Business Intelligence - helping your company plan for the future

If your company has been able to grow despite the tough economic times, you must be doing things right. However, growth can be challenging if you don’t have the right base set up to support it. The more you grow, the more activities you have, it looks like you can´t even go through all your emails anymore, let alone to think about whether your software meets your business needs or not. However, in order to support your expansion and reach the full potential of your business, you will need up-to-date information to support your decisions. You’ll need to be able to monitor and manage every aspect of your company, so that every part performs at its best in order for the whole to continue growing.

SAP Business Intelligence Solutions provide fact-based, quality information to help you identify and implement business controls. On top of that, you can also answer your  employee´s requests for mobility, as all the insight can be made available on mobile devices so they can always be in touch with the latest information available, no matter where they are. You will also have the option to adapt your solution as your business grows, no matter if you’re handling 100 transactions, or 1 million transactions.

At Clariba we can offer solutions for small companies (such as a finance and a sales dashboard we have developed to go on top of SAP Business One, the ERP for SMEs) all the way up to large enterprises (such as the SAP HANA proof of concept we are delivering for one of our biggest telco clients). No matter how big or small you are, you will need to streamline your processes and be able to make fact-based decisions to drive your business forward, and business intelligence can help you do just that.

Take Doha Bank for example, a SAP business intelligence solution developed by Clariba allowed them to be the first to respond to new reporting regulations and on top of that reduce their time to produce internal financial reports in 80%.

Although most of us know that business intelligence plays an important role on planning for the future, researches point out that only 27% of companies do a better job of using information than their competitors and 74% of companies have difficulty defining business requirements (source). Would your company benefit from SAP Business Intelligence Solutions? Do you want to know how we can help you pave the way to a top-notch BI environment?

Contact us on info@clariba.com or leave a comment below.

Big Data & SAP HANA...What are those again?

After the first year of SAP HANA and the constant debate around Big Data, its almost certain that you heard about it once or twice already - but are you 100% clear of what Big Data is and what SAP HANA can do for your company?

Big Data

Boosted by the evolution of mobility and advances in technology, we see new data sources emerge continually. It is forecasted that  by 2020, 50 billion Internet-enabled devices will be connected to the Web generating  44 times more data annually than we did three years ago.

This growth can be the fortune or the ruin for a company. This depends on their knowledge of Big Data and whether they see it as a challenge or opportunity.

In order to understand what can be denominated BigData, there are a number of factors to be taken into account. Recently, Adrian Simpson and Timo Elliott talked about Big Data and the ‘Four Vs’ – which stand for volume, velocity, variety and validity (see the studio discussion What is Big Data here).

There has been some discussion generated after this, with  disagreement about how many Vs there are. While some defend only three (volume, velocity and variety), others say there are more, such as veracity, virility and viscosity. As an example, read the blog  Beyond the Three V’s of Big Data and make up your own opinion about the topic.

The fact of the matter is that Big Data is already a reality. In order to stay competitive, companies will have to be able to analyze their growing data effectively, allowing for timely response and proactive actions taken after spotting trends.

SAP HANA allows companies to do just that. SAP HANA is a modern platform for real-time analytics and applications. It enables organizations to analyze business operations based on a large volume and variety of detailed data in real time. The main benefits of SAP HANA include:

• 3600x faster reporting speed
• Make business decisions in real-time
• Accelerate business performance
• Unlocks new insights
• Increase productivity and efficiency

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, SAP HANA is one of the fastest growing products SAP has launched, and the explanation for this exponential growth can be found on ten reasons customers choose SAP HANA Clariba is working with SAP HANA in conjunction with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence solutions so that companies can work with real-time BI information and be on top of changing business realities as events unfold. As the first proofs-of-concept succeed   at our clients, we realize that this combination of Big Data analysis and market-leading business intelligence from SAP BusinessObjects is the way forward to unleash the insights from a company´s databases.

If you want to know more, check the  SAP HANA Blog or follow some of the top 50 Big Data Twitter Influencers.

Have any doubts or want to know more about the combination of Business Intelligence and Big Data with SAP HANA? Leave a comment below.

Clariba and Exxova bring you Exxova´s MyBI Mobile at GITEX 2012

Visit Clariba and Exxova at GITEX Technology Week 2012, check out Exxova MyBI in action and enter the drawing for a 10-user implementation of Exxova MyBI Cloud!

Clariba and Exxova will be present at the SAP stand at the GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK 2012, the #1 technology fair in the MEASA region, and considered by many, as one of the top information and communications technology (ICT) trade fairs in the world. Over 138,000 ICT Professionals, 18,000 C-level executives and more than 80% of the top ICT brands worldwide are expected in GITEX 2012, which will run from 14 to 18 October at the Dubai World Trade Center.

As GITEX continues to uncover the latest IT trends, like the shift to enterprise mobility accelerating at a rapid rate on upcoming years, it is unsurprising that we find the “Mobile, Apps & Content” area at the exhibition floor. This is where you will find the SAP Stand. With Mobility at the core of their innovation agenda, and heavy investments to stay at the forefront of the enterprise mobility market, SAP will be present at GITEX , showcasing its leading solutions in mobile device management, mobile applications and development platform among others.

The SAP stand will also feature partners such as Clariba ─ an expert provider of business intelligence solutions and a specialist in SAP BusinessObjects working with Exxova Worldwide ─ global supplier of MyBI Mobile.

The two companies have partnered to bring Exxova's MyBI Mobile™ solution to the EMEA region. MyBI Mobile is a business intelligence mobility solution, which allows users to instantly access enterprise-wide BI content from mobile devices. It provides business leaders with real-time mission-critical data whether in the boardroom or airport terminal. All existing content is available without the need for rewriting or re-platforming so you can enjoy speed, flexibility, application breadth and simplicity.

• Meet us at our joint pod within the SAP stand in Hall 6, Stand #57 for a hands-on demo of Exxova´s MyBI Mobile and for insights on enterprise mobility and information management from Marc Haberland and David Monks.
• We also invite you to attend our Expert Presentation ─ Information at the Point of Decision with MyBI Mobile ─ at the Seminar Area of the SAP stand, on the 17^th October at 12:30, presented by David Monks.
• By visiting us you will be able to enter the drawing for a full implementation of Exxova MyBI Cloud for 1 year for 10 users (worth $5,000!).

“We are excited to go to GITEX; it has become one of the most important ICT events of the year. As a BI services and solutions provider, Clariba believes that it’s important for the entire SAP BusinessObjects BI portfolio to run on multiple mobile platforms," says Marc Haberland, Managing Director of Clariba. “Exxova’s MyBI Mobile solution is a very cost-effective, easy-to-use option to deliver that without compromising data security, and we think this is a great fit with the GITEX technology week, where attendants come to see innovative solutions that can help improve their work processes” Marc comments.

David Monks, Vice President of Exxova EMEA, complements, saying that “the opportunity to showcase our innovative MyBI Mobile solution delivering broad support of Business Intelligence across the SAP  BusinessObjects family and beyond in conjunction with our partners Clariba and SAP is an exciting event for Exxova. We look forward  to showing how easy it is to deliver mobile BI using Dashboards Design (Xcelsius) Flash-based dashboards, Webi Reports, Crystal and even Explorer onto mobile devices like the iPad without any re-engineering whatsoever and with only 1 or 2 days installation time”.

______________________________________________________________ SAP, Clariba & Exxova can be found in Hall 6, Stand #57 – Mobile, Apps & Content area

For more information on GITEX Technology week visit www.gitex.com

For more information on Clariba visit www.clariba.com or contact us at info@clariba.com.

For more information on Exxova Worldwide visit www.exxova.com or contact us at gitex2012@exxova.com.

SAP HANA Sandbox Implementation for In-house Tests

SAP HANA gets you moving at the speed of light

It is early days, but Clariba is at the forefront here once again with our initial SAP HANA installations. Indeed, SAP HANA is positioning properly in the starting grid of the BI stack for new deployments. That is very good news for all of us who are in the SAP World. However, even though everyone is (theoretically) aware of what SAP HANA is and its main benefits, not so many consultants know what the real options for having that in-house are and therefore they are not able to start making the first tests and getting their hands dirty with the tool. This is really important as we do not usually know when a real SAP HANA project may come up in our portfolio and we want to be ready for that. The main purpose of this blog entry is to shed some light on this topic.As mentioned earlier, surely almost all of our Clariba blog readers already have heard about SAP HANA. For all those who are still late let me pinpoint the primary concepts of it. Basically SAP HANA is a Database Server taking advantage of the SAP In-Memory Computing technology. This technology empowers dramatically the entire business – from shop floor to boardroom – by giving real-time business processes and applications instantaneous access to data, enabling real-time business applications and analytics system.

Back to the point, nowadays we have 2 real options for having our own SAP HANA environment up-and-running in our office. Depending on our budget and our requirements we can go for the cheapest option which is to apply for a virtual instance of HANA in the cloud or the most expensive one which is acquiring an official hardware appliance from one of the leading hardware partners of SAP.

The first and cheapest option is to go for a SAP HANA Application located virtually in the Cloud. This is an on-demand application environment and SAP offers a range of services with that. Nowadays SAP is offering SAP HANA Database environment in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2). This is a complete fully working instance which can be accessible through SAP HANA Studio with really nice performance (depending on the requirements the instance may be created with more or less HW resources).

Under this context, before creating our SAP HANA instance there are two prerequisites which have to be met. First thing is to ensure you are a member of the Sap Community Network (SCN) - you can register here. This process is totally free of charge. Second is registering in Amazon Web Services (AWS). You will be requested to use your credit card because although registering is free, the charges will come up as soon as we create our SAP HANA instance. Amazon charges money from that point on. Even when the instance is stopped they will still be charging. Regarding the costs, they can be foreseen in advance using their own pricing calculator which can be found here. Just to give an idea, the smallest instance costs 50$/month with a 25h per week usage. We definitively recommend terminating the instance once the test is completed. The entire process to create the AWS instance can be found here.

The second option is absolutely the best but also the most expensive one. The idea is to purchase an actual brand new SAP HANA rack data base server. Currently SAP is in partnership with Intel, IBM, Fujitsu, Dell, Cisco and HP companies so you can contact directly with them and check their actual prices. They have a nice variety of models in order to meet all customers` needs. It is only with this sort of installation that you will get the best SAP HANA performance. Just to give you an idea of the remarkable speed in one of those machines, our consultants loaded more than 250 Million records in our sandbox system and they were achieving less than 5 seconds of average response time for any query we run against the database. Not bad at all, is it?

Finally, I would like to mention that you might find other options in forums for using a laptop with a fresh SAP HANA installation that involve altering installation code. This solution is not supported by SAP; therefore Clariba strongly discourages you to use it. The 2 options listed above will give you much better performance.

In conclusion, SAP HANA has become a reality in our BI world. As time goes by, our SAP customer datasets are exponentially growing and will eventually exceed the abilities of their commonly used tools. Transition towards SAP HANA will be a must for them, but also for us. Ensure you are ready for that by getting to know the tool. You know what options you have now, so go for it.

If you have any tips or questions, please leave a comment below.

Enterprise Mobility - Efficiency that Keeps Customers Near

The current explosion in enterprise mobility means that there’s never been a better opportunity for businesses to engage with their customers more effectively.

With the right mobile apps and connectivity, businesses can have access to the right information at the right time. This lets them answer customer queries efficiently, resolve issues satisfactorily or delight customers with well-targeted communications or offers.

When customers are happy, that’s when they stay put and spread the good word.

Through enterprise mobility, organisations can increase efficiency by eliminating paperwork, reducing travel time, managing tasks, calendars, alerts and more.

With 91% of the world’s leading brands having at least one SAP mobile app, they’re number one in the enterprise mobility application market. They also offer over 200 mobile apps – a range that spans industry, line of business and analytics. And there are 60 million users who trust the SAP Sybase Unwired Platform and Afaria Mobile Device Management solution.

Users include Asian Paints (India’s largest paint company). The company used Sybase Unwired Platform to make data and information about its 200 plus products easily available to its 1700 sales people in the field (See Asian Paints success story here). And what is a best example than SAP itself running their SAP mobility platform and realizing all benefits it can bring (see SAP runs SAP Mobile here).

With SAP mobile solutions, businesses can create an enterprise mobility strategy that aligns with their broader IT strategy and helps them engage effectively with their valued customers.

Clariba as a valued SAP Partner in Europe and the Middle East can help you define your mobility needs and help you to come up with a solution tailored to your requirements, helping you to make decisions faster, from anywhere at anytime.

We have also partnered with Exxova to provide our client with Exxova MyBI Mobile, an application that allows users to securely and instantly access enterprise-wide content held in their SAP BusinessObjects environment from mobile devices instantly, without re-designing anything.

If you wish to know more about how mobility can make you run faster and more effectively, contact Clariba. You can also learn more about enterprise mobility through the Top 10 Blogs / News Sites for Mobile.

SAP BI Services - Part 1

During the last couple of years I have been part of a team developing quite a few SAB BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius). In order to develop them, one of the key requirements is to have a consistent data source. Historically we have used all sorts of techniques that SAP BusinessObjects has made available, from QAAWS to Live Office. Each method has its pros and cons and there are situations on which using one over another makes sense.

On this article I will focus on the last method I have discovered: BI Services.

Comparing the three methods most frequently used, the following table shows their common characteristics as well as differences:

The main advantages I see on using the BI services method are:

• Using W as an aggregation engine
• Robust Query/Block organization
• Enterprise re-usability
• Filter capabilities at SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) connector level
• Additional Metadata
• Performance increase by using Webi servers engine/cache

Basic Requirements

Now let’s talk about how we can implement this solution in our Business environment.

As indicated above the BI Service is dependent on a WebI document. This means that it gets its data from a WebI report block. Also note that it is only possible to use this functionality if you have the WebI Rich Client application installed and you have enterprise permissions on the application. For our particular example we are using a client tools installation with version 3.1 SP 2.4.

Configuring the BI Service CMS Server

If you meet the two above requirements then let’s go ahead an open the WebI report that contains the block that will serve as the data source for our BI service.

Once the report is open you will see the on the top right of the WebI Rich client application.

We need to mark the check box to display the BI Services panel. The following panel will appear on the right side of the application:

 

Now we need to configure the CMS server we will be accessing by clicking on the manage servers button.

 

Click on Add and enter the details corresponding to your SAP BusinessObjects system. The data input parameters are: CMS name and dsws URL (which should be something like this http://yourserver:port/dsws)

 

Once the server has been configured, select it from the list and click on the refresh button so all BI Web Services available are displayed.

 

A list of BI Web Services will appear if any exist in the system. The BI Web Services can be organized in folders and each BI Web Services can have 1 or more blocks of data. We will talk more about these organization structures later on this blog.

 

You can see the 3 levels of organization in the screenshot below:

 

In order to consume from one of the BI Services available you will need to use the WSDL url which is one of the properties that appear when you select the block you wish to consume from the list.

Click on the three dots button on the right so you can see the BI Service definition.

 

The BI service description should look similar to the screenshot below.

NOTE: If you can’t see a page similar to the  one below, then the BI service URL is not accessible from the machine you are querying from and that might cause trouble later on. 

Click on the wsdl link.

 

Creating a new BI Service

Select the block from the WebI report and right click on it. A context menu will appear with its first value being “Publish block”. Select this option.

 

In some cases the below warning might appear. If the WebI report you are using as a source is not published in the SAP BusinessObjects enterprise repository then you can’t create a new service.

 

This is the initial screen for the BI service publishing wizard:

 

You need to, define a name for the block. The block is the smallest piece of organization for the BI service and it is equivalent to the table you have selected as a data source.

 

The block can be part of an existing BI service or you can create a new one. Each BI Service can contain one or many blocks. Also the BI Service can be organized in folders. All of these selections are done at the following screen:

For publishing a block on an existing BI service just select the BI service and press the Publish button.

To create a new service, select the folder and click on the Create button below. To create a new folder click on the New Folder button on the upper right side.

 

So now that your BI service has been created it is time to start consuming it with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius).

In the next part of this blog we will talk about SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) connectivity to BI services and what we can do to manipulate our new data source.

If you have any questions or tips, leave a comment below.

Implementing SAP Rapid Marts Xi 3.2: Lessons Learned

I would like to share with you two lessons learned about the implementation of SAP Rapid Marts XI 3.2, version for SAP Solutions. In our particular case the customer didn´t allow us make any modification to the out-of-the-box solution, and this must be taken into account when reading the article.

Lesson 1: Don´t be scared by the TSV_TNEW_PAGE_ALLOC_FAILED Error

If part of your implementation of SAP Rapid Marts includes General Ledger, Inventory or Cost Center you will probably have to perform a massive extraction of information from SAP ERP during your initial load. Most probably your customer will have been working with their ERP for quite some time, and you are likely to face the following error:

At this point, you will possibly start looking at configuration of SAP Data Services or you will start trying to tune the SAP ERP configuration in order to achieve the end-to-end execution. In general terms, you will have a headache trying to solve this problem and most likely none of the configurations will work…

The truth is out there… After many hours trying to tune configurations you will understand that the only solution is to modify the ABAP extraction itself… BAD NEWS: your customer does not allow you to do this because this means altering the out-of-the-box product. GOOD NEWS: the guys from SAP Support already tackled this problem and they published the following SAP Note 1446203 - Multiple Query Transforms in ABAP Data Flows, there they clearly explain that your conclusion is correct: this error is a memory allocation error on the SAP solutions server, it indicates that the SAP solutions server has run out of memory for the SAP Data Services generated ABAP program.

You will find an attachment in the SAP Note with some ATLs where they basically tune all the ABAP extractions of the SAP Rapid Marts XI 3.2 package, after applying this ATL to the out-of-the-box solution your extraction will work like a charm.

Lesson 2: How to improve performance of Delta Load for FINANCIAL_DOCUMENT_FACT

This lesson is useful to you if SAP Rapid Mart XI 3.2 General Ledger is part of your implementation.

After finishing the initial load of this SAP Rapid Mart you will start running the delta load. At this moment you may be shocked by the bad performance. Depending of your requirement this delta load can be something simply not affordable.

In basic terms this delta load tries to rebuild all the information of the current fiscal year. We ran an extensive performance analysis and the conclusion was clear: the logic for the processing of delta loads to the table FINANCIAL_DOCUMENT_FACT was causing serious performance issues to our environment.

Only one possible solution was in sight: introduce a new logic for the processing of delta loads to the table FINANCIAL_DOCUMENT_FACT. Breathe deeply because indeed this means to re-invent the SAP solution and this can clearly jeopardize your project.

We decided to come back with this topic to the SAP Support team looking for a “magical solution” and they got it! One more time there was a solution on the SAP Note 1557975 - Poor Performance of Delta Load for FINANCIAL_DOCUMENT_FACT.

The SAP note clearly defines a scenario like ours and provides an ATL file to tune the delta load for the FINANCIAL_DOCUMENT_FACT. Again, after applying the solution provided the delta load worked perfectly.

As conclusion, I would like to mention that after many years working with different support teams I´m impressed with the capability and escalation levels in the SAP Support team. Like many other support teams you may have to push to get a solution but I don´t know many other support teams that can escalate your request up to have a discussion with the director of development of a product or provide you with solutions that fit perfectly to your environments.

That´s all folks! I hope these two tips help you to speed up your SAP Rapid Marts implementations. If you have any doubts please leave a comment below.

Tips for installing SAP BusinessObjects BI4 in Spanish

The Spanish installation of SAP BusinessObjects BI4 is said to frequently crash, and even when it does not, something is still wrong in the server side so SAP BusinessObjects installation administration console does not work as it should and certain formulas used in the front-end side malfunction. This article explains some tricks that can be applied when installing SAP BusinessObjects in Spanish so customers can successfully migrate to the new SAP BO BI4. Folders Security Configuration

When configuring the security for a folder in the SAP BusinessObjects administration console, an issue appears. This can be easily reproduced by installing the software in Spanish, proceeding to enter in CMC and start configuring security. The following error can be seen when entering in Folders Top Level Folder Security:

"A server error occurred during security batch commit: Request 0 of type 44 failed with server error : Plugin Manager error: Unable to locate the requested plugin CrystalEnterprise.ScopeBatch on the server. (FWB 00006) "

There is no other solution rather than to change the Regional Settings of the server from Spanish (Spain) to English (United Kingdom), then this issue is solved.

UserResponse Formula Use

An issue occurs in WebIntelligence when Preferred Viewing Locale is Spanish and Users refresh reports Prompts: A numeric prompt is interpreted as a text with a wrong scientific format when the =UserResponse() formula is used.

The issue can be reproduced taking one object from the official SAP “STS Southeast Demo” Universe, retrieving one object with a prompt and applying the UserResponse() formula as indicated below

In the example stated above the UserResponse() formula should be evaluated to “201010” instead of “2.0101e5”. This can cause serious issues as it is a change Vs. previous software versions because this could be included in many formulas and filters, and could cause a migration project with reports using this frequently used formula to be dramatically extended.

A workaround for this is, for the time being, to keep the Preferred Viewing Locale in English for every user who refreshes information.

So, summarizing, the pieces of advice proposed for a successful installation in Spanish language are:

• Keep your server with Regional Settings of the server in English (United Kingdom)
• Configure your BI LaunchPad users to keep the Preferred Viewing Locale in English
• Keep the BI LaunchPad users Product Locale property setting to Spanish (Spain)

As a result, users will visualise the whole front-end in Spanish language with no errors.

This solution has been tested in latest 4.0 SP4 which includes FeaturePack 3.

The benefit of these workarounds is to provide the market of Spanish language customers with the ability to start migrating to the new SAP BI4 platform with success, and enjoy the product in Spanish language with no bugs.  Hope this helps. If you wish to leave your comment or opinion, please feel free to do so below!

B-tree vs Bitmap indexes: Consequences of Indexing - Indexing Strategy for your Oracle Data Warehouse Part 2

On my previous blog post B-tree vs Bitmap indexes - Indexing Strategy for your Oracle Data Warehouse I answered two questions related to Indexing: Which kind of indexes can we use and on which tables/fields we should use them. As I promised at the end of my blog, now it´s time to answer the third question: what are the consequences of indexing  in terms of time (query time, index build time) and storage?

Consequences in terms of time and storage

To tackle this topic I’ll use a test database with a very simplified star schema: 1 fact table for the General Ledger accounts balances and 4 dimensions - the date, the account, the currency and the branch (like in a bank).

Simplified Star Schema

To give an idea of the table size, Fact_General_Ledger has 4,5 million rows, Dim_Date 14 000, Dim_Account 3 000, Dim_Branch and Dim_Currency less than 200.

We’ll suppose here that the users could query the data with filter on the date, branch code, currency code, account code, and the 3 levels of the Balance Sheet hierarchy (DIM_ACCOUNT.LVLx_BS) . We assume that the descriptions are not used in filters, but in results only.

Here is the query we will use as a reference:

Select

d.date_date,

a.account_code,

b.branch_code,

c.currency_code,

f.balance_num

from fact_general_ledger f

join dim_account a             on f.account_key = a.account_key

join dim_date d                    on f.date_key = d.date_key

join dim_branch b              on f.branch_key = b.branch_key

join dim_currency c           on f.currency_key = c.currency_key

where

a.lvl3_bs = 'Deposits With Banks' and

d.date_date = to_date('16/01/2012', 'DD/MM/YYYY') and

b.branch_code = 1 and

c.currency_code = 'QAR' -- I live in Qatar ;-)

So, what are the results in terms of time and storage?

Time and Storage Comparison

Some of the conclusions we can draw from this table are:

• Using indexes pays off: queries are really faster (about 100 times), whatever the chosen index type is.

• Concerning the query time, the index type doesn’t seem to really matter for tables which are not that big. It would probably change for a fact table with 10 billion rows. There seems however to be an advantage to bitmap indexes and especially bitmap join indexes (have a look at the explanation plan cost column).

• Storage is clearly in favor of bitmap and bitmap join indexes

• Index build time is clearly in favor of b-tree. I’ve not tested the index update time, but the theory says it’s much quicker for b-tree indexes as well.

Ok, I´m convinced to use Indexes. How do I create/maintain one?

The syntax for creating b-tree and bitmap indexes is similar:

Create Bitmap Index Index_Name ON Table_Name(FieldName)

In the case of b-tree indexes, simply remove the word “Bitmap” from the query above.

The syntax for bitmap join indexes is longer but still easy to understand:

create bitmap index ACCOUNT_CODE_BJ

on fact_general_ledger(dim_account.account_code)

from fact_general_ledger,dim_account

where fact_general_ledger.account_key = dim_account.account_key

Note that during your ETL, you’d better drop/disable your bitmap / bitmap join indexes, and re-create/rebuild them afterwards, rather than update them. It is supposed to be quicker (however I’ve not made any tests).

The difference between drop/re-create and disable/rebuild is that when you disable an index, the definition is kept. So you need a single line to rebuild it rather than many lines for the full creation. However the index build times will be similar.

To drop an index: “drop index INDEX_NAME”

To disable an index: “alter index INDEX_NAME unusable”

To rebuild an index: “alter index INDEX_NAME rebuild”

Conclusion

The conclusion is clear: USE INDEXES! When properly used, they can really boost query response times. Think about using them in your ETL as well: making lookups can be much faster with indexes.

If you’d like to go any further I can only recommend that you read the Oracle Data Warehousing Guide. To get it just look for it on the internet (and don’t forget to specify the version of your database – 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, etc.). It’s a quite interesting and complete document.