Moving to Oracle Server Technologies

Believe me; life is not easy when you are working with a Vendor Company, such as Hexaware Technologies that I work for (Hexaware is an Oracle Platinum Partner as well). I have to learn all the new things with the little time you get, sometimes you have to learn lot of things in less than few hours. For a person like me, this is exactly what I want and like to do. Learn new things all the time!!! That is my motto!

One thing I like the most here is, I have the freedom to move to other IT technologies that I have little or no experience with. However that was not easy for a person like me or anybody for that matter. You have to keep learning and understand new things that come up.

As you are already aware (or if you are reading my blogs for first time), I started my IT career as the Web Developer with Apache and Perl CGI development (really old technologies!!). After couple of years, I got bored with Web Development. Then, I moved into Unix System Administration, mainly worked on Solaris and HP-UX and related hardware and software. And again, I got bored with UNIX Administration and moved to Peoplesoft Infrastructure and Administrator positions.

I was a happy person (I am still happy!!) for almost 7 years working with Peoplesoft Infrastructure for many clients. Now, I got an opportunity to work in Oracle Server Technologies here, especially Oracle Database, Oracle Identity Management and Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies.

If you are in the IT industry, you have to know one thing for sure. Keep learning. We have to develop a mentality like kids have. They are always curious to learn new things and all the time. This is an important quality you have to develop if you want to excel in IT Technical career. You have to develop curiousness to learn new things (from internet, from other blogs, from collogues, from peers, from managers and almost everywhere!).

I started working in Oracle Server Technologies (Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Fusion middleware, Enterprise Manager etc ) less than a year ago. However, before starting, I had an fundamental understanding of what they are and why do we need them. You cannot build this in one day. You should be aware of other technologies. One major thing that helped me was, my UNIX skills. I am able to solve almost any problems if that runs on UNIX.

Two things you have to understand in UNIX World. Everything is handled as a file and everything runs in the server is a process. If you are able to make these two simple facts, then I am sure you will be able to fix any servers, anything that runs in UNIX/Linux.
Okay, I think we are going off topic. Other than books and internet, I use two simple ways of learning.

a) Blogging

b) Teaching/Mentoring

Both of these are not easy for me. I have to really develop mastery to some level before start teaching someone. Believe me, it is not easy to teach, especially in IT industry, it is difficult with all the new things popping up almost every second. That is why I wanted to start blogging more often and conduct more mentoring classes in Hexaware.

And now, within last one year, I have got quite an expertise on Oracle Server Technologies. During this time, my experience with UNIX, Web Development and Peoplesoft really helped a lot in understanding the architecture of the Oracle Server Technologies. I am still learning new things everyday (that is why I want to write here, at least I can use them later!).

I want to use this new blog site to start sharing knowledge, write about errors or failures and how we handle them (lessons learned) etc. I will start with a new topic here soon. Until then.

Read More about Oracle Server Technologies

Hybrid OLAP – The Future of Information Delivery

As I get to see more Enterprise BI initiatives, it is becoming increasingly clear (atleast to me!) that when it comes to information dissemination, Hybrid Online Analytical Processing (HOLAP) is the way to go. Let me explain my position here.

As you might be aware, Relational (ROLAP), Multi-dimensional (MOLAP) and Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) are the 3 modes of information delivery for BI systems. In an ROLAP environment, the data is stored in a relational structure and is accessed through a semantic layer (usually!). MOLAP on the other hand stores data in proprietary format providing the notion of a multi-dimensional cube to users. HOLAP combines the power of both ROLAP and MOLAP systems and with the rapid improvements made by BI tool vendors, seems to have finally arrived on the scene.

In my mind, the argument for subscribing to the HOLAP paradigm goes back to the “classic” article

by Ralph Kimball on different types of fact table grains. According to him, there are 3 types of fact tables – Transaction grained, Periodic snapshot, Accumulating snapshot and that atleast 2 of them are required to model a business situation completely. From an analytical standpoint, this means that operational data has to be analyzed along with summarized data (snapshots) for business users to take informed decisions.

Traditionally, the BI world has handled this problem in 2 ways:

1) Build everything on the ROLAP architecture. Handle the summarization either on the fly or thro’ summarized reporting tables at the database level. This is not a very elegant solution as everybody in the organization (even those analysts working with summarized information) gets penalized for the slow performance of SQL queries issued against the relational database through the semantic layer.

2) Profile users and segregate operational analysts from strategic analysts. Operational users are provided ROLAP tools while business users working primarily with summarized information are provided their “own” cubes (MOLAP) for high-performance analytics.

Both solutions are rapidly becoming passé. In many organizations now, business users wants to look at summarized information and based on what they see, needs the facility to drill down to granular level information. A good example is the case of analyzing Ledger information (Income statement & Balance Sheet) and then drilling down to Journal entries as required. All this drilling down has to happen through a common interface – either an independent BI Tool or an enterprise portal with an underlying OLAP engine.

This is the world of HOLAP and it is here to stay. The technology improvement that is making this possible is the relatively new wonder-kid, XMLA (XML for Analysis). More about XMLA in my subsequent posts.

As an example of HOLAP architecture, you can take a look at this link

to understand the integration of Essbase cubes (MOLAP at its best) with OBIEE (Siebel Analytics – ROLAP platform) to provide a common semantic model for end-user analytics.

Information Nugget: If you are interested in Oracle Business Intelligence, please do stop by at http://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/ to read his blogs. The articles are very informative and thoroughly practical.

Thanks for reading. Please do share your thoughts. Read More about Hybrid OLAP