here are my two cents on the debate.

Why you can’t compare Exalytics to SAP Hana

It is the vision of SAP Hana to be used for both OLTP and analytics. As the name already suggests Exalytics just caters for analytics. Exalytics needs to be loaded from the data warehouse or transactional systems. Not needed for Hana. Everything already sits in memory. While Exalytics is near near realtime. Hana is realtime. However, currently there are not too (more...)

Today we will have a look what happens when we place a filter condition into an outer join. We will also have a look at how this compares to placing the filter condition into the WHERE clause. Finally we’ll have a look where this could be useful.

Let’s first create some sample data.

create table customer (
cust_id number,
cust_desc varchar2(50)
);

ALTER TABLE customer
add CONSTRAINT pk_customer PRIMARY KEY (cust_id);

create table customer_loc (
customer_loc_id NUMBER,
customer_id NUMBER,
customer_loc_desc VARCHAR2(50)
);

ALTER TABLE customer_loc
add CONSTRAINT pk_customer_loc PRIMARY KEY (customer_loc_id);

insert into customer values (1,'Gold');
insert into customer values  (more...)

What are ODI Flexfields?

In ODI you can create user-defined fields on certain objects. You can think of these fields as additional attributes for certain objects. At design time you populate these attributes with values that are then used at runtime, e.g. by a Knowledge Module. There are various Flexfields defined out of the box for very specific requirements, e.g. there are Flexfields defined on the Datastore object for SAP and HIVE data integration tasks.

Where do you create them?

You create Flexfields in the Security module under the Objects accordion. You can’t create Flexfields for all of (more...)

There are a lot of confusing messages out there on what the Optimization Context in ODI is used for.

Is it a runtime setting??

First of all, this is not a runtime or execution context setting. It is only used at design time in ODI Studio.
If you execute an interface in your Test context with the Optimization Context set to Development it will still execute in Test.

It is a design Time Setting!

So what is the Optimization Context used for? ODI uses the Optimization Context to validate your Interface at (more...)