Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions:

• GA it’s a great piece of software for analyzing trends, keywords and content.
• GA it’s staying on another server than your web server and the communication is uni-directional. This means GA will get information about your site, but you cannot implement real-time decisions based on GA
• GA it’s free, same Urchin, so if you own a blog or have a small budget, these will be your choices
• Both RTD Server and RUEI are licensed products with a price per processor over 80K USD, which makes them a choice just for big enterprises
• RTD Server will be able to serve real-time content based on your behavior, just like Amazon is doing
• GA is not able to track 404-pages, loading times, code execution times

To summarize: if you’re big, go with RTD and/or RUEI. If you’re not so big, stay with GA, Urchin or other free stuff like them.

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According to the last statement of direction, the timeframe for certification/support of 11g on Windows Server 2008 is 1st quarter 2009.

However, probably most of you know the difference between compatible and supported. In the end we’ve got both 10gR2 and 11gR1 successfully installed.

Last but not least I want to share a specific issue that appeared (Metalink note 729744.1): when trying to run DBCA to create the database, it get stucked at 2% and throws a strange ORA-12560 error. This is due to the AD controller installed on the same machine.
You’ll hit this issue when trying to install any OTN-downloaded version (10.2.0.3, 11.1.0.6).

How to overcome this:

1. save the AD settings, uninstall it, install Oracle Database and reinstall AD.
2. install on a non-controller machine
3. (recommended) install the Oracle DB software.
   - If 10gR2 install 10.2.0.4 Patch 14 or patch 7677780 and then use DBCA to create the database
   - If 11gR1 install 11.1.0.7 Patch and then use DBCA to create the database (I didn’t test this version, but should work).

Good luck! … and please share with me your experience

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