Analytic Workspace Manager Release date

Question

Does anyone know that release date for the analytic workspace manager?

Answer 1

I'm reluctant to start having a go at Oracle, because there's probably good technical reasons why AWM didn't come out last year, most probably due to 9i OLAP API changes invalidating much of the work the product team had done with the prototype of AWM. However, it's been about 18 months now, by my reckoning, since AWM was first talked about and it's still not generally available.
Of course, the features announced for the first version of AWM are only part of what we need 'out in the field' when working with 9i OLAP. We also need graphical tools to load analytic workspaces directly, rather than having to write OLAP DML dataloaders or go through an intermediate step of loading an Oracle star-schema, and in addition, migration tools for Express databases to help with the creation of OLAP Catalog metadata.
It's worth contrasting this with the release of OLAP Services when SQL Server 7.0 was released. There, Microsoft provided tools from the outset to create and manage OLAP cubes, which meant that users could get up and running immediately, not have to wait the best part of two years to get the most basic of tools to enable them to create OLAP databases.
As there's no doubt been quite a few technical challenges in delivering the 9i OLAP tools over the last couple of years, what would probably help the situation would be a more proactive communication strategy from the Oracle product team, in the way that the OWB team regularly post on their OTN forum and keep us all informed on how the product is progressing. Part of the frustration with 9i OLAP is the lack of any communication or updates on the product, leaving us guessing as to exactly when elements such as the AWM will actually come out. In addition, from what I can glean about OLAP support in 10g, there's some excellent news coming out, such as Multiwriter support, an XML interface for OLAP, Parallel support for aggregation and so on, which would be great news to hear and might make people 'hang on' rather than give up on the product.
Hopefully, as the last announcement from Oracle suggested, the AWM will be made available this month, and we can get on then with helping our customers and clients start taking advantage of the 9i OLAP platform.