Finally Finished
August 23rd, 2006 by Mark Rittman
Well, that’s finally finished now. After about two months of
effort, mostly
in the evenings and on train journeys to and from London, I’ve finally
finished
the course material for the seminar
series I’m starting next week.
The normal routine I go through when doing a new presentation
is to first put
together the slides, to give the talk some structure and pull together
some
illustrations. Then I put a couple of examples together, which I
screenshot and
write-up in an accompanying Word document. Finally, I add to the
document a
write-up for each slide, so that I end up with a conference paper that
“tells a story”, which usually involves going back and reworking some
of the slides to make the presentation flow better. On average, it
takes me at
least a couple of weeks to prepare a presentation in this way, and I
took the
same approach with each of the seminar lessons to ensure the quality
was up to
scratch.
All told, it took me about two and a half months to put all
the material
together, a bit longer than I expected actually as the seminar is aimed
at a
technical audience who are already familiar with at least some of the
tools. I
did actually think when I accepted the invitation that I could re-use
the
presentations that I’ve given over the past couple of years, but
looking back at
these they were mostly written when the products concerned were new,
and I
wanted to rewrite them to build in the experience I’ve built up since
then at
various customer sites, and to make them flow together better as an
end-to-end
business intelligence story.
For those of you who are interested, I built the examples and
the course
material using my new MacBook, using Parallels
Desktop running Windows XP SP2 as
the virtual machine. Up until recently I’d been using Centos as my
guest OS, but
the Siebel Analytics element of the tech stack currently only runs on
Windows
(and Solaris, HP UX) with the Linux port coming soon, so it made sense
to
standardize on Windows until I can move the whole lot over. I mostly
used
Powerpoint and Word, either on the Mac or in the Windows virtual
machine, to put
the material together, more out of familiarity than anything, but I’ve
just
shelled out for iWork’06
and I’ll probably move over to Keynote and Pages now,
if only so I can use the fancy Mac remote to control the Keynote
slideshow
during my talks (how shallow…)
I’m just finishing off this week with our current client
(working opposite
Lisa Dobson
actually, who’s actually project managing me – she’s a hard
taskmaster although she keeps slipping out to Starbucks across the road
for a
coffee) and then I’m flying out on Monday for the first seminar on
Tuesday in
Holland. This first one should be interesting as I’ve probably got more
material
than I can deliver in two days, on the basis that I won’t know until
the day
what the experience level of the attendees will be, nor their
particular areas
of interest. I guess after a few iterations a pattern will emerge, but
from what
I know about the Dutch guys I know (the AMIS people for example)
they’re a
pretty switched on and clued up bunch over there, so it should be
interesting.
I’m trying to work out now what to do with the course material
once the
series is over, later next year. The altruistic part of me thinks I
should just
bundle it up in PDF and make it a free download, but I have been giving
some
thought, now that the bulk of the hard work is done, into tidying it
up, adding
some addition chapters around say Discoverer relational, Data Mining
and so on
and trying to get it published. Looking at other books, one thing I
need to do
is to generate my own example dataset and scenarios, rather than just
re-use the
SH, OE, HR etc schemas, but it might not be a bad idea, especially if I
can
incorporate some of the feedback, ideas etc that delegates come up with
during
the seminars. We shall see.
Of course now, I’ve suddently got a bit of free time, although
no doubt
before each seminar starts I’ll be frantically re-reading my notes,
making sure
the examples work and trying to remember all the sagely comments I’d
written
down but no doubt will forget as soon as I start speaking. However, it
does give
me the chance to start looking at some things I’ve been putting to one
side over
the last two months or so, including:
- Getting “under the covers” with OS X, particularly looking
at Fink,
the BSD underpinnings, Automator/applescript and so on - Looking in more detail at some of the more tricky BI Suite
EE features, such as Disconnected Analytics, including additional
content in Dashboards / using the “Guided Analytics” feature to
conditionally display dashboard content, bringing in unstructured / MDX
data - Trying to get myself on the 11g beta, in particular to see
what they’ve got planned for the OLAP Option (I sort of know, but it’d
be good to see how they’ve implemented it) - Take a look at some of the more exotic OWB10gR2 features
such as Experts, interactive impact analysis and so on - Try out some performance tuning scenarios with the BI
Server, in particular how to optimize/tune the SQL that it emits,
whether there’s a best way to combine data from two different
datasources, pre-seed the cache using Delivers, how to use clustering
and so on
There’s also the small matter of one of the presentations I’m
giving at the
UKOUG Conference
this November, on comparing the performance of Analytic
Workspaces and Materialized View in a data warehouse environment. This
was the
paper that I submitted for HotSos
last year, got initially rejected then
accepted when a couple of people dropped out, unfortunately it was a
bit too
late in the day and I didn’t have enough time to do the neccessary
experimentation. It’s been accepted now for the UKOUG event (should be
a DBA
audience, first time in this stream rather than the BI&W one)
and I’ll
resubmit it, with a couple of changes, for HotSos again this year. The
basic
premise is that as an alternative to aggregating data in a materialized
view,
you can create an Analytic Workspace and then place a denormalized, SQL
View
over it and achieve much the same result, except that (in theory) the
Analytic
Workspace should be faster to “roll up”, query and so on. To be
honest, I’ve no idea if this premise is valid or not, hence the paper,
so It’ll
be an interesting exercise especially if approached with the “rigour”
of a HotSos-quality paper. Thinking ahead, one issue I’m probably going
to have
is trying to get hold of a suitably large dataset – you can test it on
the SH,
Global Schemas etc but the differences often only become apparent when
you scale
up into the hundreds of terabytes and above. I’ll have to see if I can
simulate
something using multiple copies o of the SH schema rolled back into
itself, or
if any of our customers have a handy terabyte star schema that I can do
some
experiments on.
Anyway, that’s it for now. As I say, I’m working with Lisa up
in London at
the moment, having some fun and games with the Match-Merge feature in
OWB10gR2
(warning, if you’re looking to match but not merge, or the amount of
values you
wish to test against is greater than 1000, you’re in for a bit of a
suprise) but
then after that it’s a case of packing my suitcase and off to Holland.
Should be
good.
