Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d signed up to do a seminar
series with Oracle
Education in EMEA, and I noticed earlier today that the first
advertisement, for the seminar in Holland in August on the 29th and
30th, has just
gone up on their website. The venue is

Utrecht (De Meern), the cost is €1140,-, and you can register

using this form.

I’ve also had dates confirmed for
Denmark and Norway in October, the UK has confirmed for 31st October/1st
November, Estonia in going to be in September or October, and
Slovakia will be in October. The seminar will be a two-day “business
intelligence masterclass” where I’ll take delegates through the
complete Oracle Business Intelligence architecture, starting off with
the ETL process using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2, BI publishing
using XML Publisher, OLAP analysis using Analytic Workspace Manager and
OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP, through to “enterprise” business
intelligence using the new Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Answers,
Dashboard and Delivers. The seminar is aimed at developers, will be
quite technical, and take a good look at some of the more “advanced”
business intelligence features that existing users of Discoverer or
Reports might find useful.

A seminar series like this is something I’ve been keen to do
for a while now, as most of the presentations I get to do at user
groups are generally “here’s a new product, here’s it’s new features”,
and there isn’t time usually to go into too much detail about the
subtleties of the technology, how it is architected, what are the best
practices and so on. Also, the nature of a single user group
presentation is that you present the product in isolation, but from the
feedback I’ve had from the UKOUG BIRT SIG, the thing that many
customers are looking for is an understanding of how all the product
fit together as part of a BI architecture. This is especially relevant
now that you’ve got options over whether to store your data in
relational tables or OLAP cubes, options over whether to take the Core
ETL offering with Oracle Warehouse Builder or whether to license the
extra-cost options, or indeed whether to license the standard,
traditional edition of Oracle BI Suite or whether to move over to the
new, Siebel Analytics-derived BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The most
appealing bit though is the opportunity to spend two days with BI
developers in each country, discuss approaches, talk about the issues
and opportunities they’re facing on their BI implementations, and do a
technical “deep-dive” into some of Oracle’s new BI & Data
Warehousing technology.

The seminar itself is divided into four 1.5 hour tutorials per
day, over two days. Approximately half each tutorial will be slides and
lectures, with the remaining half being live demonstrations. There’ll
be time for discussions and talks throughout and I’m hoping to provide
fairly comprehensive notes (more on that later). The structure of the
two days is going to be like this:

Day 1 : Architecture, ETL and BI Publishing

• Oracle Business Intelligence Architecture
• Data Modelling and Core ETL using Oracle Warehouse Builder
  10gR2
• Enterprise ETL and Data Quality using Oracle Warehouse
  Builder 10gR2
• Publishing and Reporting using XML Publisher 5.6.2

Day 2 : OLAP and Enterprise Business Intelligence

• Creating OLAP Cubes using Analytic Workspace Manager 10g
• OLAP Analysis using OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP and the
  Spreadsheet Add-in
• Inside Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition and the Oracle BI
  Server
• Introduction to OracleBI Answers, Dashboard and Delivers

I’m going through the process now of building the seminar
material, some of which will be brand new and some of which will be
based on papers and presentations I’ve given before. I’ve also got a
bit of a hidden agenda in putting this material together, in that it
finally gives me a chance to try and put some sort of publication
together around Oracle Business Intelligence development. I’ll be
providing notes with the seminar slides, but I’ll also be pulling the
various sections together, together with additional sections on
operational reporting, data mining, BI portals and offline
(disconnected) analytics, and probably put it forward to a couple of
publishers to see if there’s some interest.

Back to the seminar, going through the various tutorials, the
first half of the first morning is going to put business intelligence
in context, and explain the architecture and positioning of Oracle’s
three BI Suites - the Standard Edition, previously known as “Oracle
Business Intelligence 10g” that’s based around Discoverer and Reports;
the new Enterprise Edition, based on Siebel’s Analytics technology; and
the Standard Edition One, a subset of the Enterprise Edition for SMEs.
The key “take-away” here is to understand why you would use one suite
over another, and how (and if) you can migrate from one to another, how
the products are architected, how they fit in with various data
warehousing architectures, and I’ll also demonstrate the various suites
so you can see how they “look and feel”.

Regardless of which BI Suite you choose to implement, you’ll
usually need to do some data modelling and mapping before your data is
ready to report against. The second half of the first morning will then
look at basic ETL using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (a.k.a.
“Paris”), and will take delegates through the process of defining a
project, importing data in, doing some data modelling and taking a look
at the new OLAP support in this latest release. There are two key
reasons for this section - first of all for completeness, in that there
may be some delegates who use Discoverer but haven’t used an ETL tool
yet, but mainly to take delegates through the new features in OWB10gR2,
such as support for MOLAP cubes, more options around partitioning,
indexing, partition exchange and materialized views, and finally to set
the context for the next session, on Enterprise ETL and Data Quality.

After lunch then on the first day, we’ll take a look at the
“Enterprise ETL” and “Data Quality” options for Oracle Warehouse
Builder 10gR2. This session will go through some of the “heavy lifting”
features in OWB10gR2 such as Transportable Modules, and will also take
a look at support for Slowly Changing Dimensions and Pluggable
(reusable) Mappings. We’ll then go on to the Data Quality features in
OWB such as the Data Profiler and Data Auditors, and discuss how these
features might be used in real-world projects. This part of the seminar
will be largely based on the “Building
an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture using Oracle Warehouse Builder
10gR2″ paper I recently presented at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006,
but with an extra half an hour to demonstrate how the features work and
spend a bit more time on features such as slowly changing dimension
support, especially the “edge-cases” where you still might need to code
it yourself.

The final session of the first day will be on reporting and
publishing using XML Publisher 5.6.2. My understanding is that XML
Publisher is likely to be re-branded soon as Oracle BI Publisher, and
therefore it seems a good point at which to bring it into the “fold” of
business intelligence applications and take a look at the integration
points it has with Oracle’s BI technology stack. In this session we’ll
be looking at how it replaces Oracle Reports Services as Oracle’s BI
publishing tool, how it compares to Discoverer, and how you can use
features such as the Analyzer and Microsoft Excel integration to
publish reports and analysis out to users. This section will be partly
based on my “XML
Publisher - What’s It All About” presentation I’ve given at
the UKOUG, Desktop Conference and ODTUG, but with a bit more of a
technical focus and more time spent on the integration points with
Discoverer, OLAP and BI Suite Enterprise Edition.

The second day is where we’ll take a look at OLAP analysis and
the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The first tutorial of the day will
focus on the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g, and in particular “why
build an OLAP cube”,”what does it give you over regular relational
analysis”, and “how do you build a cube that performs well and scales
up”. The tutorial will partly be a walkthrough of building an OLAP cube
using Analytic Workspace Manager and Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (as
well as why you’d use one tool rather than the other) coupled with a
section on building performant OLAP cubes, based on my Collaborate’06
presentation “Best
Practices for the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g”.

After the break, we’ll look at using your OLAP cube with
Oracle BI Discoverer Plus OLAP, and the OLAP Spreadsheet Add-in. This
section will be based on my “Advanced
OLAP Analysis using OracleBI Discoverer and the OLAP Option”
and will focus on what additional things you can do with Discoverer now
that you’ve put it into an OLAP cube. We’ll be looking at trend
analysis, cross-dimensional comparisons and access to highly aggregated
data, and also take a look at some of the new features coming up with
the Summer’06 release of Discoverer Plus OLAP such as calculated
members.

Finally, after lunch on the last day, we’ll spend the
afternoon looking at the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The first
section after lunch will look at the product suite architecture and in
particular, the new Oracle BI Server that powers the new tools. We’ll
look at how it works with the new Enterprise Semantic Model, how it
handles queries, caches data and performs calculations, and how it
gives users the ability to create queries that span multiple data
sources. We’ll build a Semantic Model over some Oracle data, set up
caching and add some additional data from an Excel spreadsheet. This
session will be based on the “Inside
Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition” presentation I recently
gave at the UKOUG BI & Analytics Special Event, but extended to
look at areas such as caching, adding additional data sources and
building complex hierarchies.

Finally, in the last session of the day, we’ll use Oracle BI
Answers, Dashboard and Delivers to build a “next-generation” BI portal.
During the tutorial, I’ll take delegates through the process of
creating requests and views, publish them to the dashboard, add
controls to pass parameters to individual requests, and build alerts
using OracleBI Delivers. We’ll also take a look forward to what’s
coming up in future releases of the BI Suite Enterprise Edition,
including support for OLAP analysis and JSR-168 portlet support.

All in all, it’ll be a busy two days and effectively you’ll be
getting eight extended presentations from myself, with demonstrations
and course notes. Again, it’s worth stressing that this is aimed at BI
developers and it’ll be technical in nature, but if you’re looking to
get a handle on the key parts of Oracle’s new BI architecture, keep an
eye out on your local Oracle Education website and hopefully it’ll be
coming to additional countries in Europe, Middle-East and Africa over
the next 12 months.

(edited on 4th July to add location, cost for Netherlands event, and
confirmed dates for the UK.)

Posted in Seminar Series |