Look Smarter Than You Are: OBIEE

Showing posts with label OBIEE. Show all posts

November 27, 2015

Learn About Hyperion & Oracle BI... 5 Minutes at a Time

Since early 2015, we've been trying to figure out how to help educate more people around the world on Oracle BI and Oracle EPM. Back in 2006, interRel launched a webcast series that started out once every two weeks and then rapidly progressed to 2-3 times per week. We presented over 125 webcasts last year to 5,000+ people from our customers, prospective customers, Oracle employees, and our competitors.

In 2007, we launched our first book and in the last 8 years, we've released over 10 books on Essbase, Planning, Smart View, Essbase Studio, and more. (We even wrote a few books we didn't get to publish on Financial Reporting and the dearly departed Web Analysis.) In 2009, we started doing free day-long, multi-track conferences across North America and participating in OTN tours around the world. We've also been trying to speak at as many user groups and conferences as we can possibly fit in. Side note, if you haven't signed up for Kscope16 yet, it's the greatest conference ever: go to kscope16.com and register (make sure you use code IRC at registration to take $100 off each person's costs).

We've been trying to innovate our education offerings since then to make sure there were as many happy Hyperion, OBIEE, and Essbase customers around the world as possible. Since we started webcasts, books, and free training days, others have started doing them too which is awesome in that it shares the Oracle Business Analytics message with even more people.

The problem is that the time we have for learning and the way we learn has changed. We can no longer take the time to sit and read an entire book. We can't schedule an hour a week at a specific time to watch an hour webcast when we might only be interested in a few minutes of the content. We can't always take days out of our lives to attend conferences no matter how good they are. So in June 2015 at Kscope16, we launched the next evolution in training (epm.bi/videos):

#PlayItForward is our attempt to make it easier for people to learn by making it into a series of free videos. Each one focuses on a single topic. Here's one I did that attempts to explain What Is Big Data? in under 12 minutes:

As you can see from the video, the goal is to teach you a specific topic with marketing kept to an absolute minimum (notice that there's not a single slide in there explaining what interRel is). We figure if we remove the marketing, people will not only be more likely to watch the videos but share them as well (competitors: please feel free to watch, learn, and share too). We wanted to get to the point and not teach multiple things in each video.

Various people from interRel have recorded videos in several different categories including What's New (new features in the new versions of various products), What Is? (introductions to various products), Tips & Tricks, deep-dive series (topics that take a few videos to cover completely), random things we think are interesting, and my personal pet project, the Essbase Technical Reference.

Essbase Technical Reference on Video

Yes, I'm trying to convert the Essbase Technical Reference into current, easy-to-use videos. This is a labor of love (there are hundreds of videos to be made on just Essbase calc functions alone) and I needed to start somewhere. For the most part, I'm focusing on Essbase Calc Script functions and commands first, because that's where I get the most questions (and where some of the examples in the TechRef are especially horrendous). I've done a few Essbase.CFG settings that are relevant to calculations and a few others I just find interesting. I'm not the only one at interRel doing them, because if we waited for me to finish, well, we'd never finish. The good news is that there are lots of people at interRel who learned things and want to pass them on.

I started by doing the big ones (like CALC DIM and AGG) but then decided to tackle a specific function category: the @IS... boolean functions. I have one more of those to go and then I'm not sure what I'm tackling next. For the full ever-increasing list, go to http://bit.ly/EssTechRef, but here's the list as of this posting:

What's Next

To see all the videos we have at the moment, go to epm.bi/videos. I'm looking for advice on which TechRef videos I should record next. I'm trying to do a lot more calculation functions and Essbase.CFG settings before I move on to things like MDX functions and MaxL commands, but others may take up that mantle. If you have functions you'd like to see a video on, shoot an email over to epm.bi/videos, click on the discussion tab, and make a suggestion or two. If you like the videos and find them helpful (or you have suggestions on how to make them more helpful), please feel free to comment too.

I think I'm going to go start working on my video on FIXPARALLEL.

July 4, 2013

Major Price Cuts in Essbase, OBIEE, BIFS, and OSSM

Pricing Went Down 25-40%

While Oracle is pretty good at giving discounts off list price, it's rare when they actually cut their list prices. Shockingly, they just lowered (for what I believe is the first time since these products made it onto the price lists) the per processor prices on several of their Business Intelligence offerings: Essbase, OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite), BIFS (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite), and OSSM (Oracle Scorecard & Strategy Management).

Per the price list dated June 25, 2013, the per processor prices have dropped substantially:

Essbase went from $184,000 to $138,000. That's a 25% decrease.
OBIEE went from $295,000 to $221,250. That's also a 25% decrease.
BIFS went from $450,000 to $300,000. That's a 33% decrease.
OSSM went from $149,250 to $89,550. That's a 40% decrease.

Now think about this for a second. BIFS (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite) comes with Essbase, OBIEE, OSSM, and a few other fun things like EAL4HFM (Essbase Analytics Link for HFM). BIFS was already a great deal because just buying Essbase, OBIEE, and OSSM separately was setting you back $628,250 but as a bundle costs you only $450,000. That's a 28% decrease off just those 3 components separately. Now those separate components list at $448,800 or if you buy the BIFS bundle, $300,000 which is a 33% discount off the components separately.

In other words, you now get OBIEE, Essbase, OSSM, and some other products for just $5,000 more per processor than OBIEE cost alone 2 weeks ago (it was $295,000, remember). The named user costs for these products has not changed which means that they are positioning these price cuts directly at the enterprise customers: companies who are looking to adopt Oracle Business Analytics across their organization. Considering those prices above are list, enterprise customers should be getting a discount starting off those prices which makes processor licensing start to seem very attractive for large deployments.

Core Factors

Also remember that Oracle doesn't charge this full price for every core on the processor. They have a "processor factor" which charges less per core. Depending on the type of processor, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table will charge between 25% and 100% of the list processor price.

Take Exalytics X2-4, for example. It has 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 chips in it. Each of those chips has 10 cores giving you 40 cores in total. Based on the Processor Factor, these cores count as only half a processor. In other words, to license a full X2-4, you'd need to pay for 20 processor licenses which at the new $300,000 price means a list of $6,000,000. That's the maximum (not including tax, maintenance, TimesTen, etc.) that you'd pay but it would assumedly come in less than that which is really impressive to license an entire Exalytics box for unlimited users. Unlimited, people. Your whole organization could access OBIEE and Essbase for at most $6MM in software.

This may be the pricing discount your company needs to buy unlimited user licenses of Oracle Business Analytics. And don't hold your breath for Oracle to drop any more list prices. Take it as a gift and buy it before they change their minds.

Update as of 7-15-13

According to an article on Information Week, during the release of Exalytics X3-4, Paul Rodwick was asked about the recent price decreases mentioned above. He gave the intriguing response that while the prices did go down, it's "old news" because Oracle stealthily did it 9 months ago. While I don't have the technology price list he's referring to (if you do, post a link to it in the comments), here's Paul's quote:

The cost for BI Foundation Suite on a named-user basis has never been changed, but about nine months ago we adjusted per-CPU pricing in part because we were seeing more customers want to license the full complement of Exalytics.

June 23, 2013

Kscope - Oracle Business Analytics Strategy & New Features

"Business Analytics is a key strategic priority for Oracle."
- Paul Rodwick

I'm sitting in the Kscope13 BI Symposium listening to keynote speaker Paul Rodwick, VP of Oracle BI Product Management. Paul was rather interesting despite his flight having landed in New Orleans at 4AM. On 3-4 hours sleep, Paul reviewed Oracle's Business Analytics strategy. It's surprising to me how little Oracle's EPM/BI architecture has changed over the last 5 years (other than the renaming to "Oracle Business Analytics." This is a good thing.

Why? Because over the last 5 years, the architecture has gone from a products-integrating-is-a-theoretically-good-idea-so-let's-put-it-on-a-slide-cross-our-fingers-and-see-what-happens to an actual integrated solution that uses the various products in the Oracle Business Analytics line together with each product doing a key part. Instead of "Essbase or OBIEE or an application?" it's "Essbase as the cube platform, OBIEE as the front-end, applications for needs that are often common across multiple companies."

So now that Oracle has gotten the basics out of the way, they're looking to expand their Business Analytics offerings. Their key focuses for the immediate future are big data, mobile, in-memory computing, and cloud-based analytics. The last two really speak to technology of deployment (in-memory and cloud), big data seems to be one of those things that everyone is talking about and no one's quite sure what to do with for the moment, but mobile is on everyone's minds and people are actually doing something about it. To further that immediate mobile need, Oracle is releasing new functionality in every release or patch of the Oracle mobile analytics products. For instance, Oracle 11.1.1.7 now has a full mobile security toolkit (available on OTN) for companies that want greater security than native Apple iOS provides.

Paul discussed some of the key features in the 11.1.1.7 release (including Smart View as the primary Office front-end for BI going forward). He mentioned that the bundled patch for OBIEE 11.1.1.7 will be out on a few weeks, so prep yourself for 11.1.1.7.1. He also talked about some recent improvements to Endeca in version 3.0 of that product. While I love Endeca's extremely powerful ability to discover information in unstructured data, right now, most companies are still focused on analyzing their structured information. Unstructured analysis is definitely coming: it's just only being deployed by a handful of leading-edge companies at the moment.

Where Are They Going?

The key releases we should see in the next 9-12 months will revolve around these themes:

Visual analysis. They're trying to make the analysis more intuitive because the majority of users don't spend their day being analysts: they want the system to help them find issues quickly so they can make better business decisions faster.

Mobile Analytics. Oracle is planning to create a BI Mobile "Applications Designer" that will allow developers to make HTML5 applications purpose-built for mobile deployment. They will also continue to improve the mobile applications every version but they didn't go into what some of the new improvements are going to be specifically beyond more HTML5 deployment.

Exalytics. They promised a new Exalytics announcement in the near future. I'm presuming this refers to the new Exalytics X3-4 version that's mentioned on the June 4 Oracle Engineered System Price List (page 5). I expect this will be detailed more during Steve Liebermensch's session later this week.

Cloud analytics. Oracle is making a huge investment in the cloud and it looks like there will be more and more applications in Oracle Business Analytics that run in the cloud. This makes it a lot easier for customers to get immediate ROI from a BI implementation without huge server investments.

Big data. Part of Oracle's strategy in this area is to tie into any data in any source behind the scenes into Oracle BI. Data agnostic
Predictive analytics. Paul didn't really talk to this one other than to tease that they do have dedicated resources to expanding the Predictive Analytics capabilities of Oracle BI Foundation Suite. There is some P.A. functionality in Hyperion Planning, Crystal Ball, and Hyperion Strategic Finance and that sounds like it will be expanded into the BI layer in future releases.

The one thing that's really apparent from Paul's session is that Business Analytics is now a $1+ billion dollar portion of Oracle revenue... and they're treating it as such in terms of research and development. It's a fast growing space and Oracle seems determined to maintain their market share in overall Business Analytics.

I hope to blog later in the week if any new announcements come out. Coming to you from Kscope13, this is your ~~humble~~ reporter, Edward Roske.

June 6, 2013

Looking Forward to Kscope13

On June 9, the rates for Kscope13 go up $300 per person (basically, you're going up to the last minute, I-don't-know-why-I-waited-but-now-it-costs-a-lot-more price). If you haven't registered yet for what is by far the best Oracle EPM, BI, Hyperion, Business Analytics, Essbase, etc. conference in the world, go right now to kscope13.com and register. It'll be the best training experience of the year: you're basically getting 4.5 days of training that you won't see anywhere else the entire year... for the price of 2 days of training at an Oracle training center.

And when you register, don't forget to use promo code IRC to save $100 off whatever the current rate is.

The conference is June 23-27 in New Orleans though my favorite day is always the opening Sunday, so make sure you fly in Saturday night. On Sunday, they turn the sessions over to the Oracle Development team to talk about everything they have planned for the next 1-3 years. It's the one time each year that you can hear right from the people who are building it what you're going to be seeing in the future. There's generally an hour on each major product line (an hour on Essbase, an hour on Hyperion Planning, an hour on mobile BI, etc.). The keynote this year is Balaji Yelamanchili, the head of Oracle BI and EPM development for Oracle. My only semi-complaint about this year's BI/EPM Symposium is that there's so much content that they're splitting it into three concurrent symposiums: Business Intelligence, EPM, and a special symposium for the EPM business users.

This year will be somewhat bittersweet for me since I am no longer actively involved with the chairing of the conference. This means that I get to focus on going to sessions, learning things, playing/leading Werewolf games, and of course, presenting a few sessions. Here are the ones I'm personally teaching:

Using OBIEE to Retrieve Essbase Data: The 7 Steps You Won’t Find Written Down. This is in the BI track and it's basically all the quirks about connecting OBIEE to Essbase in a way that uses the strengths of each product.

What’s New in OBIEE 11.1.1.7: Oracle on Your iPhone & Other Cool Things. This is also in the BI track and it's an overview of all the things that people will like in 11.1.1.6 (for both Hyperion and relational audiences).

Everything You Know About Essbase Optimization is Incomplete, Outdated, Or Just Plain Wrong. This is in the Essbase track and it's the one I'm most looking forward to delivering, because I get to break all of the optimization rules we all have been accepting as gospel for close to 20 years.

Learn From Common Mistakes: Pitfalls to Avoid In Your Hyperion Planning Implementation. This is a vendor presentation hosted by interRel. I get to sit on the panel and answer Planning questions from the audience while talking about blunders I've seen during Planning implementations. It should be fun/rousing. Since it's all interRel, I wouldn't be surprised if a few punches were thrown or at minimum, a few HR violations were issued.

Lunch and Learn: Oracle Essbase Panel. This is an Oracle Technology Network panel during lunch on Tuesday. I am chairing the panel and asking probing questions of a bunch of Oracle ACE Directors in the Essbase field.

Innovations in BI: Oracle Business Intelligence against Essbase & Relational (parts 1 and 2). This is also in the BI track (somehow I became a BI speaker???) and I'm co-presenting this session with Stewart Bryson from Rittman Mead. We'll be going over OBIEE on Essbase on relational and compare it to OBIEE on relational directly. Stewart is a long-time friend and Oracle ACE for OBIEE, so it should let us each showcase our respective experiences with Essbase and OBIEE in a completely non-marketing way.

CRUX (CRUD meets UX): Oracle Fusion Applications Functional UI Design Patterns in Oracle ADF. This is in the Fusion track and I'll be talking about how to make a good user interface as part of the user experience of ADF. No, this doesn't have a thing to do with Hyperion.

I am looking forward to all the wacky, new things Mike Riley (my replacement as Conference Chair for Kscope) has in store. My first Kscope conference was in New Orleans in 2008 (back when they called it Kaleidoscope and no one was quite sure why it wasn't "i before e") so this is a homecoming of sorts albeit with 8 times as many sessions on Oracle BI/EPM. If you're there (and let's face it, all the cool kids will be), stop by the interRel booth and say "hi." It's the only 400 square feet booth, so it shouldn't be hard to find.

January 23, 2012

Kscope12 - Schedule is Published

Waterpark at the JW Marriott Hill Country

2012 will be my final year as conference chair for the Kscope conference. In case you haven't heard elsewhere, in 2012, it's June 24-28 in San Antonio, TX at the gorgeous JW Marriott Hill Country. The schedule has been finalized, published, and (I'll humbly admit this since I really had very little to do with it) it's the best schedule I've seen for a conference in my memory. Yes, historians, the schedule is better than the last Hyperion Solutions conference because there are no marketing sessions (beyond one timeslot for clearly marked vendor sessions) and the content is deep and not just broad.

It's also not dominated by the software vendor (unlike Solutions). When the maker of the software speaks (Oracle, in our case), it's because they're asked to speak and on topics we care about. On the subject of Hyperion, for instance, Oracle is hosting an entire day-long symposium on what's going to be released in the future for Hyperion, Essbase, and OBIEE. It's led by product development and not the Oracle product marketing guys.

One of the expansion areas this year is that in the areas of BI and EPM, they're adding more business and introductory content. Here are all the dedicated BI/EPM tracks for Kscope12 amounting to over 150 sessions (click on the name of each to get a page about each track):

- Business Intelligence. This track is led by some of the best OBIEE (and other Oracle BI product areas) people in the business. The track has been expanded this year as the importance of BI has grown tremendously within Oracle.

- Essbase. They have over 50 sessions all on Essbase this year. This is more than any other conference in the world. This track will cover intermediate to advanced Essbase sessions you won't get at conferences like Collaborate, Connection Point, or OpenWorld.

- Essbase Beginner. This is a new track that allows people who are just getting started in the world of Hyperion to get some introductory training from the best in the business.

- Hyperion Applications. Hyperion Planning, HFM (Hyperion Financial Management), Hyperion Strategic Finance, and all the other Hyperion applications finally get a track of their own... and it has over 50 sessions dedicated to the Hyperion applications. Like the Essbase track, this makes it the largest Hyperion application track of any conference in the world.

- Hyperion Business Content. For the first time in 2012, we are adding a track devoted to the business users. If you're a director, manager, VP, controller, power user, or any type of person who primarily uses or manages Hyperion/Essbase instead of implementing it, you finally have a place to turn. Since Solutions ended in 2007, a true Hyperion or EPM business-specific user didn't have dedicated content at any conference. Collaborate tried (and no offense, failed). OpenWorld missed dramatically by assuming most users were either CFO's or users with hard-core IT backgrounds. Business people, welcome to Kscope.

In addition to those 150+ sessions on Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management, there are other tracks serving the non BI/EPM community:

- Applications Express

- Oracle Database

- Developer's Toolbox

- Fusion Middleware

If you haven't registered for the conference yet, I will save you $100. If you've already registered, it's too late. When you register, put in promo code IRC (it stands for interRel Consulting) and it'll take $100 off whatever the prevailing rate is. Consider that my gift for you reading this far in the blog (for which $100 is not nearly enough, I'm sure you're thinking).

January 13, 2012

Hyperion Solutions Roadshow to Denver

Hyperion Solutions Roadshow to Denver - Agenda

I just finished booking my travel to Denver for the big Hyperion event on the 24th at the Hyatt Regency (downtown by the convention center). It's the closest Denver has come to a HUG (Hyperion User Group) meeting since Hyperion got acquired 5 years ago (wow, it's hard to believe Hyperion was acquired in 2007). Oracle and interRel are putting on a 5+ hour event split across two educational tracks.

The first track is an introductory track that introduces some products and also covers what's new in Oracle EPM/BI 11.1.2:

What’s New in Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 and OBIEE 11g: A Customer Story with Catholic Health Initiatives
Taking Control of Your Hierarchies with Data Relationship Management
Quick Start to Hyperion Financial Close Solutions

The second track is for people that have more intermediate to advanced experience with Hyperion:

Hyperion Financial Reporting: Top 10 Tips & Tricks
Thinking Outside the Cube: Non-Financial Applications of Oracle Essbase
10 Reasons Why You Don’t Have to ‘Code’ or ‘Customize’ Hyperion Planning

I will be giving some of the sessions, Essbase expert and fellow Oracle ACE Director, Glenn Schwartzberg, will be delivering some others, and Oracle and Catholic Health will be splitting the rest. I'm most excited that Toufic Wakim (one of the greatest Product Development guys in the EPM/BI business unit at Oracle) will be delivering the keynote to start off the day. He'll be talking about the future of Hyperion in an interactive discussion. Among other things, Toufic is responsible for development of Smart View and the classic Essbase Excel Add-In, and you've seen how much those products have evolved recently under Toufic's tutelage. For anyone that's had a chance to hear Toufic speak, his sessions are always hugely attended, hilarious, and full of information. I will actually be attending his keynote and taking notes (and hopefully, blogging whatever we're allowed to publicly restate).

Throughout the day, we'll be having networking time and at the end of the day we're going to have a group dinner and then go to the Colorado Avalanche game after. I think the Avs play hockey (it's a Canadian ice sport played with sticks, I think), but I'm primarily going to the game to meet the local rocky mountain Hyperion users. It's time that the users get back together and form a community. If you're an Oracle client and can fly in on January 24th, send an e-mail to Danielle White and she'll send you more information on registering. Flights in and out of Denver are cheap and the event is free, so I hope to see you there.

January 12, 2012

Exalytics - Pricing Has Been Announced

What is Exalytics?

The official catchy Oracle name is "Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4" which come to think of it is not very catchy but does sound techie. Larry Ellison announced Exalytics at OpenWorld 2011 to great fanfare and little details. In a nutshell, it's Essbase, OBIEE, and TimesTen running in-memory on a really powerful server. How powerful? 40 Intel cores (4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors with 10 cores each), a terabyte of RAM, an InfiniBand backbone (40 GB/s when talking to Exadata), two 10 GB/s ethernet ports for connecting to non-Exadata sources, and 3.6 TB of hard drive. Imagine Essbase running fully in memory with ethernet speeds so powerful it's like you're running Essbase locally (subject to the speed of your actual corporate network, of course).

It's an exciting development for those people who want to make BI virtually real-time. There's even a slightly modified front-end on the OBIEE side of things to make queries a more interactive "speed of thought" activity. If you want to make Essbase even faster, this is the solution for you. Early benchmarks have been all over the map (I've seen 5 times improvement all the way up to 80 times improvement) but suffice to say, that once you've tuned your Essbase cubes for running in-memory, you'll be looking at five-fold improvement at the bare minimum. If you want to learn more, Oracle has an in-depth whitepaper at:

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/business-intelligence/exalytics-bi-machine/overview/exalytics-introduction-1372418.pdf

How Much is Exalytics?

Various rumors have leaked out on the pricing for Exalytics, but it's now been finalized and posted on the Oracle website. While there are a few places where you can find this on the web this morning (including the actual PDF of the pricing from Oracle), the best summary I've read comes from Chris Kanaracus at IDG.

Here are the pricing highlights:

Hardware: $135,000
Processor Licenses of TimesTen: $34,500
Named User Licenses of TimesTen: $300
Processor Licenses of BI Foundation Suite: $450,000
Named User Licenses of BI Foundation Suite: $3,675

Some additional points:

Annual Maintenance is the typical 22% of net.
Licenses of TimesTen and BI Foundation Suite must be equal (if I'm reading a footnote on page 8 of the price list correctly).
BI Foundation Suite includes Essbase, OBIEE, and Oracle Strategy & Scorecard Management. The pricing above is the current pricing for BI Foundation Suite (technology price list, page 5).
Processors must be licensed for every core meaning full list at processor licensing for every core on the box is almost $20,000,000 (though the article points out that Oracle would probably drop that as much as 70%). That's still a lot of money so I foresee most companies going with the named user license.
Oracle will probably discount named users as well. Assume ~50% discount on these (though Chris Kanaracus points out that it can go as much as 70% for large deals). Hardware, following Oracle traditional appliance discounting, will discount at most 25%.

Following the math, list price for 100 users (the minimum you're allowed to buy) would be about:

Hardware: $135,000
Software: $397,500
List Total: $532,500
Discount: $232,500 (25% hardware, 50% software)
Net Total: $300,000
Maintenance: $66,000 (due on signing for 1st year)

It's expensive, to say the least, but keep in mind that list for 100 users of just Essbase is $290,000 and this gives you some great hardware, Essbase, OBIEE, and TimesTen with everything pre-installed and configured (reducing your infrastructure costs). I don't know what Oracle will do if you already own licenses of BI Foundation Suite. My guess is (and I don't work for Oracle) that they won't make you pay for it again, but you'll at least have to pay for the full hardware and TimesTen.

SAP's Sanjay Poonen Is Clueless

Before I leave the subject of Exalytics, I have to point out just how worried SAP is about Exalytics competing with their HANA solution. SAP's Sanjay Poonen (President, Corporate Officer of Global Solutions at SAP) wrote one of the worst attack pieces I've ever read right after Exalytics was announced. To summarize his point, Essbase is an old dying OLAP technology that's been around for 20 years and is therefore worthless. First of all Sanjay, the relational database has been around a lot longer than that and no one is saying that RDBMS' are going away. But my main problem with his article is that if you take him at face value, he has no idea about Essbase beyond 10 year old bad competitive intelligence information. To quote from his article he paid to post on Forbes.com:

Essbase even with all its “optimization” cannot efficiently run in-memory – you still have to do pre-calculations and pre-aggregates, with no ability to do calculations on the fly. You’d have to limit how far the Essbase calculations propagate to ensure performance doesn’t blow up, and insert operations force the indexes in the database to be rebuilt, thus ruining performance...

Um, not to imply that no one fact checked your essay Mr. Poonen, but you're talking about Essbase Block Storage (the 20 year old technology which most would think means it's more reliable than something released in the last 2 years). Essbase Aggregate Storage (created about 6 years ago) was created to solve all these problems. It's a fundamentally different architecture than Essbase block storage: it doesn't need to be aggregated, it doesn't need to be pre-calculated, and it does all formulas and calculations on the fly. There is no separate index that needs to be rebuilt. Basically, all your problems you're listing (forgetting that there are many things the Essbase Block Storage does better than any OLAP technology out there), are for the Essbase Block Storage technology.

I would forgive Sanjay Poonen for just using out-dated information under the excuse that he doesn't have access to Essbase directly, but a simple Google search takes you to the Essbase Wikipedia page where it defines Essbase Aggregate Storage:

Although block storage effectively minimizes storage requirements without impacting retrieval time, it has limitations in its treatment of aggregate data in large applications, motivating the introduction of a second storage engine, named Aggregate Storage Option (Essbase ASO) or more recently, Enterprise Analytics. This storage option makes the database behave much more similarly to OLAP databases like SQL Server Analysis Services. Following a data load, Essbase ASO does not store any aggregate values, but instead calculates them on demand.

That text has been on Essbase's Wikipedia page for a few years, so the only conclusion I can draw is that either Sanjay doesn't know how to use Google, or he was blatantly ignoring the facts. Assuming he's not a moron, SAP must be very afraid of Exalytics to put this piece together and hope no one pointed out how fundamentally errant the whole discussion is. I don't have time to point out every one of the wrong things in his article, but if you wish to comment on his article, visit here, and feel free to correct anything you disagree with.

And just in case Sanjay thinks I'm not willing to stand behind what I write, I challenge him to a cube build-off. Let's get together and put whatever cube technology SAP is pushing today (SAP BW? SAP BIW? Business Objects? HANA?) up against Essbase. You and I can jointly benchmark cube build time, query time, calculation time, whatever you want, and we'll both jointly publish the results. If you're not afraid of how the results will come out, call my office at 01-972-735-8716. Ask for Edward Roske and say it's Sanjay Poonen calling. I'll make sure my receptionist knows to forward your call to my cell anywhere I am in the world. I look forward to hearing from you.

When does Exalytics release?

Exalytics should be generally available soon, but it has to wait until, among other things, Essbase 11.1.2.2 comes out since they're tweaking Essbase to run better in-memory. If I had to guess, I'd say before the end of Oracle's fiscal year (May 2012). Exalytics will continue to make Oracle Essbase and OBIEE a factor to be reckoned with going forward. I'm told there's a waiting list for the first Exalytics boxes to come off the line, so call your Oracle rep now if you're interested.