Database Developer
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE B Y MARK RIT TMAN
Working with the
Summary Advisor
Create in-memory aggregates for better performance
on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.
ORACLE EXALY TICS IN-MEMORY MACHINE
If you create analyses and dashboards with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise
Edition 11 g, you know that users expect
short response times even when querying
datasources many terabytes in size. How do
you provide short, consistent response times
when querying such large amounts of data?
Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine,
one of Oracle’s latest additions to its engineered systems products, works alongside
Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic to
provide a “speed of thought” business intelligence platform. Oracle Exalytics brings
in-memory analysis to Oracle Business
Intelligence solutions and provides a platform for analyzing terabytes of information
with lightning-fast query responses.
Under the covers, Oracle Exalytics works
by gathering statistics on your query workload and then recommending in-memory
aggregates to improve query response time.
To make this possible, Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition provides a set
of cache management tools that are available only when you license Oracle Exalytics.
One such management tool is the Summary
Advisor, a utility within the Oracle Business
Intelligence administration tool. Let’s take a
look now at how you can use the Summary
Advisor with your Oracle Exalytics system to
first analyze your query statistics and then to
recommend in-memory aggregates, which
you will then implement to improve the performance of queries on your system.
article assumes that your Oracle Exalytics
system has been installed and set up with
a standard configuration: query caching is
disabled, usage tracking is set up for your
system, the required tables are registered in
your repository, and the standard
TT_AGGR_STORE Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database connection is enabled.
1. Let’s start by looking at the performance
of the SampleAppLite repository and
catalog. Using your Web browser, navigate to the Oracle Business Intelligence
Web page, typically at http://[machine_
name]:9704/analytics, and log in with
your user ID and password— biadmin/
welcome1, for example.
From the Dashboards menu in the
header area, select Sample Lite ->
QuickStart. When the dashboard opens,
click the Overview tab and then locate the
History Overview pivot table on the dashboard page, as shown in Figure 1.
In this pivot table, drill into the All
Products hierarchy to get a feel for the
responsiveness of the analysis.
2. Now let’s get ready to use the Summary
Advisor to recommend aggregates to
place in Oracle Times Ten In-Memory
Database. Start by opening the Oracle
Business Intelligence administration
tool, and then connect to the repository running on your Oracle Exalytics
server (File -> Open -> Online). When
prompted, enter the credentials for the
SampleAppLite repository and your
Oracle Exalytics server. For example
Repository Password:
User:
Password:
Admin123
biadmin
welcome1
3. To start using the Summary Advisor, select
Tools -> Utilities -> Oracle BI Summary
Advisor from the Oracle Business
USING THE SUMMARY ADVISOR TO
GENERATE RECOMMENDATIONS
The following example uses the
SampleAppLite repository and catalog that
come preinstalled with Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g to dem-
onstrate the Summary Advisor at work. This
Figure 1: The History Overview pivot table
ORACLE MAGAZINE MAY/JUNE 2012
