OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

Just a quick message to say that I have created a new group on LinkedIn for "Oracle Data Warehousing Professionals". The URL for the group is here:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2129659

Please feel free to share this link with friends, colleagues etc. I have linked our Data Warehouse and Database Insider blogs to this community so as we post articles on these blogs the articles will be automatically pushed out to the LinkedIn community.

Any comments and feedback let me know.

It’s been my first week of being the proud owner of my own Oracle blog (again), and I’m going to try not to make the same mistake I made last time of getting too busy to post updates, causing my blog to become defunct.  I struggle with the concept of blogs because I equate it in many ways to writing in a diary, something I have never wanted to do.  I don’t like to speak in public or hear myself speak at all for that matter; instead, I normally only speak when I have something to say.  Writing falls into the same category for me, and I tend to keep it all bottled up in my head rather than let it flow.

Now that my writing and speaking habits are out of the way, I must begin to put some thought into conveying something meaningful that adds value to any blog visitors whom I’m lucky enough to share information with.  I was told growing up that I think too much.  That is good at times, but it’s also bad because I end up keeping a great deal of information inside.  This is also the case in my marriage (sorry, Heather).  Having an overactive imagination and constantly trying to solve problems keeps my head spinning, and I end up having many conversations with myself throughout the day.  Yes, I do talk to myself also.  Even when I’m grocery shopping.  As I have grown older, I have turned into that weird dude at the store debating with himself over which granola bars have the harmonious balance of nutrition and taste, then talking myself into getting the least healthy because I know they will be a good treat, but I’m comforted by the fact that they are granola bars.  I’m that guy.

I can’t promise that I won’t be strange or odd in the content I post, but I will make every effort to be interesting and humble while I provide snapshots of what I learn along the way in my journey through Oracle.  Thanks for coming along…

The new Oracle Data Miner 11g Release 2 Graphical User Interface (GUI) is now available internally for Oracle Sales Consultants to give hosted demos to interested customers.  The new ODM'r 11g Release 2 Graphical User Interface (GUI) provides more graphics, the ability to define, save and share analytical "work flows" to solve business problems, and provides more automation and simplicity.  For example, instead of building a single classification data mining model as with Oracle Data Miner "Classic" GUI, ODM'r 11gR2 new GUI automatically builds four (4) predictive models using all four ODM classification algorithms: 

• decision tree,
• logistic regression (GLM),
• support vector machine (SVM) and
• Naive Bayes. 

The Oracle Data Miner 11gR2 new GUI adds a wide range of graphical model viewers such as the decision tree, support vector machine and clustering model viewers shown below.

The new Oracle Data Miner 11g Release 2 work flow GUI will be available now internally only for Sales Consultants to give controlled customer demos using our hosted server and demo datasets.  Sales Consultants will be able to download the new 11gR2 GUI and establish a connection to the hosted ODM 11gR2 demo server. 

Customers who are interested in participating in the beta release program should contact their Oracle Sales Rep, stay tuned to this ODM Blog, watch the ODM page(s) on OTN, or visit ODM on Facebook or follow my CharlieDataMine Tweets. 

Oracle Data Miner 11gR2 Work Flow screen shot:

Being British, I of course love Indian food, its almost our national dish back in the UK. Roast beef and yorkshire pud is no longer the go to faire. Its a spicy hot chicken Pathia or Dal for me all the way. Thats sometimes hard to find here in Colorado, we have taken to making our own having found only a handful of Indian restaurants in Denver and Springs (suggestions welcome locals :0) Nan bread is now available in local supermarket so we have not built our own tandoori oven.
My tenuous bog post title is not referring to that delicious bread but to an XSL and therefore Publisher issue, well maybe be not an issue; more of something you may need to handle.
there is no native support to handle divide by zero errors or maybe mistakenly dividing a string into a number. Right now the only way around it is to check every value prior to using it in a calculation e.g.

<?if: XXXX >0?> <?XXXX div YYYY?><?end if?>

Not so bad, but if you have multiple calculations to handle in a template it can become a pain and of course is a bunch of code to write or at best copy and paste.
There was a questions on the forum this week asking if BIP had a safeDivide function like Actuate has? After a little digging to find out what the heck a safedivide function was, my initial thought was to create a template(function) for the template to call prior to any divide functions. I am from the school of 'why re-invent the wheel' so Google it took another hit. Lots of cool solutions out there; one of my favorite sites is from Dave Pawson of XSLT book fame - http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/sect21.html. There is a mass of answers on Dave's site from a host of experts, well worth bookmarking.
Dave's site popped up this solution

Define a format name, like so:

<xsl:decimal-format name="MyFormat" NaN=" - " zero-digit="0"/>

And use it with your format statement:

<?format-number(@totalAmt,'#,###','MyFormat')?>

this is much simpler than building a function. The first statement needs to be placed at the top of your template. In this case if a divide by zero occurs i.e. a NaN then a '-' will be returned.

First thought, corrected and a solution found. My second thought, we need to provide something natively to handle this for folks. Some folks have differing requirements in separate parts of an output, maybe 'N/A' in sme cases and '0' for others. So, I logged an enhancement request to handle this. I logged 9355897, Template Meister Hok Min picked it up and implemented the enhancement within the day. Now waiting for a release vehicle but there's service for you, logged, coded and tested within the day. If you are desperate for it, you can get support to log a one off request on your behalf.

Problem Summary: Rich UI Component references cannot be serialized by implementing Serialization interface. So, if your managed bean which contains Rich UI Component references has scope more than backing bean/ request scope (for backing bean or request scope bean the class references need not be serialized) and if it is subject to serialization then at runtime it will error out saying can't serialize rich ui component class.

To overcome this, it's recommended to keep the UI component references in a backing bean scoped or request scope bean so as to avoid any serialization done on these class references.

Solution: Move your getter and setter for the Rich components(e.g. getRichPopup(), setRichPopup()) to a "BackingBean scoped" managed bean.Then refer the Rich Components references in your pageFlowScope bean (if needed).

   BackingBean.java  (BackingBean scope/ Request scope)
  public RichTree getRichTree(){
  //Implement your getter logic here or leave the default one.
   blah..blah..
   }

//Now, you can access these getters on your pageFlowScope Bean (if needed) as follows-

PageFlowScopeBean.java implements Serialization (PageFlowScope)
 
public void uiCompRefFromBackingBean(){
            BackingBean backingBean=     (BackingBean)FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestMap().get("BackingBean");
            RichTree tree = backingBean.getRichTree();
  }

In one of my first blog entries "What to do after Oracle Open World 2008?" I posted a picture from Larry's new boat BOR 90. Now it is time to race!

Boat Type: Trimaran of carbon composite construction
Where Built: Core Builders, Anacortes, WA, USA
Overall Length: 100-feet / 30 meters
Wing Sail Height: 223 ft / 68 m (compared to 102 ft / 31 m length of a Boeing 747 wing and 143 ft / 43.5 m length of an Airbus 380 wing)

For details about Larry's renamed boat "USA" please visit the BMW Oracle Website
You can watch the race live at the Americas Cup Website

Race schedule:
Monday February 8th 2010 10:00 am
Wednesday February 10th 2010 10:00 am
Friday February 12th 2010 10:00 am

The "USA" is ready to fly! Larry still locking forward to get a ride!

Once upon a time, Proprietary Unix systems were challenged by Open Source Linux and commodity hardware in the marketplace. There were smart people on both sides of the argument but what was the final result of this contest? the market spoke, and Open Source Linux and x86 won the day, this despite the wailing words of warning from engineers and technologists that x86 and linux simply wasn't stable enough or fast enough to run enterprise workloads.

Once upon a time, there were people who argued against the use of corporate enterprise applications across "the internet", arguing that it was simply too insecure for any company to every consider having their applications exposed to the internet. The result of this contest? browser based application GUI's were once an anomaly but today if your app isn't running on a browser, its not really a player in the enterprise application marketplace. The market spoke, and the change in direction to respond to that

Once upon a time, it was considered normal to run corporate applications on baremetal rather than as Virtual machines. Virtual Machines were considered to be both slow and a security risk. Today, the advantages of Virtual machine recovery and the security provided by a VM partition far outclass what is provided from a baremetal configuration.

Once upon a time, it was considered crazy to co-locate corporate application hosting in a single shared data center. Today, its fairly common.

The point? Things change. People make statements based on the context that they know at the time. The problem is that the market often introduces change that causes the solidity of that argument to crumble away. This phenomenon in technology is known as "Bells Law" which goes something like this:

"Roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and the establishment of a new industry".

10 years ago, I worked on a project to move a large corporation from a proprietary unix and a proprietary chip to x86 and linux. 20 years ago I worked on a project to move from mainframe to what was then called "client/server'. For the last 5 years, I have been working to move people from baremetal to virtualization platforms. During the past 5 years, we have started to use the word "Cloud" to describe high density, highly flexible ( some would even say "Elastic") provisioning systems for It organizations.

Now it appears that the word "cloud" is no longer the sign of someone holding a heretical thought:

Article: Oracle signals change of tone about cloud

Its about time.

Oracle Data Mining 11gR2 scores 2nd place in Current Product Offering in Forrester DM/PA Wave.  As soon as we receive permission to post links to the report and all details, we will.  Watch this blog for more information. 

 

The Forrester Wave™: Predictive Analytics And Data Mining Solutions, Q1 2010

Executive Summary

In Forrester's 53-criteria evaluation of predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM) vendors, we found that SAS Institute, SPSS (evaluated separately from new parent IBM's other PA/DM offerings), KXEN, Oracle, Portrait Software, and IBM (pre-SPSS acquisition PA/DM offerings) head the pack with mature, sophisticated, scalable, flexible, and robust solutions. SAS leads, providing the most feature-rich solution portfolio and, through its recent expansion of enterprise data warehouse (EDW) vendor partnerships, taking the industry lead in promoting in-database analytics as an emerging best practice for high-performance analytics deployments. SPSS is rapidly integrating its already strong PA/DM solution portfolio with new parent IBM's extensive data management solution family. KXEN stands out for its focus on content analytics, sentiment analysis, and social network analysis. Oracle distinguishes itself through the depth of its PA/DM tool's integration into its enterprise database and application portfolio. Portrait provides a comprehensive set of customer analytics offerings that integrate with its core PA/DM tool. TIBCO Software, FICO, and Angoss Software are Strong Performers in the PA/DM market.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Predictive Powers Drive Business Optimization
• PA/DM Solutions Evaluation Overview
• Leading PA/DM Solutions Are Emphasizing In-Database Analytics
• Vendor Profiles
• Supplemental Material
• Related Research Documents

I'm new at Oracle. I feel like I'm trying to jump onto a fast moving train. So much is new; so much is different. But don't get me wrong, I love it. I love change. I love learning. Lately, I'm learning all day every day.

At times I've spoken to people who are upset or scared as a result of changes in their life. Whether it is losing a job or ending a relationship the issue is the same; it all comes down to change. I question them, "How do you know this isn't the best thing that has ever happened to you?"

I'm an eternal optimist. A rule I live by is 'Change is always good'.

Back in September of 2009, Site Studio 10gR4 included two extremely useful new features:

On Demand Editors-
This is a new feature that allows the contributor form to load and only show a preview of each of the elements until they are clicked on to activate them. This can be very useful when editing a region with a large number of elements where the intention is to only edit a subset of the elements.

Direct Delivery of Native Documents-
Traditionally when a link was made to a Native Doc, that link would redirect to the weblayout location for that file. This meant that a path containing entries like /groups/public/documents, etc, would be seen in the users browser. A new feature has been implemented to allow PDF files to be delivered directly from a friendly URL instead of redirecting to the weblayout location. This helps to maintain the users context within the website. In addition to PDFs, this feature has also been extended to include any other file type. The feature allows a global list of file extensions to be configured and then overrides may be applied, via custom section properties, at the section level.

See release notes for more details.

Recently I caught up with Jim Shumway and Angelo Romano of the State of Connecticut's IT group for a podcast. We talked about consolidating their Peoplesoft applications on a RAC cluster of Linux servers running Oracle Database 11g. We also talked about Data Guard, ASM, and other Oracle technologies that helped them lower costs and achieve service levels they needed. Join us to hear how they did it all and recommendations for others with similar goals.

** We invite you to subscribe to our 'Oracle Database' podcasts on iTunes or just tune-in from oracle.com.

This is valid requirement. When we burst thousands of reports and some of them fail at document generation stage or delivery stage. We should be able to re-run the process for failed cases only.

This functionality is available in latest Bursting Engine but it was not documented. Since it was not documented it is not officially supported. Those who want to give a try, here are the steps.

Make sure you define the key attribute at Document level in bursting control file. The key should be unique for each document.

Run the Bursting process in normal mode. After Bursting process complete, getRecoveryKeys() method of BurstingProcessorEngine returns the Vector which hold keys for all failed documents. Serialize this vector to file system as XML or simple text file. You need to write your own code for writing and reading these keys from file system.

try
{
//Logger.setLevel(Logger.STATEMENT);
BurstingProcessorEngine bp = new BurstingProcessorEngine();
bp.setTempDirectory("c:\\burst\\temp");
bp.setXMLAPI("c:\\burst\\InvoiceBurstingControlFile.xml");
dp.setData("c:\\burst\\InvoceData.xml");
Properties prop= new Properties();
prop.put("user-variable:EMAIL","xxxxxxx@xxxx.com");
dp.setConfig(prop);
dp.process();
Vector recoveryKeys = dp.getRecoveryKeys();
//Save these recovery keys to file system, we need to reconstruct the vector during recovery process//
dp.deletTemporaryOutputFiles();
} catch (Exception e)
{
Logger.log(e);
}

During recovery process, reinitialize the Vector from the earlier file, which hold all the failed keys. Set these keys to BurstingProcessEngine and run it in recovery mode. This will only process the failed cases.

try
{
//Logger.setLevel(Logger.STATEMENT);
BurstingProcessorEngine bp = new BurstingProcessorEngine();
bp.setTempDirectory("c:\\burst\\temp");
bp.setXMLAPI("c:\\burst\\InvoiceBurstingControlFile.xml");
dp.setData("c:\\burst\\InvoceData.xml");
Properties prop= new Properties();
prop.put("user-variable:EMAIL","xxxxxxx@xxxx.com");
dp.setConfig(prop);
Vector recoveryKeys=null;
//initialize Vector with recovery keys extracted during main process//
dp.setRecoveryKeys(recoveryKeys);
dp.process();
dp.deletTemporaryOutputFiles();
} catch (Exception e)
{
Logger.log(e);
}

Please try and let me know your experience.

The Oracle Certification Program is pleased to announce that the new Oracle Database 11g Certified Master Upgrade Exam (one-day practicum) has been released. This [one-day] upgrade exam provides a path for those already certified as OCM on Oracle Database 9i or 10g to upgrade their certification to Oracle Database 11g Certified Master.

SPECIAL NOTE:
Candidates upgrading their OCM certification to 11g via this one-day upgrade exam do not need to first upgrade their OCP certification. You will instead be granted the 11g OCP certification along with the 11g OCM certification once you have passed the necessary OCM upgrade exam (and any additional required exams), and completed the Course Submission Form.

To see the new paths as well as FAQs, visit our Oracle Database 11g OCM Upgrade Exam announcement page.

QUICK LINKS:

• New Exam Overview: Announcement
• Certification Track: Oracle Database 11g Certified Master
• Certification Exam: Oracle Database 11g Certified Master Upgrade Exam

Versatile authentication flexibly integrates a variety of open and proprietary authentication methods into one security layer, and strongly simplifies the implementation of multiple authentication methods in complex environments. In this panel, Dave Kearns will discuss with several authentication vendors about current trends in versatile authentication.
Attend this event

Recently a client asked "what is the correct course of action for upgrading the OUBI application?" There is documentation that covers upgrading a database, but they wanted to know what are the steps involved on the application side of the product.

There are two paths that can be taken when approaching an application upgrade.

1) If there have been no modifications to the existing application that need to be migrated from the existing instance to the upgraded instance, you can simply drop the existing instance (by deleting the folder) and install a fresh copy of the upgraded instance. If you follow this process, make sure you edit the cistab file to remove the existing entry. This assumes you intend to name the new instance the same as the dropped instance.

2) If you wish to install directly on top of the existing instance, the install process will read the cistab file and recognize the existing instance. You will be asked if the install process you have started is an upgrade (to which you, of course, answer Y) and the install proceeds directly into the existing instance.

If there is CM code, customers have this a separate install. Customers often build a new instance of the application server, then apply the CM on top of it.

Imagine you are performing a mapping in Oracle Service Bus where a field in your source message may contain one of a number of different values which gets mapped to one of a number of different values in the target message, e.g. you might need to map airport names to airport codes:

Airport Name	Airport Code
London Heathrow	LHR
Edinburgh	EDI
Southampton	SOU
Dublin	DUB
London Gatwick	LGW
Los Angeles	LAX
Tokyo	HND
San Francisco	SFO
….	….

This sort of mapping is typically called a domain value map as you are mapping from values in one domain to another.

Oracle Service Bus does not yet have built-in support for domain value maps - this is being integrated from the mediator component in SOA Suite and should be available in the 11gR2 release - so how do you handle this type of mapping in the meantime? Well, there are a number of options:

a) Add this information into your XQuery/XSLT transformation in the form of if/then logic

- Not very elegant

- Only really manageable for a small number of entities

b) Use the fn-bea:execute-sql() function to lookup these values from a database

- Good solution when there are lots of entities and their values change regularly

- However, likely to be more expensive in terms of performance and more complex -  data source configuration, database setup/maintenance etc.

c) Use a domain value map in Oracle Service Bus

Hey? I thought you said Oracle Service Bus didn’t have domain value map support yet? Not quite, I said it doesn’t have built-in support for domain value maps, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make domain value maps work in the meantime.

The way to do this is the following:

Create a domain value map in JDeveloper

- Create a new SOA application

- Right click on the newly created project within this application and select New

- From the SOA Tier category, select Transformation and in the Items list select Domain Value Map

- Click OK and then give your domain value map a name, description and enter the first couple of values

- Click OK again, and then add some more domain values to your domain value map using the green plus sign until it looks something like this:

- Save your work.

Import the domain value map into Oracle Service Bus

- Create an XQuery transformation file called AirportNamesToAirportCodesDVM using the contents of the domain value map you created by switching to the Source tab in JDeveloper and copying and pasting the whole dvm tag which includes all the data (you don’t need the XML declaration and generated comment above this) into the contents of the XQuery file in Oracle Service Bus

Import the domain value map schema into Oracle Service Bus

- Create an XML schema file for the domain value map using the domain value map schema which can be found here.

Define your XQuery mapping in Oracle Service Bus

- In Oracle Service Bus create a new XQuery transformation and include both the domain value map and your source message (containing the airport name) as source types:

- Set the target type of the transform to be your output message type

- Then in the XQuery mapper drag and drop a wire from the airport name field in the source messages to the airport code airport code field in the target message

- In the Target Expression tab replace $airportName with

$dvm/ns0:rows/ns0:row[ns0:cell[1]=$airportName]/ns0:cell[2]

and click Apply. This XPath expression basically says: “take the contents of the second column of the row in the domain value map where the first column’s contents equals the name of the airport in my source message”

Your mapping should now look like this:

Test your transform

- Switch to the test tab

- Populate your domain value map with some values (this will be the dvm source variable)

- Switch to the input message source variable and enter the name of the airport (or your full source message if you have done something more complex than this example)  and click the green arrow to test your XQuery:

Using the transform in a proxy service message flow

To use the transform in a proxy service message flow (i.e. within an action such as a Replace) you will need to create the dvm variable by adding an Assign action before the action in which you plan to do the transform.

You will then need to use this variable and the source message as inputs to the transformation in your Replace action.

Why use this approach?

- Domain value maps can be used in multiple transformations

- Domain value maps are one of the most efficient way of mapping relatively small, fairly static sets of data (Note: the first invocation of a transformation including a domain value map will take longer as it has to load the domain value map and cache it – subsequent invocations will be faster).

- Having these mapping defined in one places makes it easy for them to be modified if required

- Using JDeveloper to define your domain value map makes it easier to maintain, and means you can use the same domain value map with other SOA Suite components and future proofs it for when domain value maps are fully supported in Oracle Service Bus

 

By Anna Wichansky, Senior Director, Advanced UI User Experience, Oracle

Sitting in my office on a cold, gray day in December, my mind wanders back to a sunny rose garden in full bloom, and the wonderful week I spent in San Diego last summer at the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction. This was an opportunity to network with user experience (UX) professionals in my main area of professional interest, namely enterprise software usability, and find out the latest and greatest from Oracle colleagues as well as those of other companies. This conference was one of 10 affiliated conventions for UX professionals that were held at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center on July 19-25, 2009. Town & Country is a wonderfully sprawling resort in the old style of southern California hotel properties, built out rather than up, with hundreds of mature native plants and rose bushes, and lots of side paths, nooks, and crannies to explore. More than 4,000 participants from academia, research institutes, industry and governmental agencies in 73 countries submitted contributions to this forum. HCII2009 hosted 1400 papers, 23 tutorials, poster sessions, and exhibits.

Thanks to the mild climate in San Diego, we spent almost as much time out of doors chatting as we did sitting inside listening to presentations. The atmosphere was very friendly and open, and it was great just to sit down at a table with professionals from Europe, Japan, China, and Australia and talk about the papers and demos we had seen. I learned about where young researchers from Japan were job-hunting, European views of the economic crisis and its effect on behavioral research, and how brain waves were being used in Spain to assess perceptions of virtual reality environments.

In particular, the research on augmented reality intrigued me. These highly realistic simulations of virtual environments allow users to become completely immersed in experiences with new types of technologies. While the main applications I saw included training and warfare systems, the research is clearly leading to methods and instrumentation that can be used to enhance usability testing of software. These might include specialized non-invasive caps with electrodes which are worn by test participants, to measure changes in brain activity as they use technology. Methods to correlate brain wave patterns with our more traditional eye-tracking data were presented, as well as studies of these patterns in relation to mental workload in non-military situations.

By far an outstanding highlight of the conference was a tutorial on ISO standards for usability by Nigel Bevan, a leading British authority on international standards for usability. Nigel presented both introductory and advanced classes on this topic, which were well-worth the price of admission to the conference. I will provide a more detailed summary and review of relevant new standards for UX in a future usableapps article.

The paper session I organized, which supported the Human Interface and Management of Information program track, featured a total of seven papers, four by Oracle contributors and the rest by other industry experts, on enterprise software UX design. The session was well-attended with a lively audience of academics, consultants, and industry representatives. I was particularly pleased to get kudos and well wishes on my discussion of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, how it was formed, and how customers are using it to drive usability to the next level in next-generation products at Oracle. Papers were published in the conference proceedings, which are available on DVD and in Volume 8 of a 17-volume paperback set.

I've provided links below to the abstracts of the Oracle papers presented at the conference for your reading enjoyment. All authors are from our Applications UX group unless otherwise noted.

---

Customer Boards as Vehicles of Change in Enterprise Software User Experience. Anna Wichansky

Crafting Contemporary Enterprise Application User Experiences Jeremy Ashley and Misha Vaughan

Designing for the Next Generation: Generation-Y Expectations Patanjali Venkatacharya; Sean Rice; and Lulit Bezuayehu

From Research to Product: Integrating Treemaps into Enterprise Software Joseph Goldberg; Jonathan Helfman; and John Beresniewicz (Oracle USA Configuration Management Group)

Estimating Productivity: Composite Operators for Keystroke Level Modeling. Jeff Sauro

The Factor Structure of the System Usability Scale- James R. Lewis (IBM Software Group) and Jeff Sauro

Usability Maturity: A Case Study in Planning and Designing an Enterprise Application Suite - Jeremy Ashley and Kristin Desmond

The Future of Enterprise is with the Mobile Workforce. An International Field Study. Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, , Brent White, Michele Snyder, and Chad Sampanes,.

There has been a buzz around UPK Document customizations recently, so I thought I would share my tips.

I consider myself a Word novice. When this feature was released I had never even heard about the bookmarking feature. I've successfully created lots of customizations despite my modest skill with Word. Here are my tips:

1. The thing that helped me the most was showing all formatting marks. (I know Word experts everywhere are wincing at how fundamental this suggestions is. Perhaps this emphasizes that my skill with Word is minimal and brings you hope.) This allows you to see the bookmarks which makes adding, removing or editing them much, much easier.
2. Learn about the Bookmarks! Some bookmarks include a start bookmark and an end bookmark. It is important that for these you have both the start and the end. If you accidentally delete one and not the other, the document will not publish successfully.
3. When I began my journey customizing documents, I soon realized how little I knew about Word. If you're attempting to do something "fancy", try to do it in a normal Word document as a test. If you can do it there, you should be able to do the same thing in the UPK document style.

After an hour or so learning and experimenting I had produced my first successful customized output. Some more complicated customizations took more time to think through exactly what I wanted as a result and how I would need to do it using bookmarks.

Do you have specific tips to share? Let us know in the comments.

Gartner has positioned Oracle in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2010 "Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems (DBMS)" (written by Donald Feinberg and Mark A. Beyer, January 28, 2010). This report is widely used by many customers who consider it an authoritative guide which is valuable in making database investment decisions. Of course Oracle has been the leader in both the database and data warehouse markets for a considerable time, as you can see from our advertising:

Gartner's positioning of Oracle as a data warehouse leader within its EDW MQ is only natural. This latest MQ report highlights the main strengths of Oracle's data warehouse strategy and includes recognition for delivery to the market of our Database Machine platform. However, it is important to remember that Oracle has a broad range of data warehouse solutions ranging from fully pre-configured solutions delivered and supported by Oracle - Oracle Database Machine)-, optimized warehouse reference configurations with all the major hardware vendors, and stand-alone Oracle Database, 11g Release 2. No other data warehouse vendor offers this level of portability (although some have seen the error of their ways and are now trying to copy Oracle's approach).

The latest release of Oracle Database, 11g Release 2, contains many optimizations to enhance query performance with minimal intervention from the DBA. This is simply the continuation of a process which started a long time ago and is aimed at reducing both the setup, management and overall TCO. Optimizations have been added to improve refresh times for MVs and cube MVs. It is now much easier to define and maintain these transparent query optimization features and most importantly, they benefit every BI tool on the market.

To help DBAs and database designers create the best partitioning strategy, the partition advisor has been improved to take the guesswork out of partitioning and to help build a database structure that can deliver the very best levels of performance.

To help customers reduce their cost of storage, 11gR2 added columnar compression as part of Exadata. Oracle's database compression features also provide significant improvements in performance. 11g Release 2 now comes with a compression advisor which can be used to estimate the likely levels of compression to help define an optimal data/storage strategy.

Gartner recognized all the work Oracle has done to improve the automation and optimization of the Oracle data warehouse and as Gartner points out, these optimizations are unique to Oracle. No other database provides this level of support and guidance for the DBA to help simplify the manage of workloads within the data warehouse.

Both RAC and ASM are now seen as vital features, and key strengths, for extremely large data warehouses and the highlighting of these features within the MQ report validates our use of these two features within Oracle Database Machine. The use of both RAC and ASM provide the ability to flexibly scale any platform by adding additional servers and/or storage without having to take the data warehouse offline. In addition, RAC and ASM deliver an environment that provides the level of highly availability needed to support the demands of today's mission critical data warehouses.

Overall, this latest EDW MQ is an important and impressive acknowledgment of Oracle's data warehouse strategy. Taking a wider view of data warehousing it is important to understand that there are other factors which need to be considered, although the EDW MQ is definitely the foundation, or cornerstone MQ. There are a lot of other factors to consider when implementing a data warehouse such as ETL tools, data quality tools, data integration tools, BI platforms, enterprise content management etc etc. Therefore, a true leader in the data warehouse space needs to be in the leaders quadrant for all these areas - like Oracle:

This is the reason why Oracle is No1 in data warehousing!