General Availability of Oracle(R) Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2

Oracle has announced general availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2. The press release can be found here. OWB 10g2 is significant release of OWB after almost 3 years of waiting. The new release has tons of new features like better support for MOLAP (Analytical Workspace), data quality (data profiling), scheduling, data mining and many more. There are some good entries at www.rittman.net and http://www.bayontechnologies.com/ detailing various new features in OWB 10g2.

SaaS...

SaaS (Software as a Service). Now that’s the definitive word. I came across this story on SaaS today while going through the feeds. Over the period I have been hearing loads of terms: ASP, Software OnDemand and what not. And quite often have indulged into the lunch-time discussions around these topics. Oracle, SAP and other companies have OnDemand model for some time now. This big software companies helps enterprises reduce TCO and there IT cost in maintaining there systems by hosting them in their own server farms and managing, upgrading and patching them.

The next level for this evolving concept of Application Service Provider, Software OnDemand probably is naturally SaaS. During last couple of years I have heard about loats of software being delivered as service. Specially those related to content management and collaboration. Writely, Google Sheets, Salesforce.com, Basecamp, Sprouit.com and list goes on and on.

The article talks about nuances of SaaS and other related concepts like ASP and OnDemand. The marathon story covers what the big players like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are doing to address SaaS in there next generations product line. The article covers how Salesforece.com fits in SaaS model while those offered by Oracle OnDemand and other vendors are far off from SaaS. The key thing which this article brings on table is the architectural principle of multitenancy, which means a single instance of the software runs on the provider’s servers, and all users log onto that same instance. The article goes on to talk about how SaaS cultivates a Web 2.0-like community. All and all good read and gives loads of insight on the SaaS landscape.

Ruby and RoR

Web application development has always fascinated me. The first nickel I earned after joining Information Technology Engineering was by developing a web application for my friend's uncle. In the initial days of my IT career I worked with startup Rightway Solution designing and developing small and medium sized web application. And man, those were exciting days of my career. That was the time of PHP. And ofcz PHP is a cool technology even now.

So developing Web based applications has excited me always. Few days back I was following some of the articles on trends of Web Development in 2005 and how the Web Development landscape's gonna look like in year 2006. And one of this article mentioned about R0R. Googling on RoR took me to this article from Curt Hibbs. The article gives you a head start on getting along with RoR. The RoR is a cool framework build on top of Ruby. And Ruby itself is a cool language. Damn powerful and as its mentioned in http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ close to what human speaks.

As it says ...It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.

Read the following aloud to yourself.

5.times { print "Odelay!" }

Thinking of spending some time with RoR in the coming days and may be do some hands-on during the weekend of how to use this technology in developing fairly complex web applications and leveraging the framework for a typical custom build reporting and budgeting application.

www.AppsBI.com

Stumble upon this very good blog on Oracle Applications BI modules. Nilesh Jethwa, the author of the blog covers various topics related to Oracle Applications in general and Oracle Apps BI modules in specific. There are posts on EPB, DBI and likes, for which there is hardly any material available outside Oracle own site. Author also runs a parallel blog at ITToolBox on this url. There are posts which are covering the bare tables of Oracle Applications which you should be using to extract different data like GL Balances or the tables in AR which could be used to extract sales data. On other side there are posts like this on What is ERP? which covers grave IT topics in layman terms.

Like Nilesh, I have worked for Oracle Corporation. I have been working on Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OFA, EPB and Sales Analyzer) and other BI tools (OWB, Discoverer, Hyperion Essbase etc.) for quite sometime now. So it would be interesting to follow this blog. May be I end-up drawing some inspiration to put some good post on this space. I have put to gather a list of topics on which I intend to write something. However the list gets bigger and bigger and I hardly manage to get some time to write on some of them.