Friday, October 14, 2011

Oracle Open World 2011

Well, if you've been following the blogging and news from Open World you've probably already heard about the Exalytics appliance. This has just gone on-sale and features an in-memory Essbase instance as well as the rest of the BI Foundation. It's an incredible offering and I'm sure this will become a consideration for many company's BI needs. The most interesting thing I heard about the Exalytics system however, was not what it can do right now, but what it will include in the future.

As it was explained to me, Oracle has put a piece of software on the appliance that allows for products like Essbase to be moved to an in-memory solution without having to rewrite the software. This adds a lot of potential flexibility to what will be offered on the Exalytics appliance. John O'Rourke from Oracle showed the Hyperion SIG meeting a roadmap of the future EPM products and one thing he noted was that the next release of Planning was going to be available on the Exalytics platform. This goes a long way to addressing the short comings of the BSO architecture underneath planning in a couple of different ways. First of all, if everything is in-memory you should be able to build bigger Planning models without performance degradation. Secondly, if your Planning model is still too big, the functionality to produce ASO models from within Planning will become more viable because that process will obviously become faster. Either way it should make Hyperion Planning able to handle significantly larger metadata models.

That's the big news from Open World as I see it and don't forget to attend Connection Point in November in Atlanta! You can get details from our website, http://wwww.mindstreamanalytics.com