Back to Work Everybody

Club Tropicana. Closed, due to poorly thought out business strategy!

OOW IS Over
The Summer is Over (for up here in North Earth at least)
The Children has been sent of to University (Seems quiet around here!)
No more holidays this year (New York was a blast)

So let’s get back to Work.
And there’s plenty of work to do.

The Oracle BI marketplace is going through one of its ‘interesting’ phases. There are plenty of OBIEE Jobs on offer, and a good proportion of them are permanent (Which is nice). New technology is really helping us deliver great systems, I am particularly liking 12c In Memory Database, OBIEE 12c and Exalytics Machines right now. OBIEE 12c is a far better release than 11g, which should trigger the upgrade programs. The only problem are the vast number of Cloud offerings, which means clients now have to figure out what/how/why they use cloud and therefore do they need to upgrade, or just buy a new BI Cloud Solution?

There are soo many Oracle BI offerings now that we will need massive brains just to understand what they are all for. A quick visit to oracle.com will reveal a huge list of products, all of which we need to trial, test, and decide if we need them in out BI systems. (Do I need R?)

The ETL marketplace is busy trying to figure out what all these new Buzz words are (e.g. Kakfa), and What the hell Big Data is anyway? Do they need it to run their business?

And then there is Apex, the current darling of the developers world. I have been using this tool since 2007 and love the new Apex 5 – So much so I am doing a conference talk later this year on Apex and OBIEE.

All of which means, keep on Learning… and keep reading those blogs, join in on Twitter, Get into Community.Oracle.com, join the OBIEE Enterprise Group on Google, and buy our book!

New blog of the Month comes from Greg Artinoff – Check out http://www.fusience.com/blog.

BTW

This week I was updating our ODI system and wanted to do a simple update on a table, updating one column based upon another column value and another table. The question i posed on Twitter was how to do this in a mapping. Doing it a SQL Statement is easy;

UPDATE mytable t SET t.is_current= 'Y' WHERE t.a_column in (SELCT a_column from my_other_table where is_live = 'y');

So, the question is, can you create a simple mapping that does this? The only way I could think of was to have mytable and my_other_table as sources, joining on a_column and having a filter on my_other_table.a_column = 'Y', then add an expression to create a column with ‘Y’ in. Use the key on mytable.
This seems like over kill, but would it run quicker? Your thoughts would be welcome – replies on Twitter.

Blogs of the week

OBIEE 12C MULTIPLE INSTANCES

Paul Cannon blogs about a question he’s been asked a number of times recently: Can OBIEE 12c have multiple instances running from a single installation (aka multi-tenancy)

2. SQLDev at Oracle Open World 2016

Jeff Smith lets you know what you can expect from his team at the world’s largest Oracle event – Oracle Open World.

3. Real World SQL and PL/SQL: Advice from the Experts

Chet Justice writes, “Brendan Tierney and Heli Helskyaho approached me in March 2015 about being an author on this book, along with Arup Nanda and Alex Nuijten. Soon after, we picked up Martin Widlake. To say that I was honored to be asked would be a gross understatement. Rather quickly though, I realized that I did not have the mental energy to devote to the project and didn’t want to put the other authors at risk. Still wanting to be part of the book, I suggested that I be the Technical Editor and they graciously accepted my new role.”

Read on for more details.

4. Smart View and Essbase Runtime Substitution Variables

John Goodwin blogs, “Back in August 2015 when Smart View 11.1.2.5.500 was released the readme had reference to new functionality for runtime substitution variables, the readme contained the following information:

“In Smart View, you can now execute Oracle Essbase calculations that, when launched, prompt you to enter variable information, called runtime prompts. Calculation scripts and runtime prompts are created by your Essbase administrator for your specific system.

Essbase administrators define calculation scripts so that Smart View users can work with runtime prompts. For information on setting up your calculation scripts with runtime prompts, see the Oracle Essbase Database Administrator’s Guide, “Using Calculation Scripts with Runtime Substitution Variables in Smart View.”

5. Groovy, Web Services and OBIEE 12c

Stewart Bryson says, “If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of the Groovy language. It’s unfettered support for closures has made it a popular choice for writing domain-specific language (DSL) projects such as Gradle and Jenkins, and the healthy dose of syntactic sugar spooned in at runtime means that developers spend less time boiler-plating and more time implementing.”

6. Back to the Future: Time Traveling with Snowflake

Phil Goerdt writes, “In my last post, I discussed Snowflake’s unique cloud offering, and how to get it connected to OBIEE. In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of what Snowflake’s Time Travel feature is, how to use it from a query perspective, and how to integrate this feature into OBIEE.

7. SAVING YOU 15 MINUTES: OOW16 SCHEDULE BOOKED!

Philip Brown says, “Being keen to make the most out of the opportunity of attending OOW16 I have already booked out my schedule. I’ve allowed a little time for the demo grounds but here are my picks, all 29 of them.”

Read the full blog to find out what he picked.

8. Loading Oracle Service Cloud (RightNow) Data into BICS with Data Sync

Richard Williams goes through:

Downloading Latest Version of Data Sync Tool
Data Load Methods
Setting up the Oracle Service Cloud Connection in Data Sync
Data Loading

9. Oracle Database Cloud (DBaaS) Performance Consistency – Part 3

Randolf Geist writes:

This is the third part of this installment, comparing the performance consistency of the DBaaS cloud offering with a dedicated physical host. This time instead of burning CPU using logical I/O only (see part 2) the test harness executes a SQL statement that has to perform physical I/O mostly, and to be more precise this round is a read-only test, so doesn’t include any modification to data (except the logging and any other background system generated write activity, like maintaining ASH /AWR data etc.).

10. Video: Part 4 – Implementing Drag & Drop functionality