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08 July 2003 |
As this case study attests, table compression in Oracle9i can significantly accelerate query performance, especially in star schemas.
"Table Compression, a feature introduced in Oracle9i Database Rel 2, can compress entire tables, table partitions, and materialized views. It will drastically reduce the disk space and buffer cache requirements, and in many cases improve query performance, especially on I/O bound systems. Compression is targeted at decision support and OLAP applications, but others may experience great benefits as well."
The case study, on OTN's Technical Articles section, also points to an Oracle Technical White paper which gives a bit more background on table compression. Interesting.
8:13:37 PM 
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Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Reports are Oracle's two main business intelligence tools for reporting against relational data. Discoverer can report against Oracle and ODBC relational data, plus 9i OLAP data when using the new SQL Views, whilst Reports can report against a whole range of data using it's system of plug-ins, including relational data, XML and Oracle Express.
Discoverer and Reports were traditionally client-server tools, sold separate from the database and with their own install and maintenance requirements. However, in the last couple of years, Oracle have started bundling Discoverer and Reports with Oracle 9iAS, and therefore many of our clients who historically have never worked with application servers are now having to get to grips with 9iAS, J2EE, Apache and XML configuration files.
A common hurdle we have to deal with is setting up (and patching) the 9iAS server so that Reports and Discoverer run as advertised. Unfortunately, as with most Oracle products, you can't just install it and expect everything to work fine - there are various configuration steps to go through, and a number of the dreaded patches to install.
As a memory-jogger for myself, and for anyone else who's interested, i'll be putting up some of the key information about setting up a 9iAS release 2 server for business intelligence and datawarehousing. As a starter, here's the definitive list of the patches and software versions you need to install, before 9iAS is considered 'stable' for production purposes. The relevant patch numbers apply to installs on Windows 2000 Server; the patches will be the same on other platforms, but the patch numbers themselves will differ. The majority of this information came from the document "9iAS Release 2 : Patching Recommendations Within the Version Lifecycle" on metalink.
- Install 9iAS release 9.0.2.0.1 on to a server. Make sure you're not installing 9.0.2.0.0. (or you'll need more patches), and 9.0.3 isn't a full release - it only contains the core J2EE functionality.
- Install the OID patch (patch no. 2682125) on the infrastructure instance, which is an essential rerequisite for all the other patches. Beware here as there are plenty of opportunities for this to go wrong; check note 211014.1 on metalink before installing.
- Install the 9iAS Core Patch (patch no. 2703110) on both the infrastructure and middleware instances.
- Install the 9iAS Non-Core Patch (patch no. 2926973) on both the
infrastructure and middleware instance.
- If you want to run the JAZN samples, install patch no. 2452053. I didn't install this as I don't have a clue what JAZN is or does.
- If your client PCs are running IE5.0, install the one-off patch 277983 which fixes a cookies persistence problem.
- Lastly, install the Portal Import/Export patch (patch no. 2996463) so that Portal exports and imports work properly.
If you want to use Discoverer Portlets in your portal page, there's another couple of steps to go through before these work o.k.
- Install the 9.0.2.53.13 one-off patch for Discoverer (patch no. 2945041) which is a prerequisite for...
- The Discoverer Viewer One-Off Patch (patch no. 2595444) which fixes the issue " "2595444 CANNOT VIEW/EDIT DISCO PORTLET USING MS IE 5.5 SP2 - XML PARSE ERROR"
- Because the above two patches have upgraded the Discoverer EUL metadata, install patch no. 2555265 on your Oracle 9iDS installation.
That's it! 9iAS is now up to the correct, supported, level and Discoverer and Reports should work without major problems.
8:13:12 PM
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I had a mail through this morning from Larry Kamons, asking about the Discussionweb PL/SQL Message board application I and a collegue, Tim White, put together last year. We released the Discussionweb under the BSD License and made the files available at sourceforge.net, so that others could take the application and rework it to suit their needs.
It was nice getting a mail through and as far as I know, about half a dozen people are using the code at last count. We chose the BSD license as it was about the most flexible we could find, whilst still retaining ownership of the code. The BSD license permits you to use and alter the code, but doesn't require any system built on it to use the same license, as the GPL does, which would limit it's usefulness for other Oracle developers.
I haven't looked at the project site for a while and I was suprised to see that people are filing bug reports, which suggest that the code is still in use and made me think about actually reopening the project and doing some work on it. I'm up to my eyeballs on client work at the moment, but if Larry gets back to me and suggests some improvements, I'll think about dusting down TOAD and starting on it again.
When we started work on the Discussionweb, as far as I could see, there were no other easily available discussion board applications that ran on Oracle where the sourcecode was available. However, when Tim left (he was on a one-year placement) it became clear to me that the technology we were using (The Oracle PL/SQL Web Toolkit) was a bit of an evolutionary dead-end - there were plenty of standalone discussion board applications coming on stream that were based on Java and JSPs that ran well against Oracle (for example, the Jive Forums project), and, if you were particularly interested in a 'pure Oracle' solution, you'd do better to write it as a Portlet within Oracle Portal. This second option was one that we were aiming for, as portlets can be written in PL/SQL and there are PL/SQL APIs to pick up the logged in user, but again this was superceded by a Discussion Forum portlet released by Oracle in the latest Portal PDK.
I'll be interested to see how Larry gets on and whether there's still any interest out there in a standalone PL/SQL discussion board application.
8:12:42 PM
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Oracle Warehouse Builder 9.2 has just been released on OTN. Looks like it's a major release (i.e. more of a change than we had from 9.0.2 to 9.0.3 and 9.0.4) but news on what the new version actually contains is pretty non-existent. It's currently downloading on one of the work servers and I should be able to take a look tomorrow. More details to follow.
8:12:28 PM
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"Can somebody please explain to me how Oracle Express Analyser / Objects / Server fits into the 9i picture ? Has 9i Release 2 totally replaced it?" asks Jonathon Hill on OTN's OLAP Forum. This is a common question i'm being asked by Express Objects and Analyzer customers, who are wondering when they can think about migrating their existing Express applications to Oracle 9i, and have heard about the existing Express tools not working with 9i OLAP.
Partly, but not entirely, is probably the best answer to Jonathon's question.
As he points out, 9i release 2 has now got the Express multidimensional engine within the database kernel and Oracle refer to 9i now as a 'relational-multidimensional database server'. The multidimensional functionality (referred to as Oracle 9i OLAP) is a pay-extra option for the 9i database and (last time I looked) it cost around 50% of the equivalent Express Server license. It is programmed using the same Express Server 4GL and uses the same data structures, although multidimensional data is now held within Oracle schemas, rather than in Express .db files.
Express databases can therefore be easily copied across to the equivalent 9i OLAP databases, and most program code will run without major modifications. However, Oracle have not ported SNAPI and XCA to Oracle 9i; these protocols are replaced by a new Java OLAP API, together with a new feature where you can use SQL to directly query the multidimensional data. This means that Express applications such as Analyzer, Objects and Administrator, together with OFA and OSA, will not work against Oracle 9i OLAP.
The plan is, that Express applications that use Analyzer or Objects will be replaced with Java applications written using JDeveloper and BI Beans. OFA and OSA will in due course be replaced by Enterprise Planning and Budgeting which uses the new communication protocols; details of this are due soon and Oracle are the best source of info on this. The one exception to this is applications written using Express Web Agent and Web Publisher - these two tools have been ported to 9i OLAP as they don't use SNAPI or XCA, and we've found that they work fine.
So, in summary:
- 9i OLAP within the 9i Database is already a worthy replacement for Express Server. It works more or less the same as Express Server and it's got many advantages over stand-alone Express Server.
- Any applications that use SNAPI (Objects, Analyzer etc) will need to be rewritten using JDeveloper, BI Beans and so on
- Organisations that use OFA and OSA should hold fire until EPB comes out later this year, which will also include tools for migrating OFA and OSA systems.
Express will of course be supported for many years to come (I think until about 2006/7, not sure precisely) and customers are still designing and building solutions using Express Server, Objects and Analyzer.
You can read more about potential Express migration scenarios in this Plus Consultancy whitepaper.
8:12:03 PM
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Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer royal and a Royal Society research professor at Cambridge University's King's College, argues that the future of manned space travel should be left to wealthy adventurers. He points to the fact that modern state-funded space disasters become national traumas, and argues that that gung-ho millionaires are more free to take risks because they 'don't represent a nation; [they] represent humanity.
I have to say that I am totally in agreement with this article. At the moment, all space exploration is in the hands of the government, and at present we make the odd journey every few decades, and then only for national prestidge, as with the Americans vs. Russians 'Space Race'. History shows us that, when the great explosion in exploration and trade took place many years ago, it was largely private individuals, taking risks and looking for opportunities, who lead the effort, built all the ships and set up colonies overseas. Space exploration is artificially stifled at the moment, with only the government allowed to build spacecraft and settle on other planets, using overly expensive designs that are too risk-averse. If space exploration was opened up to anyone, or any organisation, who could afford it, we'd be mining the asteroids and exploring the universe within a few generations.
8:11:49 PM
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According to this survey, 8% of Americans are so afraid of getting germs from public toilets they flush the handle with their feet.
8:11:22 PM
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"Oracle is ramping up its channel focus, following analyst predictions that getting channel strategy right could decide the winners and losers in the mid-market business software space." according to this article at oracle.ittoolbox.com
8:11:11 PM
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Appsworld is on at Docklands at the moment, and Linux on the one hand, and database consolidation on the other, seem to be the main themes of the event. Oracle have released the Linux Platform Migration Utility, a set of tools to help customers move existing E-Business Suite installations to Linux, offered in partnership with Red Hat and Suse/United Linux, and promising to retain the exact patch level and many of an application's customisations.
From what I hear, the conference talking point is the proposed Peoplesoft merger; the UK and US Oracle Applications User Groups have recently agreed to team up to share database information, listservers, and negotiating power and no doubt the proposed merger, and any affect it'll have on Oracle Apps customers, will no doubt be high on their agendas.
8:10:15 PM
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9iAS has got a *steep* learning curve and it takes a good while before any of it makes sense. To get anything done, you've got to have a good understanding of how J2EE application servers work, and it's a pretty unforgiving environment if you screw something up. Nonetheless, with a considerable amount of help from some colleagues, i've got Reports displaying data and graphs from Express and Oracle 9i, all delivered via JSPs through Oracle Portal.
The clever bit now is linking the Reports portlets through to a fully slice-n-dice environment using Web Agent and Express. As Express isn't part of the 9iAS Single Sign-on environment, you need to find some way of picking up who the Portal user is, passing it on (securely) to Express and Web Agent, to give the impression of an SSO environment.
The answer? Thanks to another colleague, using the Portal Wizard plug-in to JDeveloper 9.0.3 to create a custom java portlet that uses a Portal API to retrieve the logged in user. These user details are then used as part of a custom URL, that calls a redirector JSP sitting in the Web Agent application that then formats the parameters in a way that Web Agent can pick up.
This works fine but has the drawback that in this simple form, the username picked up through the Portal API is in plain text, and can therefore be spoofed. The next step therefore is to find a way of encrypting it at the Portlet end, and decrypting it at the Express end, or find some other way to pass across the username, maybe using cookies?
It's an interesting area and i'm working with a great team who can bring all of these bits of Oracle technology together. I'll upload any generic code incase anyone else needs to tackle this sort of problem.
8:09:59 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Rittman.
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