Ray::Apps.blog

I have been interested in business intelligence and data warehouse solutions for quite a while. And I have seen that traditional data warehouse and business intelligence tool implementations take quite a long time and cost a lot to set up infrastructure, develop or implement business intelligence software and train users. And many business users are not using business intelligence tools because they are too hard to learn and use.

Therefore some while ago a had an idea of developing easy-to-use business intelligence web application that you could implement and start to use right away and which would focus on ease-of-use and not on too much unnecessary features. And result of this idea is eazyBI which after couple months of beta testing now is launched in production.

Many sources of data

One of the first issues in data warehousing is that you need to prepare / import / aggregate data that you would like to analyze. It's hard to create universal solution for this issue therefore I am building several predefined ways how to upload or prepare your data for analysis.

In the simplest case if you have source data in CSV (comma-separated values) format or you can export your data in CSV format then you can upload these files to eazyBI, map columns to dimensions and measures and start to analyze and create reports from uploaded data.

If you are already using some software-as-a-service web applications and would like to have better analysis tools to analyze your data in these applications then eazyBI will provide standard integrations for data import and will create initial sample reports. Currently the first integrations are with 37signals Basecamp project collaboration application as well as you can import and analyze your Twitter timeline. More standard integrations with other applications will follow (please let me know if you would be interested in some particular integration).

One of the main limiting factors for business intelligence as a service solutions is that many businesses are not ready to upload their data to service providers - both because of security concerns as well as uploading of big data volumes takes quite a long time. Remote eazyBI solution is unique solution which allows you to use eazyBI business intelligence as a service application with your existing data in your existing databases. You just need to download and set up remote eazyBI application and start to analyze your data. As a result you get the benefits of fast implementation of business intelligence as a service but without the risks of uploading your data to service provider.

Easy-to-use

Many existing business intelligence tools suffer from too many features which make them complicated to use and you need special business intelligence tool consultants which will create reports and dashboards for business users.

Therefore my goal for eazyBI is to make it with less features but any feature that is added should be easy-to-use. With simple drag-and-drop and couple clicks you can select dimensions by which you want to analyze data and start with summaries and then drill into details. Results can be viewed as traditional tables or as different bar, line, pie, timeline or map charts. eazyBI is easy and fun to use as you play with your data.

Share reports with others

When you have created some report which you would like to share with other your colleagues, customers or partners then you can either send link to report or you can also embed report into other HTML pages. Here is example of embedded report from demo eazyBI account:

Embedded reports are fully dynamic and will show latest data when page will be refreshed. They can be embedded in company intranets, wikis or blogs or any other web pages.

Open web technologies

eazyBI user interface is built with open HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript technologies which allows to use it both on desktop browsers as well as on mobile devices like iPad (you will be able to open reports even on mobile phones like iPhone or Android but of course because of screen size it will be harder to use). And if you will use modern browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 9 then eazyBI will be also very fast and responsive. I believe that speed should be one of the main features of any application therefore I am optimizing eazyBI to be as fast as possible.

In the backend eazyBI uses open source Mondrian OLAP engine and mondrian-olap JRuby library that I have created and open-sourced during eazyBI development.

No big initial investments

eazyBI pricing is based on monthly subscription starting from $20 per month. There is also free plan for single user as well as you can publish public data for free. And you don't need to make long-term commitments - you just pay for the service when you use it and you can cancel it anytime when you don't need it anymore.

Try it out

If this sounds interesting to you then please sign up for eazyBI and try to upload and analyze your data. And if you have any suggestions or questions about eazyBI then please let me know.

P.S. Also I wanted to mention that by subscribing to eazyBI you will also support my work on open-source. If you are user of my open-source libraries then I will appreciate if you will become eazyBI user as well :) But in case if you do not need solution like eazyBI you could support me by tweeting and blogging about eazyBI, will be thankful for that as well.

I just released Oracle enhanced adapter version 1.4.0 and here is the summary of main changes.

Rails 3.1 support

Oracle enhanced adapter GitHub version was working with Rails 3.1 betas and release candidate versions already but it was not explicitly stated anywhere that you should use git version with Rails 3.1. Therefore I am releasing new version 1.4.0 which is passing all tests with latest Rails 3.1 release candidate. As I wrote before main changes in ActiveRecord 3.1 are that it using prepared statement cache and using bind variables in many statements (currently in select by primary key, insert and delete statements) which result in better performance and better database resources usage.

To follow up how Oracle enhanced adapter is working with different Rails versions and different Ruby implementations I have set up Continuous Integration server to run tests on different version combinations. At the moment of writing everything was green :)

Other bug fixes and improvements

Main fixes and improvements in this version are the following:

• On JRuby I switched from using old ojdbc14.jar JDBC driver to latest ojdbc6.jar (on Java 6) or ojdbc5.jar (on Java 5). And JDBC driver can be located in Rails application ./lib directory as well.

• RAW data type is now supported (which is quite often used in legacy databases instead of nowadays recommended CLOB and BLOB types).

• rake db:create and rake db:drop can be used to create development or test database schemas.

• Support for virtual columns in improved (only working on Oracle 11g database).

• Default table, index, CLOB and BLOB tablespaces can be specified (if your DBA is insisting on putting everything in separate tablespaces :)).

• Several improvements for context index additional options and definition dump.

See list of all enhancements and bug fixes

If you want to have a new feature in Oracle enhanced adapter then the best way is to implement it by yourself and write some tests for that feature and send me pull request. In this release I have included commits from five new contributors and two existing contributors - so it is not so hard to start contributing to open source!

Readme Driven Development

One of the worst parts of Oracle enhanced adapter so far was that for new users it was quite hard to understand how to start to use it and what are all additional features that Oracle enhanced adapter provides. There were many blog posts in this blog, there were wiki pages, there were posts in discussion forums. But all this information was in different places and some posts were already outdated and therefore for new users it was hard to understand how to start.

After reading about Readme Driven Development and watching presentation about Readme Driven Development I knew that README of Oracle enhanced adapter was quite bad and should be improved (in my other projects I am already trying to be better but this was my first one :)).

Therefore I have written new README of Oracle enhanced adapter which includes main installation, configuration, usage and troubleshooting tasks which previously was scattered across different other posts. If you find that some important information is missing or outdated then please submit patches to README as well so that it stays up to date and with relevant information.

If you have any questions please use discussion group or report issues at GitHub or post comments here.

Recently I has not posted any new posts as I was busy with some new projects as well as during May attended several conferences and in some I also did presentations. Here I will post slides from these conferences. If you are interested in some of these topics then ask me to come to you as well and talk about these topics :)

Agile Riga Day

In March I spoke at Agile Riga Day (organized by Agile Latvia) about my experience and recommendations how to adopt Agile practices in iterative style.

RailsConf

In May I travelled to RailsConf in Baltimore and I hosted traditional Rails on Oracle Birds of a Feather session there and gave overview about how to contribute to ActiveRecord Oracle enhanced adapter.

TAPOST

Then I participated in our local Theory and Practice of Software Testing conference and there I promoted use of Ruby as test scripting language.

RailsWayCon

And lastly I participated in Euruko and RailsWayCon conferences in Berlin. In RailsWayCon my first presentation was about multidimensional data analysis with JRuby and mondrian-olap gem. I also published mondrian-olap demo project that I used during presentation.

And second RailsWayCon presentation was about CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Jasmine that I am recently using to build rich web user interfaces. This was quite successful presentation as there were many questions and also many participants were encouraged to try out CoffeeScript and Backbone.js. I also published my demo application that I used for code samples during presentation.

Next conferences

Now I will rest for some time from conferences :) But then I will attend FrozenRails in Helsinki and I will present at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. See you there!

I just released Oracle enhanced adapter version 1.3.2 with latest bug fixes and enhancements.

Bug fixes and improvements

Main fixes and improvements are the following:

• Previous version 1.3.1 was checking if environment variable TNS_NAME is set and only then used provided database connection parameter (in database.yml) as TNS connection alias and otherwise defaulted to connection to localhost with provided database name. This was causing issues in many setups.
  Therefore now it is simplified that if you provide only database parameter in database.yml then it by default will be used as TNS connection alias or TNS connection string.
• Numeric username and/or password in database.yml will be automatically converted to string (previously you needed to quote them using "...").
• Database connection pool and JNDI connections are now better supported for JRuby on Tomcat and JBoss application servers.
• NLS connection parameters are supported via environment variables or in database.yml. For example, if you need to have NLS_DATE_FORMAT in your database session to be DD-MON-YYYY then either you specify nls_date_format: DD-MON-YYYY in database.yml for particular database connection or set ENV['NLS_DATE_FORMAT'] = 'DD-MON-YYYY' in e.g. config/initializers/oracle.rb. You can see the list of all NLS parameters in source code.
  It might be necessary to specify these NLS session parameters only if you work with some existing legacy database which has, for example, some stored procedures that require particular NLS settings. If this is new database just for Rails purposes then there is no need to change any settings.
• If you have defined foreign key constraints then they are now correctly dumped in db/schema.rb after all table definitions. Previously they were dumped after corresponding table which sometimes caused that schema could not be recreated from schema dump because it tried to load constraint which referenced table which has not yet been defined.
• If you are using NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 data types then now NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 type values are correctly quoted with N'...' in SQL statements.

Upcoming changes in Rails 3.1

Meanwhile Oracle enhanced adapter is updated to pass all ActiveRecord unit tests in Rails development master branch and also updated according to Arel changes. Arel library is responsible for all SQL statement generation in Rails 3.0.

Rails 3.0.3 is using Arel version 2.0 which was full rewrite of Arel 1.0 (that was used initial Rails 3.0 version) and as a result of this rewrite it is much faster and now Rails 3.0.3 ActiveRecord is already little bit faster than in ActiveRecord in Rails 2.3.

There are several improvements in Rails master branch which are planned for Rails 3.1 version which are already supported by Oracle enhanced adapter. One improvement is that ActiveRecord will support prepared statement caching (initially for standard simple queries like find by primary key) which will reduce SQL statement parsing time and memory usage (and probably Oracle DBAs will complain less about Rails dynamic SQL generation :)). The other improvement is that ActiveRecord will correctly load included associations with more than 1000 records (which currently fails with ORA-01795 error).

But I will write more about these improvements sometime later when Rails 3.1 will be released :)

Install

As always you can install Oracle enhanced adapter on any Ruby platform (Ruby 1.8.7 or Ruby 1.9.2 or JRuby 1.5) with

gem install activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter

If you have any questions please use discussion group or report issues at GitHub or post comments here. And the best way how to contribute is to fix some issue or create some enhancement and send me pull request at GitHub.

Initial version of ruby-plsql-spec gem was using RSpec version 1.3. But recently RSpec 2.0 was released which API is not compatible with previous RSpec 1.x API and as a result plsql-spec utility was failing if just RSpec was upgraded to version 2.0.

Therefore I updated also ruby-plsql-spec to use latest RSpec 2.0 gem and released ruby-plsql-spec gem version 0.2.1. You can install the latest version with

gem install ruby-plsql-spec

Upgrade from previous version

If you previously already installed initial ruby-plsql-spec version 0.1.0 then you need to update your spec/spec_helper.rb file to use RSpec 2.0. You can do it by running one more time

plsql-spec init

which will check which current files are different from the latest templates. You need to update just spec_helper.rb file. When you will be prompted to overwrite spec_helper.rb file then at first you can enter d to see differences between current file and new template. If you have not changed original spec_helper.rb file then you will see just one difference

- Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
+ RSpec.configure do |config|

You can then answer y and this file will be updated. When you will be prompted to overwrite other files then you can review the changes in the same way and decide if you want them to be overwritten or not (e.g. do not overwrite database.yml file as it has your specific database connection settings).

HTML output option

In addition plsql-spec utility now has --html option which will generate test results report as HTML report. It might be useful for usage in text editors where you can define which command line utility to run when pressing some shortcut key and then display generated HTML output report. If you will execute

plsql-spec run --html

then it will generate HTML report in test-results.html file. You can override this file name as well using --html output_file_name.html option.

Questions or suggestions

If you have any other feature suggestions or questions about ruby-plsql-spec then please post comments here or report any bugs at GitHub issues page.