Oracle held their “Live Event: Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence 11g” at Lincoln Center in New York City on July 20, 2010. We were there to see exactly how they would introduce the product to the US audience. Oracle was quick to point out that this was not a real “launch event”, since it was already launched in London earlier in the month, but it did give a chance for a US audience to see the product live in person.
I was generally impressed with the way the event came off. The presentations were well done, and the demos showed the features of the software well. I especially enjoyed seeing how the features were presented, since I’m a technical person at heart. I even learned a few tricks that I have missed while exploring the product on my own during the beta period. For example, I had missed that you can type into the search bar at top of the “Global Header” and easily search the catalog for something like all of the maps. I knew BI Search was a feature in the product, but hadn’t had a chance to “look for it” yet. It was there all the time!
In hindsight, it’s hard to see how I missed it, but that’s what you can expect from 11g—there’s so much that’s new that you can stare right at something and miss it.
Oracle spent a lot of time showing the OLAP features of the product. It was emphasized again that these features, such as hierarchical columns, custom groupings, and stepwise selection are available no matter what the storage mechanism is, whether it be relational, MOLAP, or ROLAP. I was also pleased to see the inclusion of the new map view in the product. They showed creating a map view from scratch and it showed quite well.
Oracle is still mum on the question of pricing for the scorecard capability. Consensus is that this will be an extra cost option to OBIEE, but until there’s availability, they will not announce pricing.
It was good to see the product presented so well. It certainly showed well. Please let us know if you’d like to learn more about the product. Given what was shown in the live event, I believe we can talk about almost everything in the product now. We look forward to working with you all on implementations.
