At the Oracle Collaborate conference last week, I attended a session presented by Ray Roccaforte who is an SVP at Oracle. The BIWA (Business Intelligence data Warehousing and Analytics) SIG was Ray's idea/initiative. Ray talked about the Sun Oracle Database Machine, Oracle In-Database Analytics, and Industry-Analytics Solution Sets. This was a good session and one major point Ray made was that Oracle was bringing the Analytics to the Data rather than the Data to the Analytics.
Ray talked about the Database Machine and some key points were:
- complete data warehouse solution - hardware and software
- extreme scalability and performance
- short time to value
- hybrid columnar compression
- fast hardware
- big pipe
For In-Database Analytics, some key points were:
- bring the algorithms to the data
- Oracle OLAP for multi-dimensional queries and the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP which provides an open, dimensional interface. Oracle OLAP is also a summary management solution for SQL based BI applications. Oracle OLAP is embedded in the Oracle Database instance and storage so it automatically gets the full benefit of the database machine flash cache.
- Data Mining includes a wide range of traditional and cutting edge algorithms developed inside the SQL kernel and Exadata Smart Scan where model scoring is performed in the Exadata Storage Server
Ray's talk was very insightful and another interesting comment he made is that Oracle is positioning to be a solution provider instead of just a component provider.
Russ Tront and I also had a presentation where we talked about the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. If anyone wants the slides from that talk, please feel free to email me. Russ and Mike van der Velden also did a hands on lab where they had people walk though analyzing their Oracle OLAP cubes using the MDX Provider and Microsoft Excel 2007. The participants found this session very valuable. If anyone is interested in a demo of the Oracle OLAP MDX Provider or wants to get a copy of it to try out, again, please feel free to email me.
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