Oracle Business Intelligence Blog

Happy New Year - That would be 2012

2012-01-04T14:08:00.000+05:30

A very happy new year to all fans of Oracle BI. 2012 promises to be a great year for Oracle's BI customers - Exalytics in-memory analytics was announced at Oracle Open World in San Francisco last year. Oracle also announced an agreement to acquire Endeca, "a leading provider of unstructured data management, web commerce and business intelligence solutions." - which closed December 15, 2011. Then there were the slew of products and technologies surrounding big data - Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, Oracle R Enterprise, and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. All of this means that Oracle will continue to lead in the business intelligence market - in products, pre-packaged applications, and engineered systems, and widen the gap between itself and the rest of the followers.

All of this will mean lots of work for us in the engineering group - product management, development, quality engineering, user experience, documentation, curriculum, performance and stress testing, internationalization, and more.

Looking forward to it all!

And as for this blog, which I have been benignly ignoring for a long time now, well, let me try and post more frequently this year. Something modest, like a blog post every two-to-three weeks. After all, I have been managing close to two posts a week on my personal blog, with one post on books and one post on photos. So more work, more success, more blogging. More of all that's good.

New Oracle BI Mobile Video

2011-11-02T19:49:00.000+05:30

Our Oracle Marketing team recently put up a new video on Oracle BI Mobile at http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/1213175231001
Manan was kind enough to give me a peek at the video before it went public when I was at our Santa Clara office. It looked good then. It is good now.

It's quite nice, with nuggets of information that call out the reality of the rapidly changing face of internet penetration and where it is consumed. Mobility and geo-awareness are just two keys of that rapidly evolving landscape. Oracle is uniquely positioned to deliver unsurpassed value to enterprises the world over.

In this new world that is dominated by mobile devices, mobile Internet users will outnumber desktop Internet users by 2014. That's just over two years away. As the more than billion mobile users in countries like India and China move to Internet-enabled smartphones, this will bring about a tectonic shift in how analytics will be delivered to end-users.

Analytics is 80-90% about consumption of information. Rapid, speed-of-thought analysis, that Oracle Exalytics enables, delivered to users where they are, when they need it. Tablets are the evolution of notebooks - bringing mobility to information consumers.

Oracle BI EE keeps a close eye on the total cost of ownership of BI implementations for its customers. Design once, develop once, deploy anywhere, everywhere. The server takes care of the under-the-hood transformations needed to leverage the form factor and device where analytics is consumed.

The future promises to be exciting. Welcome to the new world of Oracle BI Mobile.

OpenWorld Database General Session and Exalytics

2011-10-14T16:46:00.001+05:30

The Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine (White Paper), announced at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, was also featured in Andy Mendelsohn's (Senior Vice President, Oracle Database Server Technologies) Database General Session. This is also the session where Andy Mendelsohn showcased the Oracle Big Data Appliance, "an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g.".

Also see my previous posts:

Here are screenshots from the Database session:

Do take a minute to read this disclaimer, since this pertains to future functionality.

The software consists of the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, the secret-sauce, so to say, that enables the in-memory capabilities of Exalytics. TimesTen is the market leading in-memory database solution. Exalytics is also tightly integrated with and can connect to an Oracle Exadata machine via Infiniband. The software foundation, of course, is the market leading analytics suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite (informally known as OBIEE).

40 Intel processor cores, 1TB RAM, and an ultra high-speed 40Gb Infiniband connection to Oracle Exadata.

This is Jacques Vigeant, currently my manager, demonstrating Exalytics in the session. Ultra industrial-scale Master-detail linking is just one of the ingredients here. Another of the features I wrote about and defined as a product manager. Others being advanced data visualizations, and mobile analytics. Feels good :-)

Geo-spatial visualizations in the Exalytics demo. Zoom into the Map View. This particular example shows store locations in the city of San Francisco. The map data has been provided by NAVTEQ.

You can add or remove formats from the Map View, with a mouse-click. Color-code by quartiles, quintiles, deciles, or any other arbitrary number of bins. Select from percentile binning, value binning, or even continuous fill bins. Choose variable shaped markers, or pie graph or bar graph overlays. Even use images as markers.

Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine in Thomas Kurian's Keynote

2011-10-03T23:18:00.001+05:30

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Product Development at Oracle, showcased the newly launched Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine at his Oracle OpenWorld keynote.

Dramatic improvements with Exalytics, including 20X better response time, 80X faster MOLAP reads, and 15X better response times for Planning applications.

A new in-memory cache that is services by the TimesTen database. An adaptive cache algorithm that ensures that frequently accessed data is kept in-memory, thereby reducing or altogether eliminating Database hits.

The first screenshot above, in the top row, is that of Map Views - geo-spatial visualizations in the OBIEE 11g suite; the second is a new type of Scorecard visualization, known as the Strategy Wheel; the third is a screenshot from the BI Mobile app running an OBIEE Dashboard page; and the fourth is showcasing a new Trellis multi-panel visualization.

Enhancements and new capabilities in the Essbase MOLAP engine to take advantage of Exalytics.

Dave Granholm doing a demo of Exalytics.

Master-detail linking allows for in-Dashboard analysis, instantaneous updates of content on your Dashboard.

Close to a BILLION records are analyzed. Prompts that refresh at the speed of thought. Search-as-you-type capabilities.

Microcharts, aka Sparklines, in their myriad forms: whether as sparkbars or sparklines, with highlighting of low and high values help visualize in an understandable manner massive amounts of data within the small confines of a single screen.

A close-up of a line graph souped up with master-detail linking.

Start at any level of aggregation.

Drill down any path, across the row or column edge of the view to drill to a deeper level of insight.

Each sparkline cell in the Trellis view is serving up tens even hundreds of data points. Multiply by a dozen rows and dozen or more columns and you are truly talking about meaningful dense data visualizations.

I need to have access to this same dashboard as I leave the office and bring out my iPad.

Adding this Dashboard as a Favorite means it is easier to access.

Like from my BI Mobile iPad app. With a consistent user-interface that is nonetheless optimized for a multi-touch gestural interface that is provided in the Apple iPad tablet.

More information, including a BI Mobile app demo in Balaji's general session.

Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine

2011-10-03T11:17:00.002+05:30

The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Here's some information on the "Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine" that was announced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at its conference, Oracle OpenWorld, in San Francisco.

"The Exalytics machine includes 40 processor cores and 1TB of DRAM, but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to compression, Ellison said." (link)
"It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle's TimesTen in-memory database, BI (business intelligence) stack and Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server, Ellison revealed." (link)
4 x 10 Core Intel Xeom CPUs (slide from Larry Ellison's keynote)
H/W Scan rate of 200 Gigabytes per second (slide from Larry Ellison's keynote)
The industry's first in-memory BI machine
Best-in-class enterprise BI platform, in-memory analytics software, and hardware optimized to work together
Advanced data visualization and exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data
"The Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation running on Oracle Exalytics features a number of enhancements including mobile enablement of existing dashboards and reports, native look and feel, better interactivity support, ability to bookmark and save reports and dashboards for offline interactive viewing etc." (from the White Paper)
..supports optimum SQL generation for Oracle Exadata.

Oracle Exalytics Trellis Charts View provide better visual data discovery

As a historical sidenote, I had written the PRD on Trellis views some time back - it felt terrific to see these visualizations in action.

Press coverage

Oracle Exalytics attacks ‘big data’ analytics — Tech News and Analysis - GIGAom.com

Exalytics, a high-end server appliance for near-real-time business intelligence applications and a big part of Oracle’s big data response, debuted Sunday night at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.

Ellison unveils 'Exalytics' in-memory machine - Computerworld

The Exalytics machine includes 40 processor cores and 1TB of DRAM, but can hold five to 10TB of data in memory thanks to compression, Ellison said.
It runs a software stack that includes parallelized versions of Oracle's TimesTen in-memory database, BI (business intelligence) stack and Essbase OLAP (online analytical processing) server, Ellison revealed.

Oracle’s Ellison Introduces Faster System to Challenge SAP, IBM - Businessweek

Larry Ellison Wants Data to Move Faster - NYTimes.com

Oracle’s Ellison Introduces Faster Data System in Challenge to SAP, IBM - Bloomberg

“Everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM -- if you keep it in main memory,” Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in a keynote address at a conference in San Francisco tonight. “You ask more questions, you get better answers.”
The Exalytics Intelligence Machine Ellison introduced will run Oracle’s Times Ten and Essbase databases, both gained through past acquisitions, in its terabyte of main memory.

You can catch videos at Oracle OpenWorld Live
There's also a 3-D demo available of the machine.
Also check out the Oracle OpenWorld blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/

Screenshots from the keynote:

The slide announcing Exalytics

The software underpinnings of Exalytics: OBIEE, TimesTen, Essbase.

Speed-of-thought analytics; Trellis views, instant prompts refreshes

Heuristic Adaptive In-Memory Cache

Performance graphs of Exalytics; average response time improvement: 18X

Average response time improvement with Exadata Oracle Database data source: 23X

In summary

And here's the video replay of the CEO keynote:

Sample App for 11.1.1.5.0 Now Available

2011-07-22T01:36:00.000+05:30

The latest version of the Sample App, for Oracle BI 11g 11.1.1.5.0, was made available for download from OTN today. As the thousands of people who have downloaded and used the Sample App would know, it is a great way to get introduced to Oracle BI and to see so many of its features in action. It also serves as an excellent tutorial of sorts, since in so many areas the Sample App makes the fullest use of the product's amazing capabilities. Since some of these features, expectedly, require a person to possess a fair amount of relevant BI and Oracle BI skills, the available examples in the Sample App serve as a useful how-to, thus saving time for the person implementing or using the product.

OBIEE Samples - the landing page for the Sample App on the Oracle Technology Network (aka OTN)

V107 - the latest version of the Sample App, for 11.1.1.5.0

Oracle Business Intelligence (11.1.1.x) Downloads
And the links for the Release Notes, Documentation Library, and Certification Information.
The tweets from the Oracle_BIEE Twitter handle:

As a disclaimer, please do take note of the following:
Disclaimer: The SampleApp contents and its code are distributed free for demonstrative purposes only. It is neither maintained nor supported by Oracle as a licensed product.

New BI Mobile Demos

2011-06-27T22:21:00.000+05:30

We recorded some new demos based on the recently released mobile capabilities in Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (11.1.1.5.0).

These are short videos that showcase some of the capabilities in our mobile app. One focuses on the Oracle BI platform, while the other showcases what is possible with the mobile app accessing Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, like Financial Analytics.

You can get the software from Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Downloads
The Oracle BI Mobile app itself is available as a free download from Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Some screenshots from the demos:

Designing With the Mind In Mind-Book Review

2011-06-18T15:16:00.003+05:30

Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules (Kindle Edition)

This is another excellent book to add to your shelf, after giving it a careful read, alongside other excellent books on information visualization.
I claim an interest in the field of data visualizations. And not just the Lego blocks in colorful arrangements type of visualizations, though that is not to gainsay their utility or ability to entertain. This interest in meaningful information and data visualizations goes back at least 8 years, to 2003, when I first started working as the product manager for visualizations in the Discoverer product from Oracle (sort of tautological - working for Oracle would presuppose that the products I worked on would be Oracle products too...). Starting in 2004 my interest in visualizations took a more detailed turn when I starting haranguing people about the utility of having interactive visualizations. Some of what I have written in my capacity as a product manager for data visualizations in Oracle BI since 2006 has made its way into the product, much more is making its way into the product, and there is much that will eventually, I hope, make its way into the product.

Therefore, it is but natural that I also have an interest in literature on data visualizations. To that end I have read some books and papers and blogs on the topic over the years, including Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, A Tour through the Visualization Zoo - ACM Queue, and more... There is always the humorous yet educational blog Junk Charts. Then there is the often acerbic yet valuable blog by Stephen Few (whose post first led me to this book), Visual Business Intelligence. And so on...

This year, the first book I have read on the topic, Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules by Jeff Johnson, is not really a book on data visualizations per-se. This book will not tell you the utility of a bar graph versus a line graph. It will not tell you what decorations to apply or not apply to graphs, whether 3D effects look good on a graph (they don't), what chart junk is (see Edward Tufte's books for that), etc... The author, Jeff Johnson, is an authority in this field, has been active in the field of HCI (Human Computer Interactions) for more than 30 years, and has worked at Xerox, Sun Microsystems, HP Labs, etc...

His latest work is more a book about the theory of how the mind perceives information, of how humans understand what they read, and how our eyes are attuned to paying attention to not just what's happening in front of us but also at the periphery of our vision. This is a "design" book - "Design rules often describe goals rather than actions. They are purposefully very general to make them broadly applicable, but that means that their exact meaning and their applicability to specific design situations is open to interpretation.". It is a book that informs us how some of the perceptual hard-wiring in our brains has evolved because of very sound reasons, and why information systems that tend to ignore or force their way against these perceptual conduits often fail. That you have more a vast proliferation of interfaces that are designed so as to violate these fundamental precepts of cognition is an indication of how far we still have to go in this field.

In every book on user interface design, whether specific or general, you will find the usual suspects - the Gestalt principles: Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, Symmetry, Figure/Ground, and Common. The author says these provide a useful basis for guidelines for graphic and user interface design.

... Several Gestalt principles describe our visual system’s tendency to resolve ambiguity or fill in missing data in such a way as to perceive whole objects. The first such principle, the principle of Continuity, states that our visual perception is biased to perceive continuous forms rather than disconnected segments.
Slider controls are a user-interface example of the Continuity principle. We see a slider as depicting a single range controlled by a handle that appears somewhere on the slider, not as two separate ranges separated by the handle.

A recommended practice, after designing a display, is to view it with each of the Gestalt principles in mind—Proximity, Similarity, Continuity, Closure, Symmetry, Figure/Ground, and Common Fate—to see if the design suggests any relationships between elements that you do not intend.

If we are to read and understand what's written, like instructions on a screen, or tooltips, or the like, then it stands to reason that the typeface be easy-to-read. But the author goes beyond that, deeper, into the roots of how we read and understand, and how, therefore, poorly designed interfaces can interrupt the process by which we understand what we understand.

In other words, the most efficient way to read is via context-free, bottom-up, feature-driven processes that are well learned to the point of being automatic. Context-driven reading is today considered mainly a backup method that, although it operates in parallel with feature-based reading, is only relevant when feature-driven reading is difficult or is insufficiently automatic.

... reading can be disrupted by hard-to-read scripts and typefaces. Bottom-up, context-free, automatic reading is based on recognition of letters and words from their visual features. Therefore, a typeface with difficult-to-recognize feature and shapes will be hard to read.

Visual noise in and around text can disrupt recognition of features, characters, and words and therefore drop reading out of automatic feature-based mode into a more conscious and context-based mode.

The same goes for colors too. Color patch size and separation for example are used by our visual system to make out one color from another.

Color patch size: The smaller or thinner objects are, the harder it is to distinguish their colors
Separation: The more separated color patches are, the more difficult it is to distinguish their colors...

Color patches in chart legends should be large to help people distinguish the colors

“change blindness” (Wikipedia link) is what sometimes causes people to not pay attention to not pay attention to a message of possible importance flashed by an application. Therefore, "Don’t require people to remember system status or what they have done, because their attention is focused on their primary goal and progress toward it."

There have been at least three books I have read this year that have ended up talking about the concept, history, and neurology of memory (Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains), and this book is a fourth one, if you add to the list books that cover only peripherally the topic of memory. In this book, the author describes the workings of memory, how they are formed, and what implications it has when it comes to aiding users in remember previously performed actions in a graphical user-interface.

memories, like perceptions, consist of patterns of activation of large sets of neurons. Related memories correspond to overlapping patterns of activated neurons.
...

However, it has many weaknesses: it is error-prone, impressionist, free-associative, idiosyncratic, retroactively alterable, and easily biased by a variety of factors at the time of recording or of retrieval.
...
One implication of this pattern is that interactive systems should indicate what users have done versus what they have not yet done.
...
A new face stimulates a pattern of neural activity that has not been activated before, so no sense of recognition results. Of course, a new face may be so similar to a face we have seen that it triggers a misrecognition, or it may be just similar enough that the neural pattern it activates triggers a familiar pattern, causing a feeling that the new face reminds us of someone we know.
...
In contrast, recall is long-term memory reactivating old neural patterns without immediate similar perceptual input.
...
Whatever the evolutionary reasons, our brain did not evolve to recall facts.
...
Because people are bad at recall, they develop methods and technologies to help them remember facts and procedures
...
The relative ease with which we can recognize things rather than recall them is the basis of the graphical user interface (GUI)
...
The relative ease with which we can recognize things rather than recall them is the basis of the graphical user interface (GUI) (Johnson et al., 1989). The GUI is based on two well-known user interface design rules:

See and choose is easier than recall and type.

Use pictures where possible to convey function.

And what does the author mean here?

Even insects, mollusks, and worms, without even an old brain—just a few neuron clusters—can learn from experience. However, only creatures with a cortex or brain structures serving similar functions[2] can learn from the experiences of others.
...
caveat is that some birds can learn from watching other birds.

The mind just races with the possibilities. A student peering over the shoulder of another at an exam is sure learning from the experience of others, on a lighter note.

As with other tasks, consistency within an application's interface is critical. This is also one of the primary tasks of a user interface design engineer - to ensure that different screens, different parts of an application all have the same vocabulary of interface and action. Different parts of an application are worked upon by different engineers, and this can often enough cause those parts of an application to look inconsistent in how they look and feel (the classic problem that LAF standards seek to minimize). Even with the benefit of guidelines and look-and-feel standards that are in place at most large software development companies, it is inevitable that inconsistencies can creep into the UI of an application. This is where the importance of a user-interface and user-experience design team cannot be stressed enough.

To reduce the time it takes for people to master your application, Web site, or appliance, so that using it becomes automatic or nearly so, don’t force them to learn a whole new vocabulary
....
Same name, same thing; different name, different thing. (FormsThatWork.com) This means that terms and concepts should map strictly 1:1. Never use different terms for the same concept, or the same term for different concepts. Even terms that are ambiguous in the real world should mean only one thing in the system. Otherwise, the system will be harder to learn and remember.

Performance and the perception of responsiveness are different beasts altogether, related only by the often contentious thread of individual experiences. Personal experiences can differ widely. What one considers slow is considered acceptable by someone else. In my life and times as a product manager, there have been several occasions where discussions about performance, the expectation of performance, and what can be considered as responsiveness on the part of an application and what should be considered as 'slow' have ranged from the pleasant, the cordial, to the contentious even.

Responsiveness is related to performance, but it is different. Performance is measured in terms of computations per unit of time. Responsiveness is measured in terms of compliance with human time requirements and, as described above, user satisfaction.
...
Time lag between a visual event and our full perception of it: 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds)
...
Our brain compensates by extrapolating the position of moving objects by 0.1 second. Therefore, as a rabbit runs across your visual field, you see it where your brain estimates it is now, not where it was 0.1 second ago

To be perceived by users as responsive, interactive software must follow these guidelines:
Acknowledge user actions instantly, even if returning the answer will take time; preserve users’ perception of cause and effect
Let users know when the software is busy and when it isn’t
...
Animate movement smoothly and clearly • Allow users to abort (cancel) lengthy operations they don’t want
...
Interactive systems should avoid lengthy gaps in on their side of the conversation. Otherwise, the human user will wonder what is happening. Systems have about 1 second to either do what the user asked or indicate how long it will take.
...
It is true that meeting those deadlines on the Web is difficult—often impossible. However, it is also true that those deadlines are psychological time constants, wired into us by millions of years of evolution, governing our perception of responsiveness.

Every book on memory and cognition will also talk about the two kinds of memory that exist. One is the long-term memory, which consists of the things we remember for a long time, often as long as our lives. The other is short-term or working memory, to which is the attributed the magic number of seven, plus or minus two, which is the average number of objects a person can hold in their working memory. It turns out that while this number may not appear to be impressively high, in reality it is even lower!

This breaking down of tasks into subtasks ends with small subtasks that can be completed without a break in concentration, with the subgoal and all necessary information either held in working memory or directly perceivable in the environment. These bottom-level subtasks are called “unit tasks” (Card et al., 1983).
...
Unit tasks have been observed in activities as diverse as editing documents, entering checkbook transactions, designing electronic circuits, and maneuvering fighter jet planes in dogfights, and they always last somewhere in the range of 6 – 30 seconds.

In conclusion, this is not the book to pick up in the middle of a time-sensitive project to get guidance on user-interface doubts. No. The time to pick this book and go through is before. Or in-between deadline-driven assignments.

Kindle Excerpt:

Google Maps Based Background Maps in 11.1.1.5.0

2011-05-26T14:04:00.000+05:30

One of the new features in the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g v 11.1.1.5.0 release is the support for Google Maps based background maps.
In a nutshell, what this means is that MapViewer now supports Google Maps as a built-in tile layer. Which means you can use MapViewer to create a tile layer with tile imagery served from the Google Maps server. Once created, you can use these map tiles in your map views in Oracle BI as background maps, without the need to do any programming or custom work. Therefore, in addition to your own background maps, or maps from NAVTEQ, you can also use background maps from Google Maps in 11.1.1.5.0

The spatial data to be overlain in your map views still needs to come from some spatial data source, like that provided by NAVTEQ and stored in an Oracle Database.

There are also some other improvements to map views in this release that I will outline next week.

In a nutshell this is what the process looks like:

1. From MapViewer, create a new map tile. Select "Google Maps" from the dropdown of available map sources. This is the new feature in MapViewer in this release, viz. the ability to specify a Google Maps map sources via the UI, without having to write code.

2. Go to code.google.com and Sign Up for the Google Maps API - Google Maps API Family - Google Code Then enter this key in the field on the tile layer's properties page. Be sure to be aware of the terms and conditions under which you are allowed to use the Google Maps API, like usage, availability, etc...

The other thing to note here is that you have to specify, as expected, where the spatial data source is for this tile layer. In this case I am using the OBIEE_NAVTEQ_Sample data source from the Sample App. This will tell me what the shapes and definitions are for the geographical entities I want to map on my maps. Unless I am using longitude and latitude coordinates, in which case I can directly plot them on any background map.

3. You can preview the tile layer thus created in MapViewer. This will allows you to verify that the tile layer was created correctly, and that it is fetching the tile layers correctly from the Google Maps server.

4. The next steps have to be done inside Oracle BI. Log in to Oracle BI, go to "Administration", and go to the Manage Map Data screen. From the "Background Maps" tab, select and import this background map into your BI metadata.

5.Now, when you create a new map view, or edit a map view, provided your map view utilizes at least one layer that is also defined to be part of your Google Maps based background map, you can select this Google Map to be your background map for the map view...

More later...

Invitation to Participate in an Oracle BI User Survey

2011-05-26T13:56:00.000+05:30

Your chance to make a difference to Oracle products and how they look. There is a survey being conducted by our BI User Experience team and I strongly urge you to take a few minutes to go over this post and to take the survey.
Thanks!!

The Oracle Business Intelligence User Experience (BIUX) Team is committed to using customer feedback to continuously improve our BI products.

We would like to invite you to participate in our first large-scale BI user survey to inform us about your main job responsibilities, technical background, tool usage, and work environment.

To access the survey, please click on the unique URL below.
http://www.oraclesurveys.com/se.ashx?s=705E3EFC3D7B563A

Our goal is to reach as many users as possible, so we would also like to ask you to help us spread the word by forwarding the survey link to other BI users in your company/institution. They can range from developers to business end users.

This survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete. It will remain open until TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011.

Should you have any questions or concerns about the survey, please contact John Hu at john.hu@oracle.com or 650-506-6500.

We look forward to your participation and assistance with spreading the word!

Regards,
The Oracle Business Intelligence User Experience (BIUX) Team

Oracle BI Mobile now available on iTunes App Store

2011-05-09T11:38:00.001+05:30

Over the weekend came the news I had been waiting for, and to admit, with a little bit of anxiety. The Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile app for 11.1.1.5.0 (see my posts on the 11.1.1.5.0 release) was approved and became available for download from the Apple iTunes App Store. It can be downloaded from http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oracle-business-intelligence/id434559909?mt=8&ls=1

As I have been saying (whining perhaps?) for a few days, I have a ton of stuff to complete this week on our mobile product, so please excuse the brevity of these posts.

You can view the doc on the mobile app from within the app itself, or from your browser (see blog post 11.1.1.5.0 Doc Chapter on Mobile)
The Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.5.0 release itself can be downloaded from OTN (see blog post 11.1.1.5.0 Available for Download)

11.1.1.5.0 Doc Chapter on Mobile

2011-05-07T10:31:00.000+05:30

Using Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile - to read up on the capabilities of Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile in v 11.1.1.5.0.
I must point out though that some of the screenshots of the app are a bit dated. We made some last minute changes to the user interface of the app, which happened after the doc had been frozen. Also, you will notice on at least one screen the version number of the app is listed as 11.1.1.4.0, which, you would realize, is not quite the correct version number.

Among the changes we made to the app, one of the more significant ones has been to provide easy access to Dashboards a user has access to. This is available by tapping the Catalog icon on the tab bar.

More later - once the app is available on the iTunes App Store.

Also see Oracle Business Intelligence Blog: 11.1.1.5.0 Release Announced and Oracle Business Intelligence Blog: 11.1.1.5.0 Available for Download

11.1.1.5.0 Available for Download

2011-05-07T00:29:00.000+05:30

I had blogged on the announcement of the 11.1.1.5.0 release of Oracle Business Intelligence
The software is now available for download from the Oracle Technology Network at the Oracle Business Intelligence (11.1.1.x) Downloads page.

The following platforms are available for download:

Microsoft Windows x86 (32-bit)
Microsoft Windows x86 (64-bit)
Linux x86 (32-bit)
Linux x86 (64-bit)
Sun Solaris SPARC (64-bit)

The Repository Creation Utility (11.1.1.5.0) software, required for installing Oracle BI, is also available for the Windows and Linux environments.

TheRelease Notes, Documentation Library, and Certification Information is also available for this release.

Happy downloading and using Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.5.0

And a happy weekend to all.

11.1.1.5.0 Release Announced

2011-05-03T22:22:00.002+05:30

The latest release of Oracle Business Intelligence, 11.1.1.5.0, was announced today. The press release can be read on Oracle.com at New Releases of Oracle® Business Intelligence Software Enable Enterprises to Improve Timely, Accurate, and Role-Based Insight, or on Yahoo! at http://finance.yahoo.com/news/New-Releases-of-OracleR-iw-2880460762.html?x=0&.v=1

I am neck deep in stuff around this release, so I do not have anything more to post yet, but the plan is to put up several posts on what's new in this release, especially around mobile and spatial.

From the press release, here are the salient features of this release:

Support for the iPad and iPhone. On-the-go access to the complete range of alert, ad hoc analysis, dashboard, reporting, scorecard, “what-if” analysis,etc... In addition, users now have the ability to initiate actions and workflows directly from their mobile devices. 11.1.1.5 content is optimized for use with the iPad and iPhone – without requiring design changes to existing reports and dashboards.
Extended support for additional data sources including Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, Oracle OLAP, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW).

The software should become available on OTN for download shortly, and then on edelivery.oracle.com after that. Once the bits become available I will post an update. You do not have to wait for me to post actually - the software when available will show up on the Oracle Software Downloads page. Actually, if you are the impatient kind, this is the deep link to the download page for the Oracle Business Intelligence 11.x releases - Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Downloads

You can also follow the @oracle_biee Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#!/oracle_biee

New Exadata v2 book

2011-04-14T22:09:00.001+05:30

Shyan Varan Nath tweeted on the availability of a new Exadata book: Achieving Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata.

From the Amazon.com page for the book, here is some background on the authors, four of them, all from Oracle:

Robert (Bob) Stackowiak is Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Oracle. He has coauthored several books on Oracle technologies. Stackowiak's papers regarding data warehousing and computer and software technology have appeared in publications such as The Data Warehousing Institute's Journal of Data Warehousing and Data Warehousing Trends and Applications.
Rick Greenwald is Director of Oracle Partner Enablement at Oracle where he has worked for more than 10 years. He is also the author or coauthor of several books on Oracle technologies.
Maqsood Alam, OCP, is Senior Manager, Product Development at Oracle. He is focused on evangelizing Oracle Exadata, performing competitive benchmarks, promoting best practices for migrations into Oracle Exadata from Oracle and non-Oracle databases, and providing support to customers undergoing large Oracle Exadata implementations.
Mans Bhuller, Senior Director, Enterprise Solutions, Oracle, has worked at the forefront of emerging technologies at Oracle Corporation for the last 13 years. He currently runs the Database, Grid, and Systems Management architecture practice within Oracle's Enterprise Solutions Group where he has been paving the way for the Sun Oracle database machine and other foundational technologies.

Table of contents

Part I: Features and Foundations

Chapter 1: Oracle and Tightly Integrated Hardware and Software Platforms
Chapter 2: Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition Features
Chapter 3: Exadata Software Features
Chapter 4: Oracle Exadata Database Machine Platform Hardware Components

Part II: Best Practices

Chapter 5: Managing the Exadata Database Machine
Chapter 6: High Availability and Backup Strategies
Chapter 7: Deploying Data Warehouses on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Chapter 8: Exadata and OLTP
Chapter 9: Consolidating Databases with the Oracle Exadta Database Machine
Chapter 10: Migrating to the Exadata Database Machine Appendix: Exadata Capacity and Performance Specifications

Kindle Excerpt:

Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites 2011

2011-03-29T09:14:00.001+05:30

Analyst research firm Gartner has published a new report titled " Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites", (Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00210145), dated March 8, 2011, authored by Neil Chandler and John E. Van Decker.

Oracle has been ranked the highest along the "Ability to Execute" dimension, and the second highest along the "Complete of Vision" dimension.

Some excerpts from the research note:

Oracle remains the best recognized brand in finance offices and continues to appear in the majority of CPM evaluations.
Oracle has a strong customer base, and the company is a strong vendor capable of competing on price, product features, performance and geographic presence.
Hyperion Data Relationship Management (PDF Data Sheet) continues to sell well...
Oracle released Hyperion Financial Close Management (PDF Data Sheet) and Hyperion Disclosure Management (PDF Data Sheet) in 2010, making it the first large CPM vendor to offer this functionality

For more head over to the Gartner link above, or to the EPM and BI site at Oracle.com

New Oracle University Course: BI 11g Sys Admin

2011-03-29T08:19:00.000+05:30

Oracle University has published a new online Oracle BI EE 11g course, "Oracle BI 11g R1: Introduction to System Administration - Online Course". It is in a self-study format, and is intended to allow users to learn how to manage Oracle BI 11g:

Fusion Middleware (FMW) Control to monitor manage, and configure Oracle BI system components
Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) Administration Console to monitor and manage Oracle BI JEE Java components
Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server (OPMN) Tool to manage Oracle BI system components
Oracle BI Administration Tool to perform administrative tasks.

The course topics are:

Oracle BI System Administration Overview
Managing Oracle Business Intelligence
Configuring the Oracle BI SystemStarting and Stopping Oracle BI
Scaling an Oracle BI Deployment
Deploying Oracle BI For High Availability
Managing Performance Tuning and Query Caching
Diagnosing and Resolving Issues in Oracle BI
Managing Usage Tracking
Oracle BI Security

Flash demo on Location Intelligence in Oracle BI EE 11g

2011-03-03T18:22:00.000+05:30

There is a short, self-running Flash demo on Location Intelligence using Map Views in Oracle BI 11g.
Watch it here.

Map Views allow you to overlay analytics data over geo-spatial map using a variety of formats, like color-fills, bar graphs, pie graphs, bubbles, variable markers, and even images.

As you drill from one level to the next, the formats carry over - which I think is very, very neat.

New BI Foundation Blog

2011-02-22T19:42:00.000+05:30

Headsup - there is a new blog, http://blogs.oracle.com/bifoundation/ by the BI Foundation product management team. The first post, by the redoubtable Bob Ertl, is a promising peek into the kind of useful and informative stuff to expect in the days to come - Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms 2011

2011-01-31T11:53:00.001+05:30

Gartner, a well-recognized information technology research and advisory company, published its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms (link to Oracle reprint, this is the permanent link) for 2011, Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00210036, authored by Rita L. Sallam, James Richardson, John Hagerty, and Bill Hostmann.

Oracle, unsurprisingly, continues to be positioned in the "Leaders Quadrant", for the fifth year running.

Here are some excerpts from the Gartner Research Note (emphasis mine):

Oracle customers indicate they deploy the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform to support among the most complex deployments in our survey. Their scope of deployments tends to be the widest across an enterprise — regionally/nationally and globally deployed versus in a single or multiple departments — while OBIEE supports, on average, among the largest numbers of users, the highest data volume, broadest product functionality use, and highest complexity of analytic workload.

Oracle's OBIEE platform is considered the BI standard in more of its customers' organizations (survey respondents) than any other vendor's platform (considered a standard in 85% of their organizations compared to the survey average of 56%).

Some links on Oracle BI:
Oracle.com/bi
Business Intelligence Foundation
Enterprise Performance Management
BI Publisher
Essbase

Oracle Business Intelligence: Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting

2011-01-24T11:54:00.001+05:30

Oracle Business Intelligence: The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting

I was approached in December (2010) by Packt Publishing and asked if I would be interested in reviewing this book. I agreed, and the publishers provided me with a PDF version of the title.
This is a quick primer to the world of Oracle’s Business Intelligence Standard Edition products like Discoverer, Reports, Spreadsheet Add-in, and to Oracle Warehouse Builder. It is clear that the author knows his subject area well, and uses a number of examples to illustrate such concepts as dimensions, data cubes, metadata construction, and working with Oracle Warehouse Builder to create target structures such as cubes and dimensions. For those familiar with these products however, there may not be much that is new. Those looking for information on the 11g version of these products will be disappointed as the focus is on the 10g version.

The first chapter, “Getting Business Information from Data”, provides the reader with a definition and description of the world of analytics, business intelligence, multi-dimensional data structures.

Chapter 2 introduces the user to the different components of Oracle Business Intelligence. The installation examples and screenshots use the 10g version. A simple installation scenario is described, where the user installs Discoverer without associating it to a metadata repository or identity management infrastructure which would give it access to public connections, portlets, and more.

Chapter 3 introduces us to analytical SQL functions, and there is a comprehensive example using the Oracle Database ROLLUP and CUBE functions.

Chapter 4 takes a closer look at the Discoverer Administrator, the admin tool used to create and manage Discoverer metadata, the EUL (End User Layer).

Chapter 5, “Warehousing for Analysis and Reporting”, is in my opinion by far the best chapter in the book, where the author dives into Oracle Warehouse Builder to give a very good and quick overview of how to create dimensions and cubes from data sources, and how to populate these cubes via staging tables. While the whole area of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is too large to be done justice in a single chapter, the author is able to do a commendable job of letting the reader take a glimpse into the powerful world of the product and the world of data warehousing itself.

The last three chapters, 6, 7, and 8, cover very commonly used and powerful Discoverer features like Drilling, Pivoting, Parameters, sorting, and conditional (or stoplight) formatting.

Some other, minor, quibbles with the book:. Diagrams are not labeled, making it difficult to refer to them except by the page numbers on which they appear.
. In the discussion of Oracle OLAP data in Ch 2, while analysts or data architects can certainly use Oracle Warehouse Builder, a much more suitable tool would be the Analytical Worksapce Manager (or AWM as it is commonly referred to.)
. There is no mention of Oracle BI Publisher and its integration with Discoverer. This was released in the second half of 2007, and allows users to use BI Publisher to create highly formatted report templates using Microsoft Word that use Discoverer worksheets as their data source. The advantage that this integration brings to the thousands of Discoverer customers is two-fold: they can create highly formatted reports from their underlying Discoverer worksheets, something that the Discoverer product does not allow users to do (basic formatting capabilities notwithstanding), and secondly, the ability to schedule and distribute such reports via email as attachments (PDF, RTF, HTML, etc...). This also has been a much-requested feature by Discoverer customers, and fulfilled a long-standing gap in the product.

In summary, there is much to like in the book. This book does do what the title says, viz., provide a condensed summary of Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition. While the book also covers in more generality such topics as dimensions, cubes, and data warehousing concepts, the treatment is at much too a high-level to be really useful. Two shortcomings prevent the from realizing its potential of becoming a truly awesome condensed guide to Oracle Business Intelligence:
. The organization of the chapters. The book seems to jump from one topic to another without giving much of a sense of cohesion, and it is not till the second half of the book when there is a logical flow to the content matter.
. The absence of a single dataset that would be used throughout the book as an example. That way a reader could follow the examples in a more coherent manner. Making a data set available for download to the book reader would have helped. The author could also have chosen to use an existing sample data set from the Oracle web site (ahem - yours truly had played a substantial part in the creation of the SH dataset).

The best book on Discoverer 10g, in my opinion, still remains Michael Armstrong-Smiths’s Discoverer 10g Handbook. It’s a pity Michael has not yet published an updated version of the book, since there is a lot that has changed in the 11g release with respect to how Discoverer is installed, managed via Oracle Weblogic and the new Enterprise Manager console. Then there is the integration with BI Publisher, the migration utility for migrating your EUL-based Discoverer metadata to the Oracle BI Server RPD-based metadata. There is also a workbook migration utility that is on the product roadmap, as is further integration with the Dashboards product in the Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Business Intelligence: The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting
Oracle Essbase 9 Implementation Guide
Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started
The Business Analyst's Guide to Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting 11

Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook (Kindle Edition)
Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook (Paperback)
Oracle Business Intelligence: The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting

Kindle for the Web - Discoverer 10g Handbook

Kindle for the Web - Hyperion Planning

Kindle for the Web - Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Replay of eseminar - Visualizations in OBIEE 11g

2010-10-25T15:01:00.000+05:30

An eseminar on visualizations in Oracle BI EE 11g that I did in September is now available on Oracle University (http://ilearning.oracle.com/) at eSeminarOracle BI EE 11g - Visualizations

Replay of spatial visualizations in OBIEE 11g

2010-10-25T14:57:00.000+05:30

As I posted I did a webcast on spatial visualizations in Oracle BI EE 11g (Spatial Data Visualizations in OBIEE 11g). This eseminar is now available online at eSeminarOracle BI EE 11g - Spatial Visualizations - this may require a login and may not be available free for everyone.

Spatial Data Visualizations in OBIEE 11g

2010-10-11T14:59:00.000+05:30

I did a webcast last week on spatial data visualizations in Oracle BI EE 11g. This entire session was focused on mapping in the suite, and while I tried to split the time evenly between the front end and the back end parts of mapping, I realize that talking about and explaining how the magic actually happens requires more than 20 minutes or so.
The plan was to do a very quick introduction to maps in 11g, and then dive straight into demonstrations. I have followed this path frequently in the last - start off at the top, show the capabilities of the product in the Dashboards interface, as end-users would see it. In most deployments, your dashboarding product is seen by more than 90% of the users. Then move to Answers, the report creation and analysis interface. Often also known as the "power user interface", this is where analysts will often go to to perform deep analysis using the tools at their disposal. Answers is also the product that is used to create the analyses - tables, pivots, graphs, maps, gauges, etc... - that are published to a Dashboard page.
The point of starting out with a Dashboards demo is to show how easy to use the interface in maps is for end-users, and the great number of options available to them, from sliders on color ramps, to drilling, to invoking Actions, to sending master events to listening views, to checking on or off different formats displayed on a map, and more.
After this little bit of magic is shown to the user, the focus then shifts to Answers. Here the point is a little different, and yet much the same too. To show how easy it is to create reports with maps. That maps are really just another view in the product suite. A point-and-click interface is what drives the creation of maps. That it is possible to create maps in as little as 15 seconds. Or less.

As we move further down the rabbit hole, we come to the little piece of magic that actually creates the maps. But before that, I explain that placing analytics data on a map is really no different than fetching a column of data from another table. Which is what you do when you write SQL statements that use foreign key joins. Maps are no different. You need to fetch the spatial attributes of a geographical column. The spatial attributes often reside in a table in a column of data type sdo_geometry, while the rest of the information is coming from your analytics warehouse. What makes it possible to have MapViewer display non-spatial information along with spatial information is the Non-Spatial-Data-Provider plug-in mechanism. Read MapViewer Concepts fro the Oracle® Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle MapViewer 11g Release 1 (11.1.1) Part Number E10145-04

Towards the end of the session, I had this neat little slide that I borrowed from one of David Lapp's excellent presentations, that I think captures very neatly the four main scenarios of mapping in an analytics environment.

Data Visualizations - Show Some Hide Some

2010-09-28T18:38:00.000+05:30

The Search Engine Land site had a post on Jun 29 2009 - Google: We’re Not Really That Big But If We Are, We Aren’t Bad - where charts were used; specifically, charts that Google has used to argue that while it may appear to be a big company, it is not that big when compared to some of its peers, or in relation to the size of the market itself.

Here is the data table used below (from the site):

And two pie-charts:

Let's start with the Google pie chart, which tries to highlight the diminutiveness of Google's market share.
Data visualization experts have lamented the use of pie charts in visualizing data. I will not belabor the point. Instead, I believe the same data could have been displayed more effectively using either of the two charts below

The first one is a simple vertical bar chart, while the second one is a stacked percentage vertical-bar chart. Since we are working with percentages, either chart is conveying the same information.

The data in question for Google is called out by the use of a different color, and the size of the data is made clear by the height of the 'Offline' bar. Even in comparison to the 'Other Offline' bar, the Google bar's size pales in comparison.
Adding a data label may seem redundant, but if the chart does not support hover tooltips, then adding the label, with the precise value of the series, helps.
OR

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-google-is-not-that-big-after-all-2009-7 mentions the post, and has an accompanying chart:

Here the attempt is to compare each company on two variables - revenue and employees. A dual-Y-axis bar as the one used above is not good, not good at all, for such a presentation of data. What exactly is the point of plotting revenue and employees as bars in this graph?A line-bar maybe, but even that is sub-optimal IMO.

If you have to do this type of a comparison, the scatter plot is most effective since it allows for a meaningful comparison across companies too. To make this interesting, you could also add a third variable, and plot the data as a bubble chart. You could also use a butterfly graph.

When displayed as a vertical bar, what is obvious is that Google has much lower revenue, and even fewer employees when compared to any of the companies it is being compared with. Fair enough. But what the chart does display, but not tell you very clearly, is something very interesting, that I explain with charts below.

Take revenue and employees, the two measures in the chart above. To perform a meaningful comparison, it is first necessary to normalize these values first. One way is by using ratios instead. i.e., the ratio of the company's revenue to the number of employees. Divide the revenue by the employees, plot **that** data instead, and this is what you get:

Innaresting, wouldn't you say?
Google's per-employee-revenue is more than one million dollars (say it Dr Evil style and it doesn't sound as sinister, maybe funnier), while IBM is less than a fourth as much at $254k per-employee, and even Microsoft is only $600k per-employee.

What this tells us, as long a we are comparing these companies, is that Google is able to eke out a lot more revenue from its employees than other companies. Unless its employees are super, super-freaks, it can mean, among other things, that Google has achieved economies of scale far beyond its peers, like Microsoft, IBM, AT &T, and Verizon. In some ways it can also be an apples to oranges comparison, because the businesses that Google and ATT and Verizon and IBM are not exactly comparable. But, this is the set of companies that accompanies the post, and is also the set of companies that Google chose. So there.

If you were to do a similar comparison with Microsoft, taking only its Windows and Office divisions, that have a near-monopoly market share in their respective segments, I am sure you would come up with near-Google numbers, or maybe even better. Conjecture, but a fascinating one, IMO.

If you accept Google's proposition that the other companies in the comparison are in similar businesses as Google, or that they are competitors to Google, then you also have to accept the proposition that revenue-per-employee figures also should be similar. If they are not, it could be because the companies are diverisified into areas where such economies of scale do not apply; which is a fair argument to make, or that these companies are just not able to extract as much money as Google is.

Let's use another ratio. This time, I use market cap-to-number-of-employees as the ratio.

Why use this ratio? What does this tell us, if anything? Well, for one, market caps are fairly fickle numbers, and can be misleading. But since the data is from the Google table, let's use it anyway. What it may tell us is how valuable each employee is to Google's shareholders.

Simplistically speaking, each Google employee adds $5 million to the company's market capitalization.
That is more than twice Microsoft's.
That is more than sixteen times IBM's.

Again, assuming Google's employees are not all hyper-efficient Einsteins, and some or even many would argue that is indeed the case, it means at the very least that Google's hold on the business and industry it operates in is a lot more efficient and powerful than its competitors. Which could result from, among other things, near-monopoly pricing power.

Let us use a third set of metrics, and this time, let's also plot a bubble chart, that can display three measures reasonably well.

What is plotted on the x-axis is market cap as a multiple of revenue. i.e. for Microsoft, the bubble in blue, this would be 184 billion (its market cap) divided by 60 billion (its revenues), to yield a figure of 3.07. And similarly for the others.
What is plotted on the y-axis is market cap as a multiple of operating profits.
The size of the bubble is the company's revenues.

What does this chart tell us?
Firstly, that Google plots as an outlier. Good outlier or bad outlier? Well, that depends on whether you are Google or its competitor.
It also tells us that Google's price-earnings ratio is way out of whack with its competitors. It could also mean that Google is incredibly over-priced, or that it has such a strangle-hold on its business that giant gains in market share, and consequently revenues and margins, are almost guaranteed over the coming years, which is why the market has driven up its market cap to such heights.

From Google's perspective, unless it intends using the currency of its market cap to make big-ticket acquisitions, such a high market cap is not really that good. It only attracts market envy and unwanted regulatory attention.

Anyway, another example of how data can be used to show some and hide some.