I’m currently sitting in the Thomas Kurian keynote at Oracle Openworld 2011 in San Francisco, and more details of the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine have now been announced. Here’s the latest details:

The Exalytics BI Machine is based on a Sun server with 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 series processors each with 10 cores, for a total of 40 cores. The server has 1TB of RAM and local direct-attach disks with 3.6TB of raw storage, and is designed to hook up to data sources such as Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft and IBM databases, plus Oracle’s own Exadata platform. Exalytics is made up of three main components:

1. A new version of OBIEE 11g that comes with an updated user interface to allow dense analysis of data using new micro-charts, dashboard prompts that work immediately rather than requiring you to press “Go” buttons
2. A special version of the TimesTen database that features in-memory, columnar compression, and
3. A special version of Essbase, that comes with parallel load and query optimizations together with optimizations to store more blocks in memory (making it likely in my mind it’s a new variant on Block Storage Option Essbase)

TimesTen has had a number of improvements compared to the release that’s out now. The columnar compression I think is new (and makes it a similar proposition to Microsoft’s PowerPivot product), and TmesTen will work in conjunction with the new release of OBIEE to recommend and then store in TimesTen commonly-used aggregates, which can then be used by OBIEE to speed-up queries.

Essbase also has three innovations in this product:

• Something referred to as a Smart Storage Manager, that stores frequently-accessed data in-memory to avoid reading and writing to disk
• An in-memory cache to optimize block access, and
• A distributed lock manager which will improve parallelism within Essbase

In terms of the new user interface, the main change seems to be the implementation of dense visualizations using grids of micro-charts.

The idea here is to pack large amounts of information into a single screen, allowing you to analyze terabytes of data with TimesTen and Essbase doing the heavy-lifting in terms of aggregates.

No details were given around pricing, or availability of the software and hardware. Oracle have made some information now on the Oracle website, which can be accessed here:

• Oracle Exalytics Home Page
• Product screenshots available on Flickr
• Product datasheet (PDF)

Keep an eye on this site, and Exalytics website, for more details as they become available.

So the big announcement for Oracle BI customers at Larry Ellison’s keynote on Sunday evening at Oracle Openworld was the Oracle Exalytics Intelligence Machine, a new hardware and software combination from Oracle that aims to provide “speed-of-thought” analysis based around OBIEE 11g and the TimesTen parallel in-memory database.

Based on what was announced today, Exalytics is part of the same family as Exadata and Exalogic, in that it is a combination of hardware, software and engineering that you can’t get by just installing off-the-shelf products. The key components in Exalytics are:

• A four socket, 48 40-core server with 1TB of DRAM and locally-attached disks
• OBIEE 11g (based on a future release)
• The TimesTen parallel in-memory database, with a 200GB/sec scan rate
• An in-memory parallel version of the Essbase OLAP Server
• An updated user interface for “speed of thought” analytics
• Fast infiniband connection to Exadata

Here’s a picture of one just outside the keynote hall:

Exalytics is designed to solve the problem of aggregating and analyzing large volumes of data, and would be used alongside source databases such as Oracle Database, Teradata, Microsoft SQL Server or stand-alone Essbase databases. Typically, customers would use it in conjunction with Exadata, so that Exadata does the heavy-lifting around filtering and searching large amounts of data, and Exalytics, through the in-built TimesTen database and Essbase server, does the aggregation. The diagram below shows the products working together.

There’s a lot more I could say, but at this point let’s wait and see what information Oracle put into the public domain. Suffice to say, it’s a very interesting development that will apply to both Oracle and non-Oracle customers, and will work alongside technologies such as Exadata, Essbase and Oracle OLAP. Watch this space over the coming months, and also look out for the Oracle Press book I’m working on which will include a whole section on Exalytics and TimesTen.

My second session of this year’s Oracle Openworld 2011 was on a perennially hot topic; change management and deployment within OBIEE 11g. In a typical project, once you’ve got past the initial prototype, you’re going to want to deploy updated versions of the repository, catalog and other metadata objects into production, and possibly scale-up the development team to include multiple developers quite possibly in different countries and timezones. Add to that the need to make changes to the configuration of your system across environments and across multiple nodes in a clustered environment, and things can get complicated, fast.

The slides for the session are available here : Oracle BI Deployment & Change Management Best Practices

I was trying to get across a three main points within this session; firstly, if you are going to scale-up your repository development team, you need to think carefully about features such as online development, the Multi-User Development environment, and things such as version control that aren’t part of the base product. Second, some of these features (MUD for example) have changed in significant ways in 11g, which may make them more practical for you now. Third, if you’re looking to manage the configuration of your system in a distributed, clustered environment, you need to get to know Enterprise Manager, and also consider getting to know WSLT and the Oracle BI Systems Management API, something I’ll be expanding on in my last session of the week, on OBIEE 11g Systems Management.

One significant change in 11g is around the Multi-User Development environment. In 10g, MUD was tricky to use in practice because the master repository got locked before developers started the check-in process, potentially leaving it locked whilst all the merge conflicts had to be worked through. Now, in 11g, those merge conflicts are resolved with a local copy of the master repository, and the lock only takes place when you merge this master copy into the main master copy. If you do hit a merge conflict at this stage (if you’re unlucky and someone checks-in before you complete your check-in), then you’re bounced back to the merge process yourself and no lock is taken. The diagram below shows the new check-in process and how it differs from 10g.

Another significant difference is around online development, where 11g is now certified for up to five developers working online, as opposed to just one in 10g. As long as you no longer hit the “transaction update failed” bug (less of an issue in 11.1.1.5, and also solveable via patch no. 9884975 on metalink), this avoids much of the work around MUD, although to be honest, once you understand MUD and can see how the new locking process works, I think MUD is much more viable.

The other topic I covered in a bit of detail was around version control. Of course the current release of OBIEE 11g doesn’t have any version control integration built in, but it’s easy to set up Subversion, for example, to version the various RPD, catalog and configuration artifacts generated by OBIEE. The trick with it is to not use SVN to do things like merging and patching of metadata, and to upload metadata into SVN in it’s entirety (i.e. the whole RPD, not fragments of it), and to consider topics such as MUD in how you set up the SVN repository.

Anyway, if you came along, thanks for attending, and if not, the slides are available for download. On to Larry’s keynote now…

I’ve just finished my first session of Oracle Openworld 2011, on OBIEE 11g Architecture and Internals for IOUG’s BIWA SIG. Thanks to everyone who came along, and I hope it was a useful session.

The slides for this session are available here : OBIEE 11g Architecture & Internals

Product internals are always an interesting area for me, and you’ve got a lot to go on in OBIEE 11g as there’s just so much middleware, servers, metadata and other elements to go on. One of the most useful parts I think of the whole session is going through the high-level logical architecture of the product.

In OBIEE 11.1.1.5, the “regular” installation method is called the Enterprise Install, and gives you a logical architecture that looks like the diagram below:

The basic unit of organization for an OBIEE 11g system is called an Oracle BI Domain. An Oracle BI Domain consists of Java, and non-Java components, with the Java components being organized into a single WebLogic Domain. Over time, you can scale-out this WebLogic domain to include additional managed servers on additional hosts, though you need to purchase the additional WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition to make use of this.

The 11.1.1.5 release of OBIEE also introduced a new install type, the “Simple Install”, which did away with the managed server, along with the Node Manager server, reducing the memory footprint of the installation but at the cost of future expandability.

The WebLogic domain, for an Enterprise Install, initially consists of a single Administration Server and Managed Server, with the Administration Server containing the WebLogic Administration Console, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Java MBeans applications, and the Managed Server containing all the OBIEE Java components such as BI Publisher, the Action Service, the BI Middleware application and the BI Office application.

What we know of as the BI Server, BI Presentation Server and other “traditional” OBIEE server components are referred to collectively as System Components, and are installed, alongside the Java components, on each host. Within each host, each set of system components are collectively known as an Instance, with each instance being managed by its own installation of OPMN, or Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server. OPMN controls and monitors the various system components within it’s instance. When you scale-out an OBIEE system over several hosts, you can end-up with several instances, once for each host.

Collectively, these instances together are known as a Farm, and the farm is what Enterprise Manager manages when you log in and make configuration changes.

The other topic, in terms of internals, that I covered in the session was around the Oracle BI Systems Management API. I’ll cover this in more detail in my presentation on OBIEE Systems Management on Thursday, but understanding the Systems Management API, the MBeans that make them available, and how Enterprise Manager uses these under the covers is to me, the key to understanding how OBIEE 11g works under the covers. I’ll cover these in more detail on my write-up on Thursday’s presentation, which covers this topic in-depth.

I’ve just finished my first session of Oracle Openworld 2011, on OBIEE 11g Architecture and Internals for IOUG’s BIWA SIG. Thanks to everyone who came along, and I hope it was a useful session.

The slides for this session are available here : OBIEE 11g Architecture & Internals

Product internals are always an interesting area for me, and you’ve got a lot to go on in OBIEE 11g as there’s just so much middleware, servers, metadata and other elements to go on. One of the most useful parts I think of the whole session is going through the high-level logical architecture of the product.

In OBIEE 11.1.1.5, the “regular” installation method is called the Enterprise Install, and gives you a logical architecture that looks like the diagram below:

The basic unit of organization for an OBIEE 11g system is called an Oracle BI Domain. An Oracle BI Domain consists of Java, and non-Java components, with the Java components being organized into a single WebLogic Domain. Over time, you can scale-out this WebLogic domain to include additional managed servers on additional hosts, though you need to purchase the additional WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition to make use of this.

The 11.1.1.5 release of OBIEE also introduced a new install type, the “Simple Install”, which did away with the managed server, along with the Node Manager server, reducing the memory footprint of the installation but at the cost of future expandability.

The WebLogic domain, for an Enterprise Install, initially consists of a single Administration Server and Managed Server, with the Administration Server containing the WebLogic Administration Console, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Java MBeans applications, and the Managed Server containing all the OBIEE Java components such as BI Publisher, the Action Service, the BI Middleware application and the BI Office application.

What we know of as the BI Server, BI Presentation Server and other “traditional” OBIEE server components are referred to collectively as System Components, and are installed, alongside the Java components, on each host. Within each host, each set of system components are collectively known as an Instance, with each instance being managed by its own installation of OPMN, or Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server. OPMN controls and monitors the various system components within it’s instance. When you scale-out an OBIEE system over several hosts, you can end-up with several instances, once for each host.

Collectively, these instances together are known as a Farm, and the farm is what Enterprise Manager manages when you log in and make configuration changes.

The other topic, in terms of internals, that I covered in the session was around the Oracle BI Systems Management API. I’ll cover this in more detail in my presentation on OBIEE Systems Management on Thursday, but understanding the Systems Management API, the MBeans that make them available, and how Enterprise Manager uses these under the covers is to me, the key to understanding how OBIEE 11g works under the covers. I’ll cover these in more detail on my write-up on Thursday’s presentation, which covers this topic in-depth.