Oracle BIWA User Community

As we get close to the event, the weather is likely to stay mostly dry, at least compared to the heavy rains from the prior week. The low will be 45F, so if you are from a warmer place, please be prepared with some jacket. We are requesting help from all speakers and attendees of the BIWA Summit, to compete the speaker survey forms, this will help us bring you the speakers that you liked the most in the future years as well. The speakers will receive an envelop with the speaker evaluation forms, all attendees are requested to fill these out and hand over before they leave the room. Please bring along your pens, hopefully the exhibiting sponsors will have pens as giveaways if you did not bring your own... We have posted the public transit information to the Oracle campus to help keep the event green. However, if you prefer to rent a car, the goos news is there are places selling gas for below $2 in this area. If you still are looking for hotels, Sofitel is very close with a shuttle to ...

It's now only a week! All the session abstracts and details at posted at this site: http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/f?p=219:77:139866668583012::NO So if you are heading there, please make your personal schedule as the event will be packed with 4 keynotes and sessions in 6 || tracks along with the hands-on-lab. This year IBM is the Platinum vendor who will showcase their Optimised Warehouse Initiative i.e. how to run Oracle DW's very fast on the IBM hardware. While there will be a fair amount of focus on the Oracle HP Database Platform, each one has its own niche. If you are a 1 TB to say 25 TB customer and have standardised on a non-HP hardware platform, then you will look at the Optimised Warehouse Initiative (OWI) space. You will find all major H/W vendors such as Sun, IBM, HP etc shipping you a reference or tested configuration with Oracle instance ready for use in DW. Typically, if you have standardised on HP hardware or are pushing over 25 TB, then Oracle HP Databas...

Now we stand 4 weeks from the Summit, 4 keynotes, 50+ sessions, ~ 10 hands on Labs. Attend a Webcast on Wed Nov 5, 2008 to learn why you should attend the BIWA Summit. See details at http://OracleBIWA.org Learn about Oracle BI, Data Warehousing. Learn about Optimized Data Warehouse, Learn about Exadata (Oracle HP Database Platform) Still time to grap good flight deals, or the hotel near the Oracle Head Quarters. Spend 2 days at the conference, speand some time visiting San Francisco Downtown or the nearby beaches.

So did Larry miss the boat again? Gates introduced the X-box years ago and its a house hold name. So what's fascinating with this new 'X' box? Joking aside, let's look deep into the Oracle/HP Database Platform based on the Exadata. Larry compared it to Teradata and Netezza in his keynote. No doubt DW appliances have been out for a while and were giving Oracle run for money in the very large DW environments. Oracle's history has been as a key database player for transactional/OLTP systems. While the database features like partitioning, bit-mapped indexes, support for upto 32K block size etc have slowly tried to transform the DB for DW market, till now Oracle was never really looked upon as a DW player in the same league as Teradata or Netezza... and the key note is a proof of that. Interestingly, what about HP. "Operational business intelligence drives business outcomes HP Neoview has industry unique, patented capabilities to make it the premier enterprise data...

I googled Exadata last night after Larry's keynote and it returned 934 hits, this morning it was in 3000's, right now its 3440 and sure anything that Larry Ellison has said or done in past, becomes an instant hype... So what is that makes Oracle Exadata storage or the Oracle HP Database Platform unique? It is the Smart Scan technology that reduces the amount of data to be sent from the storage system to the database server. For general description of the new technology, I suggest reading the White Paper: Oracle Database 11g for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence The new Storage Server returns a query result set of the SQL, rather than entire tables. This reduces the network bottlenecks and frees up database server resources. When analyzing data stored in their data warehouses, Oracle claims, that the performance improvement can be 10X or more. Whaty if you are still not satisfied? Well Oracle's advanced compression, can typically reduce the data volumnes on the ...

Convergence of hardware and datab ase soft Larry Ellison announed the database machine today in his keynote, a machine build on radicle new ideas. He used the sail boat analogy on the out of box thinking needed to overcome the bandwidth limitation between the storage system and the database. The large DW's are tripling in size every two years and are plagued with the data bandwidth problem. There is a disk to Database choking. Storage disks can easily store 100TB but movement of data is the biggest. Most hard configurations slow down at even lesser values 1-10 TB range. The largest storage systems show the exponential increase in scan time at 10TB. This problem can be solved in two way, as a data problem, reduce the data - compression or indexing the data or partition pruning etc. The other way it to enhance the amount of data travelling over the data pipes. Make the pipes faster and increase their number. This lead to the announcement of Oracle's first hardware product called...

Dan Vlamis started the day...about 100 attendees, well received talk, was in parallel with Mark Rittman's talk. Mark had arrived at 4 AM and said he was jet lagged... Next session was Ian (his story is he lost his wallet on the way to San Francisco), he spoke on Master Data Management. This was in parallel Matt Vranikar's talk. After lunch, was my talk on Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator, Carl Daniels from the Oracle Development, ran the demo during my talk. They will also be on the demopod L23 in Moscone west. Richard Solari and Teresa Wong's tag team talk was very powerful and very well received. It ran amost full 90 mins. The final event of the day was the BI Panel, moderated by Joe Thomas, participants, Charlie Berger, Dan Vlamis, Jon Mead, Matt Vranikar, myseld and Rich Solari. The Q&A was quite interactive at the end, followed by some post Q&A discussions, one on one...