OK we all know there is no such thing as success on demand, but given the right set of tools and the right set of rules it should be a darn sight easier. This article by DMReview gives you some real show stoppers to avoid. If you can adopt these rules or at least adapt them to suite your business you'll certainly be on the right road.
September 2005 Archives
This article gives a rather neat insight into what you should be looking for within your Data Warehouse in order to meet the Basle II requirments. If you're not sure if you're on track take closer look.
Oracle supplies an Excel plug-in which allows a seamless access from within Excel to any defined cube within an Oracle 10g database. The features are really quite superb. Using this front-end as apposed to using the Discoverer allows a very easy integration of OLAP technology in companies which perhaps have not yet be ready to offer such facilities to their discussion support and management levels. If you haven't had a chance to take a closer look at OracleBI, I can only suggest you find some.
On a slightly negative note, I have to add that the plug-in currently has a few problems. For one thing it's not possible to cut-and-paste between sheets. All you get are the current contents without any link to the database. As long as you only need the currently visible contents of the cube that’s fine.
Another problem is opening a second or third Excel session. Only the first Excel session gets the OracleBI plug-in menu. It's therefore not possible to do any kind of parallel analysis. You have to stop work (save and exit or close) one cube analysis before you can open a new one. This can be difficult in workflow situations, where you may need to intermittently stop work on a long and time consuming analysis to do some quick analysis on other topics if they are needed more urgently.
If you want to use the Oracle BI Suite or your own components without putting the Oracle Application Server (AS) into operation - well you can! Simply install the BI-Subset of the AS (called OC4J) which can run on you Database Server that will provide the middle tier for Oracle BI components. The OC4J is supplied within the Business Intelligence package of version 10g R2. Take a look at it this. It's currently available for Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris.
This is a list of the contents:
If you are looking for the release 2 of the Oracle AWM (Analitical Workspace Manager), you'll have to extract it from the Oracle Database Package of version 10g release 2. This link should help you. Currently available are the Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris versions, AIX5L and HP-UX PA-RISC.
