Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’ve finished the presentations now for the
Desktop Conference 2006
next week; the one on XML Publisher is the one that I gave the other week at the
UKOUG BIRT SIG (with the addition of a XML Publisher Desktop demo), whilst the
OLAP Best Practices one is a development of the two articles I did last year for
DBAZine.

If you’re "attending" the Desktop Conference, the dates and time of the two
sessions are as follows - the links are to downloadable copies of the slides and
accompanying paper:

• "XML Publisher - What’s It All About?", Tuesday, February 21st, 7.00pm
  GMT, 11.00am PT, 2.00pm ET

"Oracle XML Publisher is the hot new Oracle BI and reporting tool that
lets you build production-quality reports using a Microsoft Word add-in.
This presentation looks at what XML Publisher does, how it works, how you
use it, and whether it’s a replacement for Oracle Reports."

Download
MS Powerpoint Presentation
Download MS
Word Document

• "Best Practices for the Oracle Database 10g OLAP Option", Wednesday
  February 22nd, 7.00pm GMT, 11.00am PT, 2.00pm ET

"The OLAP Option to Oracle 10g gives you the ability
to store multidimensional cubes in your Oracle Database and perform OLAP
queries on them. This presentation and demonstration provides best practices
for designing, loading, aggregating, and querying Oracle OLAP cubes and
takes a look at what’s in 10gR2."

Download
MS Powerpoint Presentation
Download MS
Word Document

The presentation on XML Publisher takes a look at the idea and positioning
behind XML Publisher, how it fits in with the existing Discoverer and Portal
tools, and takes an in-depth look at the new 5.6 "Enterprise" release of XML
Publisher.

As I said, I’ll also do a demo of XML Publisher’s Microsoft Word integration,
and talk about how you might integrate XML Publisher into a full BI Solution.

The Oracle OLAP Best Practices paper is based on the DBAZine articles (here,
here) I
did last year, with the sections on memory management and sparsity handling
rewritten. If you’re someone who’s downloaded Oracle 10g and Analytic Workspace
Manager, built a cube but don’t really know what all the options are for, this
presentation could be useful as it goes through the significance of dimension
ordering, sparsity handling, how Oracle stores the AW data and how you can do
things like tracing.

Interestingly, I was hoping to put something together that gave a foolproof,
"if the OLAP engine is doing X, then do Y"-type paper, but the OLAP Engine just
isn’t instrumented enough to be able to do the same sort of tuning that you do
with the database, or at least I don’t yet understand it in enough detail yet to
do this. I’m also due to present the same paper at either the Collaborate’06
event in April or the ODTUG Kaleidoscope event in June, and I’m hoping to expand
on the sparsity handling, dimension ordering and partitioning elements of the
paper for these events.

I’ll put an article together after the two presentation and report back on
what it’s like to present at a virtual conference; I’ll also take a look at some
of the other presentations that’ll be on after me as well - Sue Harper’s one on
SQL Developer (a.k.a. Project Raptor) looks good, as do Kent Graziano’s "Agile
Methods and Data Warehousing", Nick Goodman’s "OWB10gR2 : Late, but Packed With
Features!" and Lewis Cunningham’s "Implementing Oracle10g Security". Also, if
you didn’t get along to Open World last year but you

heard me talking about Keith Laker’s Oracle OLAP and Oracle Data Mining
presentation ("The
Cube Factory") then you’ll be glad to know that Keith’s running it again on
Tuesday 21st at 9.00pm GMT; Keith discusses a way of performing OLAP analysis
using a large number of customer attribute dimensions, helping the user pick the
most appropriate attributes using Oracle Data Mining, and we’ve used a variation
on this approach on the QDecisions product that I’ll be showing off at
Collaborate’06.

Finally, if you’re in the mood for reading about Oracle BI&W, here’s a couple
of links to the presentations and accompanying papers I put together for last
November’s UKOUG Conference:

• "Oracle Business Intelligence 10g : The Complete Picture"

"Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, together with the Oracle 10g
database, offers an end-to-end solution for business intelligence, reporting
and data warehousing. This tutorial uses Oracle Warehouse Builder to build a
data warehouse, then analyze the results using OracleBI Discoverer, Oracle
OLAP, OracleBI Reports and OracleAS Portal. Aimed at those new to Oracle BI
or who want to find out what’s new with Oracle 10g, the presentation also
looks at what’s new for BI&W with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle
BI 10gR2 Phase 2."

Download MS Powerpoint Presentation

Download Adobe Acrobat Document

• "Advanced OLAP Analysis With OracleBI Discoverer and the Oracle 10gR2
  OLAP Option"

"Just what is the OLAP Option, and what extra does it add to Oracle
Discoverer? What can you do with it that you can’t do with relational
reporting? How can you use the calculation and analysis features of the OLAP
Option in your business applications?

This presentation and live demonstration looks at what OLAP can do for
your organisation, and how you can use Oracle 10gR2, OracleBI Discoverer and
Analytic Workspace Manager to extend the features of Oracle Discoverer, and
discusses how you can use the calculation and forecasting features of the
OLAP Option in your business applications."

Download MS Powerpoint Presentation

Download Adobe Acrobat Document

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