04 September 2003

The first Oracle Database 10g book has been announced: "Oracle Database 10g New Features  for the DBA" by Mike Ault, Daniel Liu and Madhu Tumma. According to the authors' website, "Written by the world's top authors of best-selling Oracle books, Mike Ault, Daniel Liu and Madhu Tumma target their substantial knowledge of evaluating Oracle new features in this important book.  With decades of experience evaluating new Oracle features, this book focuses on the most important new DBA features of Oracle10g as they relate to database administration and Oracle tuning." What's particularly interesting is the book's table of contents, which lists out in detail all the new features of Database 10g, including those applicable to business intelligence; "Data Warehousing Enhancements   Interrow Calculations SQLAccess Advisor tool DBMS_ADVISOR package for Indexing for materialized view   Partitioning Enhancements partitioning for index-organized tables. partitioning materialized views in OLAP Hash-partitioned global indexes. ETL Enhancements   SQL Support for Analytic Applications   Grouped Table Outer Join Size of aggregations in a single SQL statement. SQL Inter-row Calculations   Summary Management   Enhanced Partition-aware Materialized View Refresh EXPLAIN PLAN Shows Materialized View Access The Enhanced Dimensions Nested Materialized View Refresh Materialized Enhanced PCT Refresh Partition Query Rewrite Uses Multiple Materialized Views   New OLAP capabilities   Parallel AGGREGATE Command Parallel SQL IMPORT Command PL/SQL Creation of Analytic Workspaces Intra-Dimensional (Attribute) Aggregation Enhanced Composite Dimensions Indexing PL/SQL OLAP Measure Calculation Definition Complete Analytical Workspace Management Multi-Writer Support XML Interface for Analytic Workspace   Support for Bioinformatics   DOUBLE and FLOAT Datatypes Blast Queries Statistical Functions Document Clustering Document Named Entity Extraction Support Vector Machines Document Clustering Non-negative Matrix Factorization Document Clustering Neural Nets Taxonomy Builder   Data Mining for Analytical    Attribute Importance Algorithms Enhanced Data Preprocessing PMML Producers / Consumers Data Mining Rapid Application Development Multi-User Access Control JSR-73 RI & TCK (Java Data Mining) Complete Oracle Data Mining Management GUI Enhanced Adaptive Bayes Network Enhanced Model Seeker" Did anyone notice 'Multi-writer Support for Oracle OLAP'? Now there's something that's going to be useful.   You can pre-order the book now at Amazon.co.uk 4:32:54 PM

Details are emerging about the next releases of Oracle Warehouse Builder, the first of which is due to be launched at Openworld next week. The next release of OWB will be known as OWB 10g and will be a bundled install with the Oracle 10g database, much like the existing OLAP and Data Mining options with Oracle 9i. I assume that this will only be the 'server-side' install of OWB (the runtime and repository schemas) as it wouldn't make much sense to install the client element on the server. Apart from the bundled install, the functionality of this first OWB 10g will be the same as OWB 9.0.2.3 The version after that, codenamed 'Paris', is expected to have a raft of new functionality which Oracle are currently keeping close to their chests. This 'Paris' release has been talked about for quite a while now; I'd heard this codename being used for the version of OWB that was to include 9i OLAP functionality, but this is now present to a limited extent in existing versions.  Maybe this forthcoming release will add to this functionality, hopefully allowing a 9i OLAP Analytic Workspace to be populated directly rather than having to load a relational star-schema as an intermediate step. 11:02:50 AM