I attended yesterday’s webcast launch of Oracle 11g. The event was hosted by James Burke, author of Connections (by the way, an excellent PBS program I’ve enjoyed in years past). There are lots of great new features in 11g which I’ll let you find out more about from others, but I’d like to focus on the OLAP option.

Chuck Rozwat detailed several of the really interesting new features in 11g and eventually made it to OLAP at time index 33:28 through 36:40 and described this as a merger of OLAP and materialized views. With 11g OLAP, we have semi-automatic refreshing of OLAP cubes and built-in views of OLAP cubes. There’s also query re-direction that will take non-OLAP-aware SQL and redirect that to OLAP cubes in a smart way. This leads eventually to “OLAP under the covers” that will accelerate SQL using multi-dimensional storage without DBAs having to think about OLAP. Now, that’s the eventual goal, so don’t expect it to be 100% in the first release of 11g OLAP, but you can at least see where this is heading. It was nice to see Oracle include a segment on OLAP in their official launch event!

We had already mentioned in our May 2007 Newsletter our presentation showing screenshots of 11g and the features we are most interested in.

We’re on the 11g beta program, so we’ve had some hands-on experience with 11g now. We’re very excited about what this brings! If you’d like to work with us on an 11g OLAP pilot, please contact me at dvlamis@vlamis.com. We can load your data in 11g (beta) today! Chuck says Linux 11g will ship in August, 2007, so we can be ready to go as soon as it’s shipping if we start today. You don’t have to move your entire operations to 11g to take advantage of this.