Saturday, September 27, 2014

Oracle DB 12.1.0.2.0 is available for MS Windows


In July the 12.1.0.2.0 DB  (Enterprise Edition) of Oracle was released for Linux and Solaris. Today it is also available for MS Windows OS.
You can download the complete installation here at Oracle Site, or as Patch 17694377 from Oracle Support.   

This DB release is known for it's In Memory option (No, this is not Times Ten) covered by Oracle White paper, Oracle Page, Oracle Blog and some nice blogs like test on counting 1 Billion records by Antony Heljula from Peak Indicators or the post by Mark Rittman.  



Actually there are some additional new features in this release, such as:
  • JSON support in Database (links: Oracle Docs, Blog and slides).
  • Approximate Count Distinct (APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT() function).
  • Advanced Index Compression.
The new features guide is here.
The Upgrading to 12.1.0.2 white paper is here.


Finally, a personal experience:
It seems that the "In memory" term is used very often by different vendors, with various meanings.
I had a conversation with a customer few days ago. He assumed the in memory option of MS 2014 DB and Oracle 12.1.0.2, described here, are the same. They are not! As far as I understand, The Microsoft option is oriented on OLTP processes, you need specifically define tables as In-Memory and (If you don't like loosing data) make sure the log is created for them (there are many other limitations).
The Oracle In-Memory is designed for Analytic, the existing relational tables are updated as they always were, in the regular method. We can define additional in-memory columnar data storage on any table or partition we want. The DB optimizer can work with both. As a result every thing that worked before, keeps working.  Just faster.
Microsoft has a different tool for analytic data, that is the Tabular, but it seems to me more of a Microsoft Analysis Services replacement. What I like about the Oracle 12.1.0.2 In-Memory, is how open and flexible, though powerful this option is.
 

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Building KPIs And Using KPIs Presentations

At the last ILOUG we presented the "KPIs creation in OBIEE"  and "Using KPIs in OBIEE". You can see the presentations as one file here.
Unfortunately, I created them from scratch. Any feedback is welcome.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

OBI - Now on Cloud

It seems that Oracle BI on cloud is available: https://cloud.oracle.com/business_intelligence

It comes with:
  • Multiple file load options
  • Interactive reporting
  • Powerful analysis
  • Mobile built-in
  • Oracle managed service
  • Oracle managed service
  • 2 instances (production and pre-production)
  • Oracle Database Schema Service(50 GB storage &  300 GB / month bandwidth)
 There is a FAQ & Demos page there as well (and a video on YouTube).

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Big Data SQL is available from Oracle

Oracle has announced the availability of BIG Data SQL as part of the BDA (Big Data Appliance) 4.0 few days ago. It seems to be available only via Exadata. See here for some details and links.

Unlike many existing big Data SQL solutions (Hive, Impala...) or ETL-like attitude (Oracle Big Data Connectors or Sqoop), Oracle Big Data SQL enable SQL queries that can access both Oracle Exadata relational tables, and big data sources such as Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL.

(See also the blog "Oracle SQL Developer & Data Modeler Support for Oracle Big Data SQL" if you are interested)  

Add this to the new 12.2.0.2 in-memory DB option (see also here, here, here and here, for example).

We seem to get more news from Oracle as OOW14 is approaching.



Wednesday, September 10, 2014

OBIEE - 37 links to "OBIEE How To" notes at Oracle Support

Just a set of "How To" notes I saved for myself, with no specific order.

Monday, September 8, 2014

17-Sep ILOUG Forum on OBIEE KPIs and Scorecards

ב17 לספטמבר יתקיים פורום BI של ILOUG בבית אורקל (בזל 25, פתח תקווה).
הנושא הפעם:  KPIs & Scorecard.

פרטים ורישום באתר ILOUG:

http://www.iloug.org.il/Event_Page.php?EventID=200

Agenda
14:00-14:15 Coffee
14:15-14:30 Introduction
Dan Postar
14:30-15:00 KPI – key performance indicators and Scorecards, Introduction
Dan Postar, BWS
15:00-16:00 Building KPIs in OBIEE
Boris Dahab, Oracle
16:00-16:15 Coffee Break & Networking
16:15-17:00 Using KPIs in OBIEE
Tobit Leiba, Oracle
17:00-17:45 Creating Scorecards
Nir Zarafati, Enix