DWH News

Last week I attended TDWI in San Diego.  This conference’s theme was agile BI.  With talk in the industry about what agile means to the organization and how businesses are applying BI to become more responsive to change, the ability to react more quickly to what is happening within any industry becomes important.  Due to consistent advancements in technology, the ability to deploy BI in a way that is easy to use and to maintain is becoming more realistic.  Certain vendors seem to be jumping on the bandwagon in relation to quick deployments and easy to maintain backend technologies (for instance 1010data, Kapow Technologies, and Wherescape). 

Pentaho Corporation, the open source business intelligence (BI) and data integration (DI) leader, announced today the Pentaho Agile BI Global Tour, Data to Dashboards in Minutes. The seminar series will visit more than twenty cities around the world and is expected to attract several thousand leading business intelligence and data integration developers and architects as well as business analysts and executives. Attendees will leave these seminars much better prepared to build BI applications more quickly, adapt to changing business requirements more easily and achieve faster time-to-value at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

SAP presented a preview last week of its game plan for developing mobile applications, enterprise information management and analytics in conjunction with its recent acquisition of Sybase. Within nine months, an open standards-based mobile business applications platform will be available for a variety of mobile devices and operating systems.

With Sybase's contribution, SAP aims to give companies real-time visibility into business activity with up-to-date information on any device, reported Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service. Other plans include certifying the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database for use with Business Suite by mid-2011.

To glean value from information, organizations must first locate and retrieve relevant data. SAS® Text Analytics, named a Trend Setting Product for 2010 by KMWorld magazine, lets customers obtain insights from electronic text, improve search results and derive intelligence to determine their best course of action. The offering is from SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services. 

Open source projects aimed at enabling enterprise IT application development for cloud computing are proliferating, according to an analysis by Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software.

myDIALS, a leading vendor of SaaS performance management solutions, today announced the availability of its myDIALS Performance Module for Marketing, the industry’s first SaaS performance management solution that provides sophisticated visualization and analytics to show the effect marketing programs have on revenues and profits. Executive teams can now quickly understand how marketing spend will impact revenues through what-if scenarios.

As well as the three Rittman Mead OBIEE 11g Training Days events we’re running in London, Atlanta and Bangalore later this year, I’ve also agreed to do a number of Enterprise Business Intelligence Masterclasses for Oracle University, including a visit down to Australia and Singapore. These events are seminar-style, cover OBIEE 11g as well as OWB11gR2/ODI 11gR1 and a bit of Essbase 11.1.2, and are an ideal high-level introduction to the technology behind the Oracle 11g BI&DW technology stack.

More dates will be announced over the next few months, but for now, here’s the current set of confirmed dates and venue:

• De Meern (Utrecht), Netherlands, 10-11 November 2010
• Bratislava, Slovakia, 25-26 November 2010
• Melbourne, Australia, 6-7 December 2010
• Sydney, Australia, 9-10 December 2010
• Singapore, Singapore, 13-14 December 2010
• Oslo, Norway, 14-15 February 2011

I’ll post details of any future events on our Events website page.

BI EE 11g is a significant feature filled release when compared with the previous 10g release. Most customers who are planning to upgrade to 11g have an automated way of upgrading their 10g Web Catalogs and repositories to the 11g version. When moving from 10g to 11g, we will have to go through the upgrade utility as there are significant changes to the repository structure and the web catalog structures. A direct copy & paste into the 11g version will not work.

The upgrade process involves the following steps

1. Install the new 11g version in either the same machine or a different machine.
2. Run the upgrade assistant utility to upgrade the repository & Web Catalogs.
3. Migrate other 10g specific customizations manually to the 11g instance. The different customizations are

a. Any Static files added to the 10g app server
b. Custom XML messages
c. Styles & Skins (The upgrades for this will have to be done carefully as some CSS & files have changed in this release)

4. Upgrade the Scheduler schema (Both BI Delivers & BI Publisher) through the upgrade utility
5. Upgrade BI Publisher

In this blog entry we shall see how to go about upgrading the RPD and Web Catalogs from the 10g to the 11g version. After installing 11g, start up the upgrade assistant utility from {ORACLE_HOME}/bin/ua (or ua.bat if you are on windows)

The upgrade assistant can be used to upgrade the scheduler schema, BI Publisher as well as the RPD & Web Catalogs. Lets start with the first option, i.e. upgrading RPD and Web Catalogs

In the upgrade screen, choose the 10g RPD along with the Web Catalog Path. In the Deliveries folder, choose the 10g deliveries path ({OracleBIData}/web/catalog/deliveries

In the next screen, provide the details of the weblogic server on which we will be deploying the Repository and Web Catalog to.

The upgrade utility does not seem to support remote deployments of the RPD and Web Catalog i.e. Upgrade Utility will only deploy the repository and web catalog on the machine containing the weblogic admin server.

The upgrade process will stop all the components first and then will do the individual RPD and Web Catalog Upgrade.

This is just a utility. We cannot expect all the reports to start working out of the box immediately after an upgrade. Good amount of testing is required to make sure all the older queries of the most commonly used reports are working without any major issues. Also, not all the reports would get migrated seamlessly due to the significant changes across the versions which the utility cannot recognize. Care has to be taken to make sure that all the warnings logged as part of the upgrade process are properly analyzed and corrected manually. A sample upgrade log is shown below (containing 4 warnings)

Teradata Corporation, today announced that the Teradata OLAP (online analytical processing) Connector provides Microsoft Excel PivotTable users with direct access to real-time data, which significantly enriches their reporting and analytics capabilities. Supported by real-time business data, the new enterprise intelligence capabilities help companies make more insightful, timely business decisions, which can create a sustainable advantage.

Information Builders, the independent leader in operational business intelligence (BI) systems, today announced that the iWay Enterprise Information Management (EIM) suite was named a "Trend-Setting Product" of 2010 by KMWorld magazine. The award recognizes products that clearly demonstrate technology breakthroughs, which serve the vendors' full spectrum of constituencies, especially their customers. The iWay EIM Suite was selected for the second consecutive year.