BI Blogs

I often mouth off on the importance and power of getting your data into a star-schema and Mondrian; the power you have to respond to time variant and analytic needs of your users is immense.  In the next few weeks I’ll cover more about these powers in a more concrete form, showing specific examples instead of just alluding to them.

Starting with a relatively straightforward implementation of a Trend Line.  Traditionally a trend line is built using a good old fashion linear regression on a set of data and then used to calculated current and future X and Y coordinates.  This usually involves some knowledge about building the linear regression formula, and then calculating points based on it.  Fortunately for us, we can skip most of this tedious process and just use an MDX function, LinRegPoint, to sort out most of that difficulty and we’ll just enjoy a beautiful trend line on our graph.

Let’s start with the output, so it’s clear what we’re talking about:

The RED is the data set, and the BLUE is the trend line we’ve built using MDX.

The only thing you need to run through this tip is the Pentaho Demo download, available at http://www.pentaho.org/download/latest.  I used 1.2RC2 for this example, but it should work on versions more recent than that.  It’s zero installation and starts up with everything you need for this tip.

Start up pentaho (start-pentaho.bat) and hop into your web browser (http://localhost:8080).  Navigate to the “Samples” section and into “Steel Wheels.”  Steel Wheels is an example we’re shipping with the demo installation now which provides some great time variant data examples (needed to do interesting things with OLAP).  Steel Wheels data is the sample data provided by the BIRT folks at Eclipse, actually.

Navigate to the Analysis folder, and then to “01. Territory Analysis by Year.”  It doesn’t really matter which one, we just need to get into JPivot on our Steel Wheels cube. 

Click on the MDX button and paste the following MDX fragment to get a base “sales view” and hit Apply:

select {[Measures].[Sales]} ON COLUMNS,
  {[Time].[Months].Members} ON ROWS
from [SteelWheelsSales]
where [Customers].[All Customers]

t a result that looks like this:

Ok… Now it’s time to build our Calculated Member.  This is kind of hairy: it requires some technical prowess to get the MDX calculation correct.  Just remember, once you’ve got the calcuation working properly you can include it as part of the Cube so your business users (using JPivot or Pentaho Spreadsheet Services) don’t see that complexity.

We’re going to use an MDX function, named LinRegPoint (reference link). I think the best online tutorial was done by Mosha Pasumanksy in his blog entitled “Using Linear Regression MDX functions for forecasting“  I used his tutorial to help build the regression below!  I won’t get into the details of linear regressions; you can read the reference or do some other googling for Linear Regressions. 

Basically, you rank Time to get straight numbers (X coordinates: 1,2,3,4,5), use your measure Sales as your value to regress (Y coordinates: 129754, 140836, …) and then you get it the ranked time as INPUT to your Linear Regression (which time is this) and it CALCULATES the Y output based on the Linear Regression it’s built.

Our LinRegPoint MDX formula comes down to:

LinRegPoint(
  Rank(
     [Time].CurrentMember,
     [Time].CurrentMember.Level.Members),
  {[Time].CurrentMember.Level.Members},
   [Measures].[Sales],
   Rank(
       [Time].CurrentMember,
       [Time].CurrentMember.Level.Members)
)

lowing MDX Fragment into the MDX editor to see the results of the Linear regression on Steel Wheels.

with member [Measures].[Line] as
‘LinRegPoint(Rank([Time].CurrentMember,
[Time].CurrentMember.Level.Members),
{[Time].CurrentMember.Level.Members}, [Measures].[Sales],
Rank([Time].CurrentMember, [Time].CurrentMember.Level.Members))’
select Crossjoin({[Markets].[All Markets]}, {[Measures].[Sales], [Measures].[Line]}) ON COLUMNS,
  {[Time].[Months].Members} ON ROWS
from [SteelWheelsSales]
where [Customers].[All Customers]

And you should see the following output:

Note: if you want to see the graph on the right, change the chart settings (icons at top of page) to be a Horizontal Line chart, Width = 300 and Height = 600.

The steel wheels only has data extending to [2005].[May].  If we had “time” members extending beyond our data set the line would extend to the future.  Careful; a simple linear regression is not best practice for doing forecasting on MANY things.  However, business users like to see the overall trend, and slope.

Was this helpful?  What would you like to see next?  Rolling Averages?  It’s VERY IMPORTANT to note that in most circumstances “MDX examples” for Microsoft Analysis Services works with Pentaho.  There’s a dirth of articles about MDX on MSAS… That’s a wealth of tutorials that apply to your work with Pentaho.

Pentaho, being a family orientated company, is big on kids holidays.  The design team dropped an easter egg on our homepage today.

Can you find it?

One of the things I love to do, is connect with fellow bloggers and chat over mutual interests.  It sounds silly, since there are like 100 million blogs or something, but there’s a certain camaraderie and shared identification amoungst bloggers.  I’ve always had fantastic meetups from the UK to OZ to the good ole USA.

While in Sydney I had the good fortune to connect with the folks behind the product, BI Documenter.  John, Richard, and Cyril are the principals involved in building what looks to be a sweet little product.  It’s a great concept:  collect and process the metadata from SQL Server, MSAS, Integration Services, Reporting Services and build some useful documentation about your BI Solution.

They have a live set of these docs here: http://www.bidocumenter.com/Sample/Index.htm
 but here’s a snapshot of the main table of contents once its done its slurping.

How many times have we wanted shoot ourselves when the business users ask some simple, straightforward questions about their reports because we’ve explained it about one hundred times.  Does net sales take into account product returns?   If you’re a MSFT (grumble) solution, you don’t have to answer these questions again and again and again and again.  You can provide documentation that will provide these answers for your users.  From what I saw, the navigation will be very familiar and similar to a “Help” system.

I can’t tell you how many more times the $$ of their license I would pay to have this for past Oracle engagements.  If you’re a MSFT shop, definitely check them out.  They even have a FREE VERSION which works on just one data source (SQL Server).

Disclosure:  I haven’t used it, and probably won’t because my day to day life keeps me in non-MSFT BI land.

I blogged some time ago (link) about an article on The Harvard Business Review by Babson College’s Tom H. Davenport on how analytics are becoming a key competitive factor for companies. I have just learned that Prof. Davenport is giving a free webinar today. The theme…

[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

So when I first started the site I had recently started using GMail and I thought the “Beta” tag made sense. I knew I’d be messing with the site here and there tweaking things and thought it was a good way to communicate that the site was up and running but don’t badger me if it’s down every once in a while.

Then after a while it kind of became a joke that when GMail comes out of beta so will we… Well, I give, I can’t wait as long as Google. Then again maybe the product is actually called GMail Beta…

So, we’re out of beta! In conjunction with that, we’ve got a new look and feel and a new sponsor! The folks over at BI Documenter have stepped forward to help keep the site up and running for the BI community. Thanks John!

Otherwise, nothing new to report. Please let me know if you’ve got any suggestions of ways the site could be improved and, as always, I’ll see what I can do.

I spent the week of the 18th in Buenos Aires spreading the word on Oracle Data Mining. I was invited by Snoop Consulting as a keynote speaker at their Update’ 06 (warning, the site is in Spanish) event. Snoop Consulting has a very capable technical team. They are…

[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

This is a common situation:  Don’t show me what my total sales figures were month after month, show me something that describes something important to my business.  ie, Sales Growth

Chris Webb, who runs a wildly popular MSFT blog in addition to being an in demand independent consultant, wrote an article on Previous Period Growth using Pentaho.  Mondrian (Pentaho Analysis Server) uses MDX, a powerful expressive multidimensional query language which Chris is one of the leading experts on its practical use and applications.

Chris outlines how to build a “custom” calculated measure that displays the Sales Previous Period Growth:

All you need is the zero install pentaho demo installation to run through his tech tip, available at http://www.pentaho.org/download/latest.php

Remember, this isn’t trivial (ie, writing MDX fragments) but it’s VERY VERY powerful.  Check out the Mondrian MDX reference here for some of the powerful analytic calculations available.  Remember, once you’ve got your MDX member working properly HIDE that complexity from your users by adding it to the Mondrian OLAP schema definition.

I had the recent good fortune of traveling to Sydney to deliver a “much sought after” scheduling of our “Building Analytic Solutions with Pentaho” class.  We did little advertising but it was packed (12 people, the maximum we ever do for public classes).

I love doing training courses for more advanced topics, like the Analytic solutions course.  I love it because it’s a chance to converse with other practitioners and share knowledge, experience, and war stories.  These experiences, and the camaraderie is invaluable when one tends to be the “lesser known” topics at an organization.  It’s GREAT to hear about open source adoption in the enterprise; stories of countless millions being saved, people feeling empowered to make their infrastructure and applications what THEY want instead of what their VENDORS want.  It’s just nice to connect with people of similar interests.

It’s also a chance to hear some validation for strong points and deficiencies in Pentaho’s open source strategy.  I have my own opinions, as someone who uses the software day in day out on real customer problems.  It’s great to hear that others either feel the same way or disagree; because that’s the nature of this community driven process.  It doesn’t really matter what I think the product should be like (I work for the vendor right?) it matters what customers and community want.  I think feature X is awful, doesn’t work properly and is total crap.  OK.  If community members find it entirely suitable for their needs, and say “Go work on feature Y” then that’s PERFECT.

This is the most effecient part of open source:  The closer you are to your customer, the closer you are to your market, the closer you are to the pain or joy, the more likely you are to make better product.  Cutting out the middle men (in many cases, account managers and product managers and development managers, etc).

Thank you, Sydney trainees for sharing your praises and criticisms.  I’ll bring them to those that can actually do something about it (ie, Java Jockeys). 

PS - Based on the training people like more of our product than dislike AND I was right about Feature X. 

I mentioned in my posting yesterday that, whilst at Open World last week, I was struck by the many conversations I had with people around Oracle business intelligence and Service Orientated Architectures (generally shortened to SOA and, within Oracle, pronounced “So-ah”.) BI was also positioned very much within the Fusion Middleware stack of products, alongside areas such as indentity management, as one of the key pillars of the platform, and many of the BI Suite Enterprise Edition talks made reference to how the suite played well with SOA-enabled applications. So what does this mean then, in practical terms, for us Discoverer, Warehouse Builder and Oracle OLAP developers? Is it just another architecture, or does this represent a step-change in the way we put BI applications together?

First of all, I have to say here that my knowledge of SOA, BPEL, middleware and so on is at the level of “interested observer” - I know what they are, I know the basic value proposition, but I’ve never actually implemented anything using the technologies, and I guess that’s where most people using Oracle BI tools are as well. As a basic starter, a Service Orientated Architecture is an application architecture that makes use of loosely-coupled, self-describing web-based components that can be accessed by a calling application without any knowledge needed of the way in which they are implemented. Like previous component architectures used when building VB, C++ or Java applications, you can call published components and work with the results, except in the SOA world there’s no need for the calling application and the components being used to be built using the same technology; you just register the components using something called a broker, your calling application then checks in with the broker, establishes what services are available and what parameters they require, then makes use of them as desired.

What we’re doing then is building an application architecture at the macro, rather than the micro, level. It’s evolutionary, rather than a complete new way of doing things - components and object-orientated programming have been around for a while now, but the difference here is that by integrating at the published, standards-based interface level, you can string applications together that draw on functionality from all sorts of systems, even where you have no idea as to how they were implemented.

Apart from the loosely-coupled integration factor, another key feature is that these services can be “orchestrated” - the analogy here is with Oracle Workflow, but workflow generally works with PL/SQL components only whereas SOA orchestration, using something called BPEL (Business Process Orchestration Language), is implementation-independent and a standard across the industry. As well as BPEL, another acronym is ESB, or “Enterprise Service Bus” - a communications layer that takes messages from one SOA component to another, queues them and ensures their delivery.

So, I ask the question again - where’s the relevance for business intelligence and data warehousing? Well. doing a bit of research, I came up with these recent articles on the subject:

• What Do SOA and ESB Mean in Business Intelligence - Colin White
• What Does Software as a Service Mean for Business Intelligence - Colin White
• What Does Web 2.0 Mean to the Enterprise - Colin White
• Integrating Business Intelligence into the Collaborative Workground Environment - Colin White
• Business Intelligence and SOA - Robin Mulkers
• Why SOA is Important to Your BI Solutions - Colin Hulford
• OTN Service-Orientated Architecture Technology Center

Reading through these, it seems that the major areas of impact for business intelligence are:

1. Exposing ETL functionality as a service, having these routines transform data coming into a warehouse in real-time and in such a way that they can be called by any sort of application
2. Surfacing analytics, reports, dashboards and so on generated by SOA-compliant BI tools within line-of-business applications, and
3. Using the scalability of these loosely-coupled applications to create bigger and better BI applications that are quicker to respond to new data sources, new business opportunities and new ways of analyzing data.
4. BI has to become pervasive, user-friendly and as easy to use as Google Search.

So, getting back to the real world, what does this mean for us? Well, my initial thoughts are along these lines:

• Our ETL tools need to be able to consume, and produce, web services, and work in real-time, so that they can provide the data formatting and transformation facilities required in an SOA environment. This is a step-change beyond the “flat files and database links” that we’re currently used to with OWB, and we’re going to have to get used to writing ETL routines that are fast, can be run on-demand as opposed to in a batch, and are more about interfaces and standards than automatically assuming we’re working with Oracle-only data.
• The analytics generated by our BI tools need to be made pervasive - it’s no longer enough to provide a standalone client-server or web-based query tool; we need this tool to make it’s insights available, again through web services, to all sorts of applications, so that for example a real-time prediction, or a visualisation showing a customer opportunity, is as likely to be shown in a call centre application as in a dedicated BI dashboard.
• We have to build our data architectures in a way that makes them quick to respond to changes in the data landscape; no more three months to load a new data source via OWB into a data warehouse, we need the data in now, integrated and presented in such a way as to immediately be relevant
• We need to get away from crosstabs, dedicated BI tools that need a week’s training to master, and present just the insights people need to do their jobs directly in the applications they work with.

In terms of real-world specifics, my predictions in terms of Oracle BI embracing SOA include:

1. Much more emphasis on BI’s place in Fusion Middleware - more emphasis on identity management, more emphasis on interoperability, such that all major new features in Oracle BI (especially Discoverer, OWB) are centred around SOA-interoperability and enabling their use in this new architecture.
2. A very strong emphasis on the technologies now available through the Sunopsis purchase. Sunopsis Data Conductor ticks all the right boxes in terms of SOA-enablement, process orchestration, being platform agnostic and so on. OWB will still be important, but in the world of SOA, Sunopsis will be the key ETL technology.
3. BPEL will be the key workflow technology, replacing Workflow as the way you string together ETL tasks and business processes.
4. BI Suite Enterprise Edition will be the key BI technology, with analytics then being surfaced through traditional dashboards but more increasingly, directly through the Fusion line of business applications
5. The new Real-Time Decisions product will be the key to delivering real-time analyics, and automated decisions, through this architecture
6. OWB will take on more SOA-type features over time; already you can consume a web service through a PL/SQL routine, it’s only a small step to publish OWB mappings or processes as web services through a PL/SQL wrapper
7. Web services will increasingly be used to expose Discoverer functionality to other applications
8. In the Oracle BI world, it’ll increasingly be about working in heterogeneous environments - Oracle will still hopefully be the centre of the BI world, and will individually have the best features, but it’ll play well with other applications and BI solutions developed using Oracle tools will be designed as data source and visualisation technology agnostic

So, it looks like interesting times. Going back to my original question - hype or here now? - I’d say I’m coming down on the “here now” camp. Certainly if you’re a partner, or a customer, this is the conversation Oracle and it’s competitors are having with their customers, so by definition it’s here now.

In terms of Oracle’s products, SOA is definately here in terms of the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Fusion Middleware and Sunopsis Data Conductor; it’s not such an easy fit when you come to the traditional tools - but I guess that’s not a bad thing; if you’re after a fairly straightforward, tactical solution, and you’re primarily working with Oracle technology, then Standard Edition and OWB are the best fit.

If, however, you’ve seen the possiblities when it comes to Oracle’s middleware platform and the new SOA paradigm, well it just so turns out that Oracle may have the products to make it all work. Interesting times indeed.

I just happened to check out the dashboard on my wordpress installation and noticed a trackback from Jonathan Lewis’ new blog. I bumped into Jonathan in the lobby of the King George last week and he mentioned that he was going to give the idea a try; from looking at the first entry he’s going to run with it for a while to see if it’s easier to update than his main site. Anyway, the URL is http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/ and I’ll certainly be checking back over the next few weeks to see how it progresses.

Other people talking about global and partition statistics reminds me of a quirk of having new created and unanalysed partitions (or it could be dropped partitions to be fair)

Well I’m back in the UK now, and I’ve had yesterday and this morning to myself before the family gets back from Ireland. We’re all back at work tomorrow (well school and nursery for the kids, we haven’t got them working as chimney sweeps yet) so I’ve been earning a few brownie-points giving the house a bit of a clean before things all kick off again. Now I’m back, although it’s a shame to leave SF it’s nice to actually get a proper cup of tea, plus there’s the Observer to read and a few programmes on Sky Plus to catch up on before the kids take over.

I’m actually in the UK for the next few weeks, and mostly working from home/the local office apart from two days running the BI Masterclass at Oracle City Office, London. I’m quite looking forward to this one - a bit like taking a tour around the world, then playing at home at the end - and as usual I’ll be adding a bit more content, this time around the slight difference in dimension and cube creation in OWB when you’re working against a multi-dimensional dataset. The seminar in the UK actually sold out a few weeks ago, and Oracle are therefore running a second event on November 23rd/24th which you can still book up for. Once the seminar is done, I’m preparing a one-day course for one of our University clients on building effective data warehouses using Oracle 10g, delivering it and then getting things sorted out for the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham the week after. The good thing is that this all means I’ll be UK-based for a few weeks, but it’s going to be a busy time and all very client-focused.

Now that I’m back it’s possible to reflect a bit on the announcements and general “vibe” coming out of Open World last week. For me, there were three main things that particularly caught my attention:

1. The extent to which SOA, Fusion Middleware and the new Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) are going to affect us working in the Oracle BI&W arena,
2. The degree to which the Sunopisis purchase is going to affect how we do ETL,
3. The slight disappointment that was the Oracle Database 11g announcement

Starting off with SOA, Fusion Middleware and OBI EE, going to all the talks and speaking to various people brought home firstly, how much the new Enterprise Edition is going to dominate mindshare and product development going forward, and secondly how much this technology is going to embrace the word of SOA, process orchestration, identity management and so on. OBI EE is certainly where the action is going to happen, and whilst Discoverer will be enhanced going forward (XML Publisher integration, JSR168-compliant portlets, OLAP enhancements) it’s clear that Enterprise Edition has the momentum behind it, product features that play nicely with all the latest architectural moves, very clued-up product managers and a very sexy user interface that puts it up there with the latest and greatest from the pure-play vendors.

In the same vein, it was a real eye-opener to hear of our business intelligence technology being spoken of in the same breath as Service-Orientated Architecture, indentity management and all the other Web 2.0-style technologies. Probably like most people, I thought BI was bundled in with Fusion Middleware through it being a sort of “catch-all” technology bucket that contained everything that wasn’t a database or an application; from looking at it in more detail, and speaking to people, BI will play a central part in this middleware architecture and as developers, we’re going to have to get our heads around concepts such as SOA, indentity, Enterprise Service Bus and so on; crosstabs, OLAP cubes and platform-specific ETL tools aren’t going to cut it for much longer.

On a similar theme, I was struck by the features and possibilities that came up when I looked in more detail at the Sunopsis products. You’ll probably recall that Oracle bought Sunopsis, a rival ETL vendor, earlier this month and at the time Oracle were very keen to stress that OWB wasn’t on it’s way out, and in fact some of the technologies from Sunopsis were going to make their way into OWB (support for heterogeneous sources, for example). That’s as maybe, but I think the real role for Sunopsis isn’t to supplant OWB, but it’s to be the ETL technology that works alongside OBI EE in this new Fusion Middleware environment. OWB will be the ETL tool for use with the Oracle database and Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition, where you’re generally working with data in an Oracle environment, but for OBI EE, where you’re working in a heterogenous, loosely-coupled environment, where your database, application server, BI platform are all standards-based and hot-pluggable, you need an ETL tools that’s designed from the ground-up to be database-independent, and service-orientated, and that’s where Sunopsis will come in. OWB will still be important, just as Discoverer is, but if you’re looking to move into the wider SOA world, just as you’re going to want to take advantage of the features of the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, hand-in-hand with that you’ll want to get up to speed with Sunopsis, in a way the “Enterprise Edition” of Oracle Warehouse Builder.

Whilst the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Sunopsis were all very exciting, I couldn’t help feeling underwhelmed by the news of Oracle Database 11g. the “Change Assurance” release …. please. I know when 10g was first announced, it seemed more like 9i Release 3, and there do seem to be some nice new features around caching, partitioning and so on, but 11g doesn’t exactly seem groundbreaking so far, nothing in there particularly to get you all excited. What I can tell so far is that some of the new BI features, such as the “Next-Generation OLAP” mentioned in Andy Mendelsohn’s talk, aren’t even in the beta yet and will probably start to become apparent later in 2007, but so far, it’s the dog that didn’t bark in my view.

I have been asked a couple of times for a script that would reproduce the results in the time series forecasting series. I finally managed to do it. In the process I found out that a couple of the queries needed to be tuned:
In the airline example described in Part 2,…

[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

Have you ever thought about Master Data as a Service? Well, some companies are thinking this way. If this happens, a major paradigm shift will occur. This entry looks at MDaaS - and it’s possibilities for changing the way we do business entirely. Who knows, maybe EII vendors could play in this space very very well. After all, they are the ones with Niche technology that really fits this space to begin with.

Just feeling sorry for myself and my weekend siting by the cell phone.

Yesterday was the Business Intelligence CAB meeting, which consisted of a number of presentations to BI customers and partners on Oracle’s ongoing product direction. As it’s all under an NDA I can’t go in to most of it, but one presentation that I can report back on what Mike Durran’s “Discoverer - Protect, Extend, Evolve” on as it was also given later that day in the main conference.

Mike is the PM for Discoverer and has worked with it for even longer than I have, first as a consultant and then in the PM role based out of Bristol, UK. We also agreed yesterday that Mike would do a short bit on Discoverer futures at the end of my UKOUG Presentation, so if you’re looking to see where Discoverer is going and how it’s going to integrate in with BI Publisher, come along to the talk on the Tuesday.

Anyway, here’s the highlights of Mike’s talk:

• There are three releases for Discoverer, part of BI Suite Standard Edition, on the horizon; the 10.1.2.2 release which should be out soon, the 10.1.2.3 release sometime next year, and the 11g release in FY2008. This is one more release than Enterprise Edition, which’ll have a 10.1.2.3 release in the next twelve months, and an 11g release some time after that (with the usual disclaimers, i.e. don’t base purchasing decisions on what is just information)
• The 10.1.2.2 release will introduce the concept of custom members in Discoverer Plus OLAP (custom aggregates in Express/OSA terms), and will allow the addition and subtraction of custom members from a grouping.
• The 10.1.2.3 release will extend the custom members feature to make the process of creating them more flexible, with an interface where you can divide, multiple and carry out other calcuations on the members within the group
• The 11g release will support publishing of Discoverer portlets to JSR168-compliant portals such as Oracle Portal and Plumtree, and will sport integration with Oracle BI Publisher, the new name for XML Publisher.

Mike walked us through the process of publishing a workbook using BI Publisher. Unfortunately I haven’t got screenshots but the process went like this:

1. Start up Microsoft Word, log in to BI Publisher (there’s now a login to the server, rather than just a disconnected toolbar for loading up XML documents), select Discoverer as the catalog source rather than the BI Publisher reports and folders catalog.
2. Select a Discoverer connection - this can be to either Discoverer relational or OLAP
3. Pick a workbook and then a worksheet
4. BI Publisher then uploads details of the worksheet - a reference to the worksheet, not the worksheet details or the resultset - to it’s own catalog, so that it now has a native BIP object to work with
5. BI Publisher then grabs a sample set of data from the worksheet, so that you can lay out the template
6. You then lay the template out as before, and publish it as a native BI Publisher report

When you create the BI Publisher report, it maintains a reference to the Discoverer worksheet, and gets the list of columns to work with from Discoverer, i.e. you still need the Discoverer worksheet to be there to run the BI Publisher report in future. As such, it’s another publishing option for Discoverer, rather than a standalone reporting solution that works independently off the Discoverer End User Layer. What you can do though is pick and choose the exact set of columns you want to take from the Discoverer worksheet, so if you create a worksheet with a superset of the columns you want for a set of reports, you can selectively pick off a subset of these columns for each of your reports, with the same Discoverer worksheet providing all the data.

Under the covers, the way this works is that the Discoverer worksheet is made available by a private Web Services API that will also be used when Discoverer is integrated with OracleBI Delivers, the alerting and distribution part of BI Suite EE. This whole interoperability thing was a central part of the BI proposition going forward - come 11g, OracleBI Interactive Dashboards will be able publish Discoverer, as well as Answers reports, Delivers will be able to schedule and base alerts of of Discoverer worksheets, Oracle Portal will be able to host Answers requests (this may even be a 10.1.3.2 feature), and presumably in the future Discoverer will even be able to run off of the BI Server as well as direct against the Oracle database. Interesting times indeed.

Anyway, I’m about to check out of my hotel and start the long journey back to the UK. For me, the highlights of the week included:

• Spending a bit of time with Tim Hall, Andrew Clarke, Lewis Cunningham, Laurent Schnieder, Lucas Jellema and Michael Siebert
• Spending four out of five nights in the Thirsty Bear - now my official bar and brewery for Open World
• Meeting up with the Oracle BI PMs, including Mike Durran, Mike Donahoe, Osama Elkady and Phil Bates
• The Blogger Meetup
• Getting to see Sunopsis for the first time
• Getting a handle on the Maui release and the Discoverer/BI Publisher integration
• The ACEs dinner, the Oracle Press event and the ST Beta Program - a chance to meet some very smart people
• The weather - about 25 degrees most of the week, certainly better than the UK so I hear

That’s it for now though, I’m off to check out and get my ride to the airport. Bye for now, San Francisco.

I upgraded one of my machines the other day to IE7 and it seemed to be going well until today - found my first problem when I went to look at the Ofsted page to get a school report for a location we’re potentially moving to. IE7 just gave me a largely blank looking page…trying Firefox and it worked fine.

I’ve also noticed that the house searching site we use - Rightmove - seems to have problems not being able to go back pages - keeps saying it’s out of the cache and giving me an error page which is slightly annoying.

Shame I only waited a week after the upgrade and didn’t see these problems as I’ve since upgraded both of my machines now!

I wonder how many other sites out there will be having problems with IE7?

Well, where has all my free time gone. I seem to be moaning too much about a full schedule for the rest of this year

I’ve not got Microsoft Vista yet but my brother Steve tells me that I might need to read this link in order to install it onto a VMWare Workstation VM.

I must remember this when my copy of Vista comes through on my Microsoft Action Pack subscription.