Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

Excel Pivot Tables and Oracle 11g OLAP Option

Yesterday, Simba announced the following: "Simba Technologies to Showcase Native Microsoft® Excel® 2007 Connectivity to Oracle® OLAP 11g at BIWA Summit 2008".  You can read the press release here: http://www.simba.com/news/Simba-Demonstrates-Native-Excel-2007-Connectivity-to-Oracle-OLAP-11g.htm.

Simba is building an ODBO Provider for Oracle 11g OLAP Cubes.  Our goal is ultimately to support full ODBO and XMLA connectivity (using the MDX Query Language) to Oracle OLAP.  Our initial version will support Excel 2007 Pivot Tables for ad hoc query and analysis against Oracle OLAP.  This is very exciting because for the first time users will have the ability to use the MDX Query Language to directly query data within Oracle OLAP.  The MDX Query Language is the de facto multidimensional query language standard and for many years people have wanted this ability within Oracle OLAP.

Excel is probably the most prevalent BI product in the marketplace today.  Microsoft continues to enhance the BI/OLAP capabilities of Excel.  With the Simba MDX for Oracle solution, Excel Pivot Tables can connect natively to Oracle OLAP.  No need for add-ins.  A simple install on the client machine will make everything possible.  Excel can be used natively against Oracle OLAP the same way Excel works with Microsoft Analysis Services or SAP NetWeaver BI (SAP BW).

We welcome you to attend the Oracle BIWA Summit 2008 (http://www.oraclebiwa.org) where we will have a session on Tuesday, December 2nd at 11:10 am.  We will demo our Excel 2007 Pivot Tables and Oracle OLAP and will be asking for early adopters to help us test the product to make sure it works on all possible data sets.

More about Teradata

Another thing I found interesting at the Teradata Partners conference was something called "multi-temperature" data access.  It seems you can have different speed disks on the same system and the database will store "hot" (more frequently accessed) data on faster disks and "cooler" (less frequently accessed) data on slower disks.  Pretty nice feature.

Stephen Swoyer interviewed Randy Lea from Teradata and wrote the following article about Teradata's data warehouse appliances which I thought was quite good: http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9197.

Teradata Data Warehouse Appliances

At the Teradata Partners conference last month, Teradata was showing off their family of data warehouse appliances.  They have some very powerful solutions.  The package starts with a software only edition that scales up to 6 TB with pricing starting at $40K.  The appliances were positioned as follows:

Data Mart Appliance 551 - data marts or application development environment - up to 6 TB - starting at $67K / TB.

Extreme Data Appliance 1550 - analytics on extreme data volumes from new data types - up to 50 PB - starting at $16.5K / TB.

Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 - entry level data warehouse or departmental data marts - up to 140 TB - starting at $99K / TB.

Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5550 - enterprise scale for both strategic and operational intelligence EDW/ADW - up to 10 PB - starting at $200K / TB.

The above information comes from the presentation by Mike Koehler - Teradata's CEO.

More on Microsoft's Gemini

I was reading Nigel Pendse's take on Gemini http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_Gemini.htm.  Gemini does push more users to Microsoft Excel which is a freight train that just keeps rolling.  It will be interesting to see what the Excel 14 previews look like with respect to Pivot Tables and how they interact with Analysis Services.