Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One available for download

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition 1 (OBI SE 1) is now available for download on OTN.

Business Objects acquires Inxight

Inxight - a leading player in the Content Intelligence game has been acquired by Business Objects.

New Power6 AIX Benchmarks for Oracle

IBM's Power architecture has been leading the performance pack for database applications for some while now. The Register has found some benchmarks for Oracle running on the latest Power6 processors cloked at 4.6Ghz.

The benchmark is for Oracle eBusiness Suite with 2100 users running against the Oracle 11i database. We have not studied the results but they appear to show a 30% performance advantage over presious benchmarks run on a 2.2Ghz Power5 architecture.

The benchmarks were run on Mercury Interactive LoadRunner 8.

New servers based on the Power6 architecture are expected to be announced by IBM this week.

Read the full benchmark here.

Simple eBusiness Suite BI

Sometimes Business Intelligence is just about giving users really simple access to complex data, and this can be especially true for eBusiness Suite.

eBusiness Suite can be complex and developing custom reports for every reporting requirement can be expensive. A BI solution, based around Oracle Discoverer for instance, can be an effective solution for sites with extensive reporting requirements or significant customisations (including descriptive flexfields).

Trouble is this can be expensive. Oracle Daily Business Intelligence is a sophisticated reporting solution and can be cost effective if you require all of the functionality it provides. If you only require part of the suite then licence costs can be prohibitive.

Noetix Views can likewise prove too sophisticated, and therefore expensive, for some clients.

These solutions are also sophisticated and yet generic, this means they need to provide access to nearly all of the columns in nearly all of the application tables which can prove overwhelming for occasional users of the system.

Often an organisation wants to have simple access to a few key objects, with a relatively small set of fields. One solution can be to create custom Business Areas on top of these products to pick out the simple objects users want to see.

Another option a number of corporations are choosing is to revert to a few simple views and a small End User Layer (EUL) which present the data to the end users in a simple format and allows them to quickly build their custom reports.

With a consultancy knowledgable in the eBusiness Suite creation of these views from templates need not take long (and therfore cost much) which significantly improving the availability of information and reducing the spend on low value static reports.

Oracle EPB Rollup Patch G

Oracle have released a new rollup patch for Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB) - ZPB.B G.

You can read the full details in Metalink note 304853.1

The patch is mainly design improvements for performance and storage usage of the product.

Public Sector Failing to Exploit Business Intelligence

According to a report from the Butler Group only 20% of Public Sector organisations in Europe and the US have invested in Business Intelligence compared to 40% of private companies. And only 15% of Public Sector organisations plan to invest in BI in the next two years compared with 28% of private companies.

The findings are surprising considering the importance of KPIs and decision making in the public sector.

Business Intelligence helps organisations ensure decisions are made based on facts rather than perceptions and can build solid information from a morass of data (something that abounds in public sector organisations).

Read the full article in Computing Business.

Protecting your investment in OFA and Oracle GL

Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA) is a powerful tool for multidimensional reporting of financial data and modelling and forecasting corporate budgets. It is especially effective when used in conjunction with the Oracle GL where it is a low cost option for providing a flexible reporting tool that can replace or supplement FSGs (Financial Statement Generator reports).

As the product is now mature, Oracle will not be providing any further functionality enhancements and support for the product will cease at the end of 2010 (Note 365197.1 Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA) 6.4 - link requires Metalink login).

We don't think that means the end of the road for OFA just yet. As a GL reporting tool there is still a lot to be said for OFA - the free GL link tool makes it easy to configure and deploy a GL reporting solution. Typically this can be achieved with only a few days effort with little or no coding required to deploy an easily managed interface. OFA can add considerable value to a GL implementation - using your defined hierarchies to provide a powerful, flexible user driven reporting tool.

OFA also performs extremely well. Oracle Express is still one of the best performing OLAP engines with powerful facilities for managing sparsity and controlling the amount of pre-calculation of summary data that is carried out.

Flexible access to your data is simple with OFA 11i - as standard you get a full windows client, web access and easy Excel integration to keep the Finance department happy. With all of these facilites it is easy to provide pervasive access to your 'single source of truth' - the Oracle GL data.

The maturity of the OFA product can be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. There are very few problems left to find with the product now. We have raised very few service requests with Oracle over the past couple of years.

There are still some green field OFA implementations these days where clients recognise the need for a flexible reporting tool and budget modelling with tight GL integration. We believe that as long as requirements are met without extensive customisations this is still a valid option.

For people with existing implementations there are a couple of options - extend the life of the OFA implementation or migrate to another tool.

Extending the life of OFA can be a best value way of extending the life of your reporting tool. There is a lot of flux in the BI market at the moment and it may not be a good time to bet the farm on any option.

To extend the life of OFA it is important to upgrade to the latest patch release (currently OFA 11i (version 6.3.4) patched to patch set 7). The challenge is then to reduce the maintenance and support costs with OFA skills becoming increasingly rare. We take a two pronged approach by firstly 'hardening' your OFA system and then offering a range of cost effective support options.

To harden your OFA system we take the following steps:

• review your data structures to ensure they are optimal;
• ensure your code base is robust to reduce failures;
• implement a comprehensive jobs schedule to reduce manual intervention; and
• establish a maintenance schedule to keep your database in good working order.

After this we can offer a number of support options to suit your requiremetns - from a set number of days on site, to remote access support only and any combination in between. We believe our knowledge of OFA will enable you to run your systems significantly past the 2010 Oracle support deadline.

Migration from OFA to another tool can represent the best way forward where requirements demand extensive modification of the OFA system, where you already have a large installed base of another OLAP system such as Oracle 10G with the OLAP option or where the desupport notice for OFA is a large problem for your organisation.

To upgrade a reporting system we would recommend migrating to Oracle 10G OLAP with Oracle Discoverer reporting.