Comments on: Other notes on Oracle data warehousing

By: Initial reactions to IBM acquiring SPSS | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:34:56 +0000

[...] notable point is that SPSS is more SQL-oriented than SAS. Thus, SPSS has gotten performance benefits from Oracle’s in-database data mining technology that SAS apparently [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:25:05 +0000

I’m hoping MDX becomes a standard, I applaud
Oracle’s 11G material cube approach but OLAP
4GL is not as elegant as MDX. MS analysis
services and reporting services can generate
full MDX queries you can tweak instead of
writing entire statements from scratch. Looking
for the next version of Essbase to do this.
I believe the power of OLAP is drag n’ drop to
minimize coding along with all the data’s permutations pre-indexed ( cube ). I wonder are
there any OLAP appliances out there that are
specifically designed for just OLAP cubes….

By: sreeenivas

sreeenivas — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 10:32:06 +0000

why we have to go to data ware housing

By: okumu wilfred mayira

okumu wilfred mayira — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:44:34 +0000

Some of the critical success factors which must considered and kept in the dataware house like the mission of the business. The duration of the business are missing.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:46:19 +0000

Chris,

It sounds as if you buy into both halves of Ted Codd’s original “OLAP” argument on behalf of Essbase:

1. Performance
2. Easier calculations

I share Richard’s question — which aspects of the metadata do you regard as particularly important?

Thanks,

CAM

By: Richard Gowan

Richard Gowan — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:06:34 +0000

Chris…can you clarify re this missing metadata?

It seems to me that in a traditional ROLAP situation, there is still metadata (rich or otherwise). This information is entered into the BI tool – which keeps it in a ‘stash’ somewhere.

It’s this ‘metadata stash’ that then allows the BI tool to translate business data requests into SQL.

By: Chris Webb

Chris Webb — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:51:59 +0000

I think you’re missing at least half the point of OLAP here, and that’s the half that explains why Oracle is apparently increasing its commitment to Essbase.

It’s certainly true that one of the main drivers for adoption of ‘disk-based OLAP’ is to improve query performance, and you’re right that improving the performance of relational data warehouses will stop many people looking at OLAP in the first place. But OLAP is much more than raw performance for simple queries, it’s a rich metadata layer over your data – and this rich metadata layer in turn enables you to express the kind of complex multidimensional calculations that are simply not feasible in SQL, and to be able to do these calculations quickly. This is what MDX calculations in Analysis Services allow you to do, and what Essbase calc scripts (among other features) do too. These types of calculations are especially important in financial applications, which are of course Essbase’s traditional sweet spot, and building a high-performance multidimensional calculation engine that can handle everything a finance department can think up is by no means a trivial task. So if Oracle is indeed increasing its commitment to Essbase, it’s probably in recognition of this fact.