Taking a break on working through EPM 11.1.2.4 and rewriting my 123OLAP manuals. Hope to have the revised HFM Admin class ready in a few weeks or so and a couple new classes right after that.

Anyway, the other day I was at an Oracle event in Charlotte NC and got a look at an upcoming product, called Oracle Visual Analyzer. No date was given for the release but it sounded like 2015 - we'll see. OBI as a whole isn't my area of expertise, but this looked really good and I hope it can be used with EPM eventually. Here are the notes I got from it - note that I may have heard something wrong, got told something wrong, can't read my notes correctly, etc.

• Uses just a browser, whether computer or mobile. No addin needed as it's HTML5
• Connect to a data source, drag and drop the fields that you want to analyze, and the screen starts showing graphics
• The style of graphics can be changed and go way beyond bar and pie charts
• If a part of the graph has data that doesn't mean anything, you can highlight it and do a remove only and zoom in on the data that means something
• Can upload a spreadsheet, do some field mapping, and integrate the data with another data source - thought I heard this will expand to allow merging/mashing multiple online data sources together
• Can also switch to a data view, but the power here is in the visualizations
• Not meant for production reports like Publisher but more ad hoc analysis
• On premise version will be 12c based not 11g based

You get the idea that this is Smart View ad hoc analysis, except through a web page and graphically instead of numerically. Quite cool. Apparently it isn't all that new, though, as here's a YouTube video on it from Sep 14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJKCL4efTQI.

The other thing they talked about was a new product, just released, called Oracle Big Data Discovery, a visual interface for a Hadoop cluster. Check it out at https://cloud.oracle.com/bigdatadiscovery. Something else mentioned that was in development was a voice interface for mobile, currently called BI Ask. Think Siri for Oracle - hmm, maybe call it Larry?


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