Recently in Oracle Category

I made it to the Oracle Collaborate show this week in Orlando.  I presented a case study presentation on a MDM initiative.  I spent several hours in the expo hall talking with people in some interesting concepts.  A couple of themes stood out as being somewhat new to being on an expo hall floor.

1.       Lifecycle data support

There continues to be evidence that new approaches are necessary to keep data alive and do it at a lower cost than keeping "all data online everywhere".

Sure, we've got major compression and columnar orientation to compress complete rows of data everywhere it resides.  However, we usually don't usually want to carry production data loads in the development and test environments, yet we need data that approximates production data there.  One feature of IBM Infosphere Optim, among others, is the ability to get a representative sampling of production data into those environments according to the direction you set. 

Also, there were the archival features of TierData, which smartly determines which production data, even columns, you can safely archive to improve the overall performance of the application.

2.       Part Time Help

The commoditization of certain functions that were always just there in the shop and taken for granted continues.  For better or worse, services like SmartHelp from Circular Edge and DBA on Demand from SmartDog give their clients flexible work arrangements for a variety of technical enterprise functions. 

Join me next Thursday as I talk about the Hottest Issues in Oracle Business Intelligence.

Abstract:

Oracle Corporation (Oracle) is undoubtedly one of the market leaders in business intelligence technology.  With tools and products for just about every business function and problem, Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) offers something for your entire enterprise.

But with so many options available, what's a customer to do?  How does one make sense of Oracle Business Intelligence?

Leveraging that experience, William has put together a highly informative webinar for this spring on The Hottest Issues in OBI!

This complimentary, 60-minute webinar is scheduled for Thursday, May 14, 2009 from 1pm to 2pm Central.  During the session, William will a range of OBI-related topics.  Those include:

• Oracle's BI and EPM product evolution
• Oracle BI applications:  What do you really get?
• OBIEE+, OBI applications and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM):
  What are the differences and which is right for your business?

I'll be speaking at Oracle Open World with Haidong Song, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Master Data Management, Oracle Corp and Gino Fortunato, Solution Architect, Oracle Consulting, on November 13 in San Francisco on the topic “Data Governance, Data Stewardship and Data Quality” and will attempt to clear up the interfaces and responsibilities between these concepts. 10:45 am at Marriott Nob Hill AB.

It's official. Oracle has bought Hyperion for $3.3 billion. The main assets include Hyperion's enterprise planning system, OLAP engine and financial consolidataion product, the latter of which is widely considered best of its kind. Perhaps most important in this for enterprise data warehouse environments, where Oracle and Business Objects mostly are, is that it would appear now that Oracle is not buying Business Objects.

The Hyperion OLAP product could replace the Oracle OLAP component now in the Oracle DW stack. Oracle OLAP has been only modestly embraced by Oracle DW customers. On the other hand, the Hyperion tool has become more of a "data mart" in its environments. I wonder if Oracle will get behind an EDW strategy with Hyperion or continue the "mart excellence" approach that Hyperion has got the most traction with.

I can still see IBM buying Cognos (or Microstrategy). I also know excellent, experienced information management talent is being amassed at Hewlett Packard and would not be surprised to see an acquisition there as part of an impending market push to join IBM, SAP and Oracle in the BI race.

This acquisition, along with any others that happen between now and then (and that will happen in the future) will doubtlessly be points of conversation at the Pacific Northwest BI Summit.

Technorati tags: Business Objects, SAP, Hewlett Packard, Hyperion, Oracle,
data warehouse

Open source databases are gaining recognition, whether it be stand-alone DBMS such as MySQL or embedded in data warehouse appliances. Oracle bought the open-source database company Sleepycat this month. Sleepycat open-source database is the Berkeley DB. Oracle has spent $19B acquiring companies in just the past 18 months.

Complimenting those well-publicized acquisitions that already have market share like Peoplesoft, Oracle is also acquiring technology that has yet to make much market splash, but has potential. In the database area, Oracle also purchased InnoDB in October. InnoDB is the transactional database technology embedded in MySQL.

IDC projects the embedded database market, where Sleepycat plays, to grow to $3.2B in 2009.