What's New in Oracle OLAP Applications Development?

The following identifies some of the major changes from prior releases.

Oracle Database 10g Release 10.2.0.3 Oracle OLAP

Analytic Workspace Manager in Release 10.2.0.3 provides a Sparsity Advisor, which examines the source data and makes recommendations for defining OLAP cubes that will provide the best performance. The functionality of calculation plans has been enhanced to provide post-load forecasting, allocation, and aggregation. Analytic Workspace Manager also supports Java add-ins, so that any Java developer can extend and customize the tools in Analytic Workspace Manager.

See Also:

Chapter 5 for information about the Sparsity Advisor and plug-ins
Chapter 7 for information about aggregation
Chapter 8 for information about allocation
Chapter 9 for information about forecasting

Oracle Database 10g Release 10.2 Oracle OLAP

Oracle OLAP in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) provides numerous performance enhancements and extensions to the dimensional data model.

Enhanced Data Model in Analytic Workspace Manager

Analytic Workspace Manager 10.2 supports Calculation Plans and multiple languages. Compressed composites provide support for partial computation and non-additive operators.

See Also:

Chapter 1 for upgrade instructions
Chapter 5 for new features in Analytic Workspace Manager

Support for Transportable Tablespaces

Analytic workspaces are included with other database objects in transportable tablespaces.

See Also:

Chapter 6 for information about backing up analytic workspaces

Oracle Database 10g Release 10.1.0.4 Oracle OLAP

Oracle OLAP 10.1.0.4 provides a simpler approach to building and enabling analytic workspaces while introducing the more powerful analytic tools of the OLAP engine into the build process.

New Storage Format for Analytic Workspaces

Analytic workspaces are still stored in LOB tables in Oracle Database 10g, but in a different format that supports partitioning and multiple writers.

See Also:

Chapter 1 for upgrade instructions
Chapter 6 for a description of the storage format

New Model View in Analytic Workspace Manager

The Model View in Analytic Workspace Manager 10g enables you to define the logical model of your analytic workspace directly in database standard form. You no longer create logical models in the OLAP Catalog for building analytic workspaces. Analytic Workspace Manager supports a wider range of schema designs than the OLAP Catalog.

See Also:

Chapter 5 for instructions on using the Model View

Database Standard Form 10g

Analytic Workspace Manager and the PL/SQL DBMS_AWM package generate a new version of standard form metadata that supports the new features of Oracle Database 10g.

Dynamic Enabling for the OLAP API and OracleBI Beans

The SELECT statements for the views of an analytic workspace are stored in the analytic workspace itself. Enablement no longer requires the creation of database objects.

Direct Metadata Access

The OLAP API and OracleBI Beans query the Active Catalog views, which display the database standard form metadata stored in analytic workspaces. Enablement no longer requires the creation of OLAP Catalog CWM2 metadata.