SQL for Data Warehousing and Analytics

Here's another great story about how to use data warehousing and big data technologies to solve real world problems using diverse sets of data using Oracle technology. BAE Systems is taking unstructured, semi-structured, operational and social media data and using it to solve complex problems such as financial crime, cyber security and digital transformation. The volumes of data that BAE deals with are very large and this creates its own set of challenges and problems in terms of optimising hardware and software to work efficiently and effectively together. Although BAE had their own in-house Hadoop experts they chose Oracle Big Data Appliance for their Hadoop cluster because it’s easier, cheaper, and faster to operate. BAE is working with many telco customers to explore the new areas that are being opened up by the use of big data to manage browsing data and call record data. These data sources are being transformed to provide additional insight for the network operations teams, ...

This post continues on from my first post on analytical SQL " introduction to SQL for reporting and analysis " which looked at the reasons why it makes sense to use analytical SQL in your data warehouse and operational projects.  In this post we are going to examine the key processing concepts behind analytical SQL.   One of the main advantages of Oracle's SQL analytics is that the key concepts are shared across all functions - in effect we have created a unified SQL framework for delivering analytics. These concepts build on existing SQL features to provide developers and business users with a framework that is both flexible and powerful in terms of its ability to support sophisticated calculations. There are four key concepts that you need to understand when implementing features and functions relating to SQL analytics: Process order Result-set Partitions Windows Current Row Let's look at each of these topics in more detail. 1) Processing order. The execut...

  Support Quote ”Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the best platform on which to run the Oracle Database and the X4 release extends that value proposition,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd. “As private database clouds grow in popularity, the strengths of Oracle Exadata around performance, availability and quality of service set it apart from all alternatives.” We have just announced the release of the fifth-generation of our flagship database machine: Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4 . This latest release introduces new hardware and software to accelerate performance, increase capacity, and improve efficiency and quality-of-service for enterprise data warehouse deployments. Performance of all data warehousing workloads is accelerated by new flash caching algorithms that focus on table and partition scan workloads that are common in Data Warehouses. Tables that are larger than flash are now automatically partially cached in flash and read concurrently from both flash and d...

If you are interested in spatial analytics or just wanting to understand what Oracle can offer in terms of bringing graph and spatial analytics to your projects then this is the conference for you:  Location Intelligence and Oracle Spatial Summit . It is taking place next year between May 19-21 in Washington, DC and as well as great presentations there will also be technical training and workshops. The conference is divided into three areas: May 19 - Technical Workshops May 20 - Location Intelligence, HERE Summit and LocationTech Summit May 21 - Oracle Spatial Summit)Location Intelligence, HERE Summit, and LocationTech Summit + Workshops This is, most definitely, the premier educational event for Oracle’s spatial and enterprise information technologies. The Oracle Spatial and Graph Summit will take place on May 19 and May 21 and it will offer workshops, technical deep dives and use case sessions led by the Oracle product management teams. Sessions will cover spatial, locati...

dunnhumby presented at this year's OpenWorld where they outlined the how and why of data warehousing on Exadata.  Our engineered system delivered a performance improvement of more than 24x . dunnhumby pushes its data warehouse platform really hard with more than 280 billion fact rows and 250 million dimension rows for one large retailer client alone, dunnhumby’s massive data requires the best performance the industry has to offer. In Oracle Exadata, dunnhumby has found that solution. Using Oracle Exadata’s advanced Smart Scan technology and robust Oracle Database features. This new environment has empowered its analysts to perform complex ad hoc queries across billions of fact rows and hundreds of millions of dimension rows in minutes or seconds, compared to hours or even days on other platforms.  You can download the presentation by Philip Moore - Exadata Datawarehouse Architect, Dunnhumby USA LLC -  from the OpenWorld site, see here:  https://oracleus.activeevents.com/2013/conn...

I have decided to start a series of blog posts on Oracle's in-database SQL analytics. The aim of this series of posts is to provide some historical background to show how SQL analytics has evolved and then start to explore some of the core concepts behind our SQL analytics followed by an examination of some of the key features and functions. The reason for creating this series of posts is that in talking to customers and partners it is clear to me that many project teams are just not aware of all the SQL features inside the Oracle Database that support enhanced reporting, data sampling, advanced aggregations, statistical analysis, pattern matching and spreadsheet-like data modelling. Today, data warehouse and operational development teams need to quickly deliver new and innovative applications that provide significant competitive advantage and drive additional revenue streams. The challenge facing many teams is to find the right platform and language to securely and efficiently m...

To follow-up on last week's post where I announced the new weekly data warehouse newsletter this week I have setup a Flipboard magazine for tablet/smartphone users. I will update the magazine each month with the very best articles from the various Oracle data warehouse blogs, press releases, YouTube videos, Facebook posts etc. In this first edition there is: a video interview with George Lumpkin, Vice President of Product Management for Data Warehousing and Big Data a customer video of Chinese e-commerce company Yihaodian a look at SQL mashups using pattern matching and spatial analytics a link to the latest big data whitepaper from the Economist and Oracle a review of the multi-tenant feature that is a key part of Database 12c a review of simple and advanced time series with Oracle R Enterprise by the R PM team …. and so much more. You can subscribe to this new monthly  magazine by following this link:  http://flip.it/nw8FU . I hope you enjoy this mo...