Open World is a wrap

I’m sitting at the SFO airport waiting for an 11pm flight home after a looooong 9 days in San Francisco for the Oracle Ace Directors meeting and Oracle Open World. From my earlier blogs, you should surely have seen the announcement of the Exlytic machine so I won’t repeat it here. I sat through a lot of sessions, most on stragetic direction and/or roadmap. They seemed to blur together as the slides overlapped in many of them. There was talk of many enhancements and potential new products. I say potential because until I have my fat little hands on them, they are just a dream to me.

Interestingly, I think the best sessions of the conference were today (Thursday) when most people had packed up and gone home. I sat through a session on Fusion Apps and EPM and the voice in that session was how important Essbase and the Hyperion applications are to Fusion apps. As others have reported, Essbase is the engine beneath many of the apps and the apps have been designed to integrate seamlessly with Planning, HFM, Financial Close and other applications. Since Fusion apps have now been released, we should quickly see how they work. 

I next sat through a Smart View session and saw interesting things they are for HFM and  what they are working on for Essbase. For OFA customers who are switching to Essbase, there will be (insert standard disclaimer here) a new “Set” retrieval that looks like the OFA retrieves.

I ended the day going to the “It’s a wrap” party where I listened to Berlin for a while, then went and got one of my favorite dinners. There is a restaurant in SF called Cioppinos that of course serves the fish stew cioppino. It was a great way to end my time in SF.

I touched a machine and I liked it

With apologies to Katy Perry for the title. (My daughter would be amazed I actually know who Katy Perry is, but that’s a different story); I got my first look at the actual Exalytics machine. Well a sample box. and here is what it looks like. I would love to get my hands on one and try some client applications on it. I am going to two sessions today that give more details of the machine. Stay tuned!!!!

Larry’s Keynote

Sitting with Edward Roske, listening to  Larry Ellison’s Keynote.Forgive me if this post is a little disjointed as I’m typing as I listen. I’m going to post this  He spoke about the success of the Exadata and Exalogic machine. His  talk discussed  parallel processing and the infinaband network to make it fast. Moving data fast is the key to speed of processing. Everything including the VM had to be optimized for performance and reliability. Another performance enhancement is 10X data compression which means les cost and less data movement. Again this means moving data  faster.  In the Exalogic case 100 times faster. Add to all of this DRAM and Flash to put almost everything in memory to create optimal speed for lower cost.
Why am I talking about all of this and how does it relate to Essbase? Well I let the cat out of the bag in my previous post. Larry announced the new Exalytics Intelligence Machine. Extreme performance  In Memory Analytics. Hardware and software merged to provide speed of thought Analysis (Gee we have been saying that about Essbase for years).  Now there is a machine than can support it. It uses a completely different UI. Everything is in memory, parallel versions of OBIEE< Essbase and Times 10.  This means huge improvements in Essbase performance. There will be a new UI for this machine because of the speed of query. It will be adaptive self tuning of  in-memory cache to optimize query based on workload.
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Look at the hardware specs. Impressive

Here is what the performance improvement is for OBIEE

Here is Essbase performance

Notice the comparison of Essbase 11.1.2.1 vs. 11.1.2.2 for Exalytics. I guess they had to make some changes for in memory processing

Finally a summary

Daddy(Edward), I want one for the holidays. Will you buy me one?

Exciting news from Open World

I attended the Hyperion SIG meeting today (Sunday) at Oracle Open World and heard something that made my heart race. There on a slide on Major announcements for this year was the announcement of a new BI machine I believe the name was Exalytics. Larry is supposed to have details in his keynote, but this is exciting. From the short announcement, it sounded like a machine designed/optimized and integrated for optimal BI performance. There could be huge performance improvements from a standard install. It follows the Exadata and Exalogic machines from past years.

Two other announcements were:

Financial Management Analytics. This is OBIEE based real time analysis from HFM

sustainability Reporting Starter Kit. Again this goes against HFM. It is built on the GRI framework.

I don’t have much information on any of these, but I’ll blog the details when I know more.