Oracle Open World Trip - Day 4

Sorry for the delay in posting but you know how time flies when you are having fun!

Sunday, September 19 consisted of two big events in my mind, the User Group forums and the Oracle ACE Dinner.    The best thing about the forums is hearing from Oracle Development on upcoming plans.   I jotted down a bunch of notes on the Essbase Roadmap.   Here are the notes with my comments in italics..

Essbase Roadmap - OOW 2010

General 

• Calc extensions within ASO - The effort seems to be focused on making allocations much easier in ASO in order to better integrate Essbase with Oracle E-Business Suite and other Oracle general ledger products.   This seems to me to be a great usage of Essbase in the Oracle Fusion strategy.  Further, it may lead to ASO being a viable option

• In-Memory Analytics - Not much was discussed on this point but my gut feel is this is a competitive response to both TM/1 and Qlikview.

Integration

• Migration of OFA/OSA - Great news for Oracle Financial Analyzer/Oracle Sales Analyzer users as they will now have the power of Essbase backing them.
  
• Studio/OBIEE integration - I don't recall exactly how this will work..  Sorry!
   
• Essbase web services layer - Yeah!  Finally, a real way to get to Essbase via web services (besides XML/A which originated as the way to get to Microsoft Analysis Services data..)
  
• Essbase ADF control - I have heard about this one now for 2 1/2 years..  I don't know what, exactly, to expect when we do finally see it.   It is a tool for Essbase/Java developers only, though.

Enterprise Scalability and Reliability

• Agent re-write - The Essbase Agent will be rewritten into Java to make it work natively within an application server and to provide better scalability.

• High availability/Continued focus on performance and scalability - Better clustering/rollover capability including (if I remember correctly) deployment within Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

Improved Administration Experience

• Thin client Studio - Pure HTML administration application.

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Integration - Oracle Enterprise Manager is the main application for administering Oracle databases and will now add Essbase functionality.

My evening featured one of the highlights, for me, of Open World.   The annual Oracle ACE Dinner was held on a cruise boat out in San Francisco Bay.  I got to spend a bunch of time with some of the other Oracle ACE's including Edward Roske, Glenn Schwartzberg, Mike Riley and Jerry Ireland.   Unlike the ACE Dinner at Kaleidoscope, where I arrived just as dessert was finishing up, I actually made the boat launch this time and it was a great time.