Long Time no see...

Nearly four weeks in the Carribean really slows you down. You get used to the slow pace of life. Breakfast at the marina cafe takes until lunchtime, Lunch takes hours, and dinner takes all night. Sailing at 5 miles per hour from glorious beach to fabulous snorkling bay is a steady, casual affair, best done one hand on the wheel and a cool beer in the other.

Just as well really, because if I was in a hurry then downloading and installing the Oracle BI software would be driving me mad. I am on day three of night and day downloading. I have a fast broadband and a new laptop, but I have dozens of large files to get, unzip and install.

I started by getting VMware, installing a 50GB virtual machine, then setting up Windows Server 2003, including the updates, then downloading all the relevent Oracle files. There are hundreds of them. Database installs, BI platform (OBIEE, informatica, BI Publisher), EBS files, samples, and BI Apps. I'm mainly interested in the 7.9.5 Analytics for CRM plus HRM and Financials analytics. I'm not even sure if I will bother with the Essbase stuff.

One of the reasons for setting up a whole environment is for a client presentation next week, but the other is that there are rumours that the HR BI Apps repositories are in need of some improvement. This doesn't surprise me if it's true, we have had lots of interesting days with the CRM Analytics, but I would have thought that Oracle have had enough time to get these 'pre-packaged' apps sorted out. Trouble is, they still seem to be unsure what to do about ODI vs Informatica (and what about OWB). At the last UKOUG conference the product development people still had no clear direction on this.

I'm beginning to think that there is rooom for some competition on the pre-built Apps front. Question is, how much effort should I put into this, and should we try an Open Source model?
Then there is the choice of subject. Marketing and Forecasting needs some pre-built work (two clients I know wanted it), but now maybe HR.

Mind you, it'll be a few weeks before I get round to anything. Maybe I should jst start the downloads and head back to the beach!

Let me know what you think of the pre-built ETL, DAC and rpd's.