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Breakthrough Analysis, by Seth Grimes
Seth Grimes is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He consults on data management and analysis systems. See More by Seth Grimes Can Oracle 11g OLAP Query Acceleration Alter BI?
Yes, Oracle 11g is a blockbuster release, sure to maintain the company's dominant market position. Yet despite nearly 500 technology features new in 11g, InformationWeek Editor at Large Charles Babcock leads his recounting with a regression-testing feature and hot-standby systems. Those options are great for you CIOs out there but they don't send shivers down the spines of analytics types like me. What does? I'd love to see new OLAP features that will transform the BI market, just what Oracle says 11g offers. Let's take a closer look. IE editor and fellow blogger Doug Henschen reports on 11g's new OLAP-cube based management of materialized views, #3 feature on Babcock's new and noteworthy list. Oracle Database Senior VP Andy Mendelsohn, quoted by Doug, touts use of "OLAP cubes as a transparent performance accelerator" for access to materialized views. This feature is important because, according to Mendelsohn, 60 percent of Oracle's data warehousing customers use materialized views. Users "won't even know they're using OLAP." My take? Oracle is admitting that interactive, slice-and-dice, pivot analyses have been too expensive -- too slow and difficult -- in the majority of Oracle data warehouses. The company is righting the situation with an accelerator for their previously delivered kludge, for DW reliance on materialized views, which by the way strikes me as functionally equivalent to the massive precomputation of aggregates that a number of non-RDBMS OLAP engines used to be notorious for. Babcock quotes Charles Rozwat, Oracle executive VP for server technologies: "Oracle's new OLAP features take business intelligence 'from a specialized niche into a much broader market.'" So we can add Oracle to the long list of companies promising BI for the masses. All it took was a query accelerator! It appears that 11g's OLAP-cube based management of materialized views is only enabling technology, that it does not deliver new end-user analytics. The accelerator sounds like good stuff -- and so do 11g's binary XML handling, encryption and compression. These new features are nutritious fare for the reliability and performance hungry database administrator and CIO. But sorry, a query accelerator will not transform BI. Notes Seth Grimes is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation.  E-MAIL | SLASHDOT | DIGG This is a public forum. CMP Technology and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not control what is posted herein. CMP Technology makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by its staff members or readers. Community standards in this comment area do not permit hate language, excessive profanity, or other patently offensive language. Please be aware that all information posted to this comment area becomes the property of CMP Media LLC and may be edited and republished in print or electronic format as outlined in CMP Technology's Terms of Service. Important Note: This comment area is NOT intended for commercial messages or solicitations of business.
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