Oracle BIWA User Community

One of the privileges of being in the BIDW field for long enough, is to do book reviews. Currently, I am looking at the book by Packt Publishing, titled " Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Getting Started ." The author is Bob Griesemer. This book has 9 interesting chapters, however I am jumping to Ch5 for now as it is the Extract, Transform and Load Basics. Someone with a weaker ETL background could reach this first. The interesting section of this chapter is "To Stage or not to Stage." The author talks about key considerations in ETL, such as: > For faster movement of data, amount of source data, degree of manipulation of source data and nature of source is important; AND > Handling failures due to connectivity and handling changes in the source data. The author has presented options for extracting data directly into staging without worrying about computations in the source system or extract along with some manipulation from the source. He brings up a good poin...

Cloud Computing is drawing attention from almost all the CIO's. Is it another fad or is the Cloud "real." Since the field is evolving, let us look at some of the details here. In general Cloud Computing allows users and organizations to use computing power on demand just like water or electricity from the grid. Users can request computing power, storage, enterprise applications or even databases from such Cloud services providers. These Cloud Services providers will act as data centers, except they are no longer privately owned by each company. I simpler analogy would be single family home v/s a condominium with multiple tenants who share the common facilities like the hallway, elevator, pool and the club house. The users of Cloud pay only for the computing or storage they use. Thus, companies no longer need to create their own data centers thus do not need to buy servers and massive storage arrays. Cloud Computing is not really something obscure, a lot of us are actuall...

The keynote sessions have started and CEO of Infosys S (Kris) Golapakrishnan is now speaking on innovation and how he create a culture of innovation in his company. Each department has to come up with at least 2 new innovations for productivity boost every year. Every building looks different in Infosys, some even like flying saucer. Thus the culture of innovation has to be ubiquitous. Kris is explaining the need for simplifying Organizational complexity. They operate in 27 cities but airline booking is done from one city (Bangalore). Anyone can email Kris (Ask Kris) directly, he gets about 600-800 emails a week and directly responds or are posted in company blog. Kris saus we often use 2000 year old learning techniques..."Learning through collaboration and personalization delivered at their own pace" is most effective" Infosys uses web based training delivery internally to achieve these. ICICI bank of India is power by Infosys solution and is an exaple of branchless ban...

Highlights include key note by Michael Dell Release of Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.1 with support for databases like DW DB2 and Teradata. My session was at 5:30PM

The OTN night started at 7PM, in the Tent, good food as usual and the drinks! Entertainment in the far side of the tent, Middle Eastern dancers... On the near side (towards 3rd st) was the Trivia sponsored by Blackberry. I was drafted to be on the stage with 5 other contestants to fight it out for a Blackberry, in front of the crowd! It was a tie with 300 points each, the other contestant from was from Canada. The questions were in three different categories - about Oracle , about RIM/Blackberry and about San Francisco. So what was my winning strategy? Let me explain it in Exadata terms. The storage index is a new concept which is not a pointer to the row or block rather a negative index, i.e. where not to look for data. Likewise, I won with a similar strategy today, the last question was about San Francisco and neither on knew the answer, the other contestant answered and lost the point on the tie breaker, I won... so my "negative" strategy of not answering won me the Bla...

I spent a good part of the day in the Exhibit Hall (Moscone West and Moscone South). Some of the things that caught my attention were: 1) Pretty Large Presence of Salesforce.com ( I think it is their first time at OOW) 2) Focus on Oracle on the Cloud, Amazon is also present 3) A real Sumo wrestler in the booth on Application Security - You don't know who you are up against? Steve Miranda is talking now about Oracle Applications including Application unlimited. The customer Smucker is also expected. Janet Foutty of Deloitte will be on the stage. Deloitte is the sponsor of this session. "Business Led and Technology Enabled" is the mantra. Tie back every penny to shareholder value. Janet is talking about Value maps that Deloitte uses to map business problems to Oracle products. Janet has a financial services background. Clients are focussed on cost cutting, efficiency and re-tolling their IT. What's next, in the mind of clients - Improved Agility... is one of them. Nex...

According to Ann 40% of Oracle deployments are on HP!!! Ann will tell how HP and Oracle work together to unleash the business potential. Now that EDS is part of HP, it is a big services company as well. Businesses spend 70% of IT budgets on routine operations and 30% on innovation. HP's goal is to help businesses reverse this tread. HP has 3400 Oracle related professionals. I wonder if that includes that came with EDS. HP's goal is to help manage the Information explosion. Now Ann is talking about BI solutions? HP is number 1 on number of server for BI deployments, a lot of these are on Oracle software stack. She mentioned about Neoview - the HP DW appliance.