VSS Newsletter July 2007

In this newsletter we inform you about recent and upcoming events in Vlamis Software and the Oracle business intelligence and data warehousing communities. We hope you find this information helpful.

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Vlamis Software Solutions is a consulting company specializing in Oracle-related business intelligence and data warehouse solutions. Learn more about us at our web site at www.vlamis.com. Contact us at sales@vlamis.com or (816)781-2880.

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National Petroleum Council uses OLAP

One of Vlamis Software's clients, the National Petroleum Council was recently in the news. Vlamis Software developed the data warehouse used by NPC to analyze global energy demand and supply through 2030. Simply Google National Petroleum Council or U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman, who commissioned the study, and you'll see lots of references, including one in the New York Times. You can find much more about this on our blog www.vlamis.com/blog or the NPC web site. Page 352 of the full report, includes the following:

The data warehouse was designed to be the main analytical tool for the Task Groups, accepting all data collected from the survey questionnaire and other data sources. As the survey data were multi-dimensional, Oracle OLAP database technology was used and the collection was organized using 7 dimensions:

Time (year)
Geography (country or geographic region)
Energy type (e.g., Oil, Gas, Coal, Nuclear, Renewable)
Energy sector (e.g., Commercial, Residential)
Case type (e.g., Business as usual, Alternative energy policy)
Units (applicable unit of measure)
Source (e.g., Public, Proprietary)

We used a mix of relational technology and Oracle OLAP analytic workspaces to perform the aggregations and averages necessary for the analysis. We developed many of the reports and graphs used in the analysis using Discoverer Plus OLAP and data was viewable by NPC analysts using Oracle Portal. This was a very interesting project to work on with many interesting technical challenges, including non-additive data, skip-level hierarchies, non-standard aggregation rules, and more. We hope that this data becomes publicly available some day. Contact us if you want to know more.

Oracle Launches Oracle 11g

Oracle launched Oracle 11g on July 11 in New York City. If you missed the show, there's all sorts of information on Oracle's web site. Rather than me try to summarize the new features, simply read Oracle's white paper.

We were very pleased that Oracle OLAP materialized views were mentioned prominently in Chuck Rozwat's address. This is covered from time index 33:28 through 36:40 in the replay of his presentation.

We're on the 11g beta program, so we've had some hands-on experience with 11g now and we're very excited about what this brings! We can load your data in 11g (beta) today! Oracle says Linux 11g will ship in August, 2007, so we can be ready to go as soon as it's shipping if we start today. You don't have to move your entire operations to 11g to take advantage of this. We also covered this previously in our blog on July 12 and we had already mentioned in our May 2007 Newsletter our presentation showing screenshots of 11g and the features we are most interested in.

Oracle BI SE:One Available

Oracle has released Oracle BI SE:One. This is a subset of Oracle BI EE, with the addition of a copy of Oracle Database Standard Edition. Oracle is gearing this to the small and medium sized business. There is a limit of 50 users and is sold only on a named-user basis. This can be very attractive; it contains the same core technology as Oracle BI EE, enabling you to add additional features with no re-tooling if your needs become more complex in the future. This also contains Oracle BI Publisher, a great way to create BI Reports.

Oracle BI EE Plus Announced

Oracle has also announced Oracle BI EE Plus. This adds the Hyperion reporting products to Oracle BI EE. See http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/enterprise-edition.html for more information.

Vlamis to Present at BIWA Summit 2007

Our presentation "Implementing Oracle BI EE on Top of Oracle OLAP Cubes" has been selected to be presented at the BIWA Summit, October 2-3 in Reston, Virginia sponsored by the BIWA SIG of the IOUG. See the Oracle BIWA SIG website for more information.

BIC2G Images Sent

We recently mailed several Business Intelligence Challenge To Go images to people that have requested them. This allows you to run Oracle's Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition in a standalone VMWare image. Our very own Oracle BI EE on Oracle OLAP demonstration is included on the image. See www.vlamis.com/demo for more information on our demonstration and www.bic2g.com for more information on the image itself. Please send us an email if you would like your very own image. This is discussed more in depth in our June newsletter article "Demo of OBI EE on Oracle OLAP Available For You". This can be a great platform for building proofs of concept. Let us know if you would like to work with us on this.

Prior Newsletter Articles

We feature breaking news in the "Headlines" section of our home page at www.vlamis.com. More news items can be found on our Business Intelligence and Datawarehousing Blog at http://www.vlamis.com/blog. An archive of our newsletters going back through 2002 can be found at http://www.vlamis.com/newsletters.

Our June 2007 newsletter featured the following articles:

Our May 2007 newsletter featured the following articles:

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