Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

Tutorial on using Excel Pivot Tables with Oracle OLAP Option

There are a lot of people who currently use the Excel Spreadsheet Add-in for Oracle OLAP 10g cubes. Moving to Oracle OLAP 11g cubes, the spreadsheet add-in has been replaced by the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. If you need to learn how to use the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP with Excel spreadsheets, Oracle has now come up with a nice tutorial that covers "how to use Excel 2007 with Oracle11g OLAP data for easy and powerful ad hoc query and analysis": http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr2_db_prod/bidw/olap11g_excel/olap_excel.htm#s8.

Oracle and Sun - the new IBM of the 60's?

I was reading an interesting article by Larry Barrett about how Oracle's series of acquisitions over the last 5 years including it's recent acquisition of Sun now makes it equivalent to what IBM was in the 1960's.  An interesting perspective and worth the read: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/datbus/article.php/3861176/Oracle-Takes-a-Page-From-IBM.htm

Oracle OLAP Newsletter - January 2010

I just got the Oracle OLAP Newsletter for January 2010 and we got a nice write-up on Simba's MDX solution for Oracle OLAP 11g.  The University of Applied Sciences in Wildau, Germany has a Masters course in Data Warehousing.  They use Oracle OLAP in this course and the students used Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP in their course work. They were able to connect from Excel spreadsheets to their OLAP cubes.  You can read more about it on the Oracle website: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/olapref/newsletter/oracleolapnewsletter_jan10.html.

Oracle Exadata

Over the last year, we have been doing a fair bit of work with Oracle 11g OLAP Option and the MDX query language.  Although I have not had access to an Exadata machine for testing, people tell me that OLAP runs very well on the database machine and our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP allows Excel to connect to OLAP on the database machine.  In doing more research on the database machine, I re-read an article by Stephen Swoyer from October this year that I thought might be of interest to others who are curious about the Data Warehousing space and Exadata in particular.  You can find the article at: http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9628.  Worth a quick read.  I expect that there will be more Exadata reference customers in 2010.

Happy New Year to everyone and wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010.

Also, if anyone is interested, Vancouver and Whistler will be hosting the Winter Olympics from February 12 to 28, 2010.  It will be quite an event.  If you want more information, please visit http://www.vancouver2010.com.  If you are planning on visiting, please give me a heads up.

XMLA for Oracle OLAP 11g

Now that our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP 11g is released, the team has been working on the next version. The released product supports the MDX query language and the ODBO COM interface.  We now have a proof of concept of an XMLA provider in house.  If anyone is interested in trying this out, give me a shout and we can discuss.

Smartphones and the Apple AppStore

Jenna Wortham wrote an interesting article that Apple's AppStore is changing the game with mobile software.  One interesting quote from her article is "Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age."  I always felt smartphones would be a game changer.  I had an original Palm Treo and stuck with the Treo series because I found the device very usable with the keyboard and touch screen.  I switched from a Treo to the Nokia Communicator because the Treo 680 had very bad battery life.  The Nokia Communicator was an exceptional device using the Symbian operating system.  Last week I got an iPhone and so far my favourite app is Skype.  I can call anywhere in the world for pennies.  I call a lot of people around the world and have found that Skype is very effective.  Being able to run it so easily on my iPhone is great.  You can read Jenna's article in the New York Times at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/technology/06apps.html?_r=2&ref=technology.

Teradata Partners Conference

I found a nice blog by Larry Dignan on Teradata's Partners Conference which is worth a quick read: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=25942.  The blog post talks about Teradata's cloud strategy and also about the Blurr machine.  Also from the blog:

"The company is unveiling a “business intelligence optimizer” designed for better optimization with systems from the likes of SAS, Cognos, Oracle and SAP’s Business Objects. The big plus is this optimizer allows users to view data via Excel."

For those of you out there who are interested in OLAP and analytics, the "business intelligence optimizer" is worth looking into.

Interesting article I read about Google...

Baseline magazine had an interesting article on Google entitled "How Google Works" http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Infrastructure/How-Google-Works-1/?kc=BLBLBEMNL11272009STR1.  This is a basic overview of Google and its technology which is a nice and easy read.  Definitely points out some areas worth looking deeper into like MapReduce and Hadoop.

Cool title... "Peace in Our OLAP Time"

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge wrote a nice piece about what Simba has done for Oracle OLAP by adding MDX query language support and I thought I would mention it here: http://www.ctoedge.com/content/peace-our-olap-time.  Mike is quite right when he says "For an IT organization, the alliance between Oracle and Simba creates a way to develop an OLAP application using MDX without ultimately having to worry about whether the OLAP engine of one of the major database vendors in the market will support that application."

With version 1 of our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP, we have really promoted Microsoft Excel as a BI/analytics client for Oracle OLAP cubes.  Ultimately, we intend to provide a solid MDX query language interface to Oracle OLAP so that any MDX compliant front end can connect to Oracle OLAP cubes.  There is a lot of data stored in Oracle and we want to open that up to dimensional analysis.  Think about all the creative people in an organization who could do so much more if they just had access to the data for analysis purposes.  Our solution frees the data for analysis.  That it really cool!

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 and MDX for Oracle 11g OLAP Option

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was quite busy for me.  We jointly with Oracle launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and there was great interest.  I will write more about that later.

Larry Ellison's keynote was interesting as always.  This year, his major rant was against IBM.  Larry is offering a $10,000,000 reward to anyone that can make a Oracle database run at least half as fast on an IBM computer as it does on Sun's fastest computer.  Larry did also show off the Fusion apps which looked very nice.  These are expected to be available in early 2010.

We launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP on Monday, October 12th. We put out a joint press release with Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/036550.  We also had a session at the end of the day to show off the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and Excel connecting to Oracle OLAP. It was a fun session to do because people were quite excited to see what we had.  Attendance was quite good - we had over 70 people - considering we were at the end of the day and competing with the OTN party.  In the session, people found it interesting that we were not using a spreadsheet add-in because that is how everyone else connects to Excel.  People were quite impressed with the BI and charting features of Excel as well as how easily you could pull PivotCharts into PowerPoint and have them dynamically update.

We also demoed the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP at the Oracle DEMOgrounds.  Thanks to Bud Endress, Marty Gubar, and Jameson White who did a great job showing everyone what you can now do with Excel and OLAP Option. We were demoing in 2 pods and we had good traffic all throughout the show.  One person who came by explained that up till now, their users pull the data from OLAP into Microsoft Access and from there into Excel.  This, of course, loses all the dimensional characteristics of the data but it shows you how much people want to get data into Excel.  I also had people asking me if this works with other dimensionally aware BI products and the answer is "we are working on that".  In fact, we are making good progress on that front.  We even demoed SAP BusinessObjects Voyager to an Oracle OLAP customer this summer even before we had released version 1 of the product.  The SAP guys involved couldn't believe how easily we connected to Oracle OLAP.

Now I can finally say that the MDX Query Language is a widely used standard that is supported by every major OLAP cube product!