I'm officially on the trail of OBIEE and figuring out its strengths and weaknesses. This is going to be fun. I'm meeting with a bunch of Oracle guys in the upcoming weeks and, who knows, I might even bump elephants. (That's a term from the Warren Buffett biography I'm reading from some meeting of the big dogs in Sun Valley).
One of the elephants is clearly Mark Rittman. The more I get close to finding out what OBIEE is and how it works, the more his name appears. So today I just ingested this piece of his over on the Oracle network. Basically he shows, for OBIEE folks, how to build an Essbase cube. It's a very good introduction to how to think of Essbase if you come strictly from the relational world, or if you're new to BI.
It's kind of astonishing to me how small the overlapping sets are of relational experts and multidimensional experts. Funny, I remember thinking to myself, in my 8th year of the profession how I'd like to start a company called 3DB with relational, multidimensional and object oriented database guys. Come to think of it, I started way back with hierarchical databases, so it shows you how old I am. But the idea of 3DB was that we could conceive of any model of reality and stick it into the most efficient place. Now these webby mash-up guys are saying even database technology is passe. Well, we'll see about that. In the meantime, there is still some great advantage to be had if one truly understands best practices in relational and multidimensional. The OBIEE stuff is all about what it looks like on the front end.
Speaking of which, I hope I get to use my iTouch client of Oracle Indicators with all this. I'll be a walking advert, just like I was for the Palm and AvantGo a decade ago. (sigh).
Anyway, that's the update. I should be signed into a server this week and get some hands-on. In the meantime, I will try to contain my bulldog proclivities about the superiority of Essbase especially given my involvement on the losing team of selling Essbase technology to the guys at Siebel back just before nQuire was purchased by the Siebel guys.
Michael,
"Elephants" ! Are you implying that I've put a few pounds on over the past few years....!?
Seriously, thanks for the name check. Once you get further into OBIEE, I'd be keen to trade insights with you in particular on how OBIEE and Essbase can interact, particularly in the context of hybrid relational/multidimensional OBIEE semantic models. Drop me an email when you get a chance, it'd be good to hook up.
best regards, Mark
Posted by: Mark Rittman | October 21, 2008 at 07:46 AM
I'm actually going to be meeting with Oracle BI reps on the West Coast over the next several weeks in order to coordinate. The one I've spoken to is giving me some names of Oracle SCs and other tech folks that I should be touching base with. So I'm getting ever closer. I will definitely keep in touch. Hmm. Why are you not on my blogroll?
Posted by: Cobb | October 22, 2008 at 04:06 PM