Dataprix

Finally I could attend the Informatica World 2008, now I'll try to explain what I found there. The conference was held under the slogan 'Gain the Edge'  from june 3 to 5.

First day began (after breakfast) with a general session entitled Vision. Strategy. Technology Announcements. Industry leadership. At the session both Sohaib Abbasi, President and CEO of Informática, as Chris Boorman, Ivan Chon and Girish Pancha, Vice-presidents in the Marketing, Data quality and Data integration areas respectively, showed their vision of current market, how technology and business are evolving and what role play in this context data and data-related aplicacions.

Much of what was familiar to me, because I had seen before at the Powerday 2008 Barcelona. This is an indicator that the company maintains a well-defined strategy, and shares with its partners.

Each speaker under the perspective of his area made particular emphasis on data value and the importance for each organization of the ability to maintain consistency and quality, ensure on time data availability, protection, sinchronization, and eficient data management and exchange with other organizations.

We noted that now having a Data Warehouse System that delivers new information every certain hour interval is insuficient. Internet and technological development, the globalization and our competitors are the reason. We heard repeatedly terms like SaaS, Real Time and Data Quality, clues about the new features of Powercenter and other tools of the company.

They also made an interesting demo about how an application like Salesforce.com can be synchronized in real time through the internet with a Google Docs spreadsheet. This cloud to to cloud computing example was made showing Salesforce.com on left screen and Google spreadsheet on right screen, each controlled by a laptop. The made a change in Salesforce.com data, and we saw how Google spreadsheet was automatically updated. Then they made a change in the spreadsheet and we saw how Salesforce.com data was also updated. Finally, they repeat the last part, but using an iPod Touch instead of the laptop. We must consider the opportunities that new mobile devices bring when we connect it to Internet.

Before starting a Business Intelligence project, or if we have doubts about the tools we are using, we can take a look at Magic Quadrant For Business Intelligence Platforms from Gartner.

In this quadrant Gartner positions the best-known platforms in the market in terms of Ability to execute and Completeness of vision. 

These are the four resulting portions and providers that fall within each:

+ Ability to execute + Completeness of vision (Leaders)

Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Oracle y SAS

+ Ability to execute - Completeness of vision (Challengers)

SAP, Microsoft e Information Builders

- Ability to execute + Completeness of vision (Visionaires)

The easiest way to access from an Oracle database to objects of another Oracle database is using a DBLink (this does not mean that it is always the most desirable, abuse of DBLinks can generate both performance as security problems).

First, you need a user who holds the create database link privilege. Then, you can create DBLink in source database (A) through this simple sentence:

• create database link lnk_from_A_a_B connect to user identified by password using 'B';

- 'lnk_from_A_a_B ' is the link name,

- 'user' and 'password' are the user identifiers who will use the link to connect.

- 'B' is the SID of the target database.

Through this DBLink you can connect with objects in the remote database with privileges owned by the user of the creation sentence.

To reference an object of the remote database should indicate object name concatenated with '@' and the DBLink name.

Example: select * from mytable@lnk_from_A_a_B

If you work with Oracle databases and are thinking about using and ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool to create or support a Data warehouse system, or simply to facilitate data integration or migrations, you have to know that Oracle allows to use his Oracle Warehouse Builder basic version without any license charge. The only requirement is that you have at least a license of Oracle Database Standard Edition One, Oracle Database Standard Edition or Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.

More details at Oracle Announces General Availability of Oracle(r) Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 

This April the Powerday's seventh edition was held. This is an annual event organised by PowerData and it's objective is to give attendees a comprehensive view of the appropiate strategy to make the most of his data. I had the opportunity to attend at the one celebrated in Barcelona.

They showed half-hour presentations, which talked about the importance of Data Quality and Integration processes, and about the current market and technological situation. Obviously they talked also about how Informática tools like PowerCenter can help to make things easier.

These are the presentation titles:

Oracle SQL Developer is a free graphic tool that Oracle provides for developing, or simply to execute SQL queries or scripts, DML or DDL, on Oracle databases.

The appearance and funcionality is similar to that offered by commercial tools like TOAD or PL/SQL Developer, but it's not the same. Oracle SQL Developer is more simple, but we have to bear in mind that it is a free tool.