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Oracle Marketing Cracks Me Up

I've always wondered how they manage to employ so many people, yet do such a poor job of getting good messages out. I could list dozens of things that Oracle had years before DB2, and which they do better, yet I've never once seen Oracle marketing actually use any of them. I even went so far as to supply them with a list, circa DB2 UDB version 7, and they didn't touch any of it. Would easily counter the "UDB is better for data warehousing" messages from Gartner and company (trust me, I lived in that world and it was Not Fun). But I digress.

Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 (Paris) has finally been released. You can download the software now. But the official launch isn't until June 17. God only knows when the official release announcement will be. My guess is July. It's really not that hard to do this right. Here's a project plan to help the next time around:

1. Announce official release, June 17
2. Launch event, June 17
3. Release software, June 17

That said, there's a lot to like in OWB 10gR2 (sounds like a Star Trek insignia, maybe marketing can change the name? It's actually broader than data warehousing, but they stuck with OWB as well, over the protests of product engineers from the rumors I've heard).

I rank some of Oracle's features ahead of the market leaders in ETL, mainly because they focus on the tasks ETL developers are trying to accomplish. The pit many vendors fall into is not looking at the higher-level tasks that people doing data integration must do, and designing features at that level. All you need to do is look at slowly changing dimension features across 3-4 vendors to see how bad it can be. Let's hope OWB can shake things up a little.

I'm mourning the loss of Nicholas Goodman from the Oracle/OWB community. He provided a lot of excellent technical details at his site and nobody is filling his shoes yet for OWB. I'm also cheering his joining the Open Source world since I spend a lot of time tracking Open Source in the BI/DW world. Pentaho is on a roll with acquisitions and recruitment.

Posted by Mark Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:40:00 PM | permalink |