Speaking of first class, ODTUG Kaleidoscope never disappoints, the level of the sessions is consistently excellent. People tend to vote with their feet and the word is that attendance is up this year as well. This certainly fits with what we’ve been seeing at the presentations. This is the first conference I’ve gone to in the last 9 or 10 month that I haven’t presented at and it is nice to be able to attend more sessions. This is actually my first trip to Monterey and variation in landscapes in California continues to impress.

Stewart delivered an impressive presentation on considerations for selecting OWB. There were some particularly interesting points regarding the advantages and trade offs of the cube and dimension accelerators. The question and answer session afterward suggests that the new packaging of OWB with ODI has helped to reduce if not eliminate customer concern regarding which tool to use for new development.

Mark moderated the BI/DW panel with Mike Durran, Dan Vlamis, Jean-Pierre Dijcks and Michael Armstrong-Smith (Left to Right). There were some provocative opinions expressed regarding possible future paths for the essbase engine and how it might or might not integrate with the Oracle technology stack. Perhaps I’ll kick that bees nest in some future post. It is a topic that I think would generate a lot of discussion. Mark also presented our OBIEE optimization methodology. This approach focuses on specifically on measuring and managing the performance of the Oracle BI server. It joins our methodology for improving the performance of the Oracle BI applications. If you are reading this before today’s sessions, you will also want to stop by Mark’s presentation “Creating Hybrid Essbase/Relational OBIEE Logical Models”.

I’d like to welcome Venkat to the team. One of the reasons that Stewart and I were drawn to working with Mark and Jon and forming Rittman Mead America was their ability to identify and recruit world class talent. Venkat is a great example of such talent and we are very happy to have him on board.

A highlight of this conference for me was finally meeting Stanley. We may have been roommates at Collaborate, I really can’t say, I was pretty jet lagged at the time because I had flown there directly from Singapore. But this time we got to meet and he was good enough to pose for a picture with me, no autograph though. Stanley is Dan Norris’ Oracle Ace vest, he has his own twitter tag #stanleyace and his own blog (http://www.wtfistheacevest.com/). Apparently, he had gone diving with Dan in Monterey Bay over the weekend, and frankly he did not smell like he had showered since. This is why I only half have my arm over his sholder. Happy travels Stanley.

I’d like to take a little time to introduce myself and share some of my world view on BI. First, I’d like say how much of an honor it is to be able to lead Rittman Mead America, having known Mark and Jon for some time, it is great to be able to work with them as well. I’ve been an independent Oracle consultant for the last 15 years and I’ve been focusing on BI for the about the last 12. I’ve designed and implemented BI solutions for companies in the automotive retail, manufacturing, transportation, commercial real estate, insurance and finance industries.

On the one hand I was one of those unfortunate children who taught himself to program in assembly language in elementary school. On the other hand, I had the opportunity to work with small businesses in my rural town early on. This gave me both a strong enjoyment of technology for technology’s sake, as well as an appreciation for the value or lack of value of technology to a business. These twin and somewhat opposing experiences have defined my view of Business Intelligence. Sometimes as technology people we forget that we are also business people and as BI practitioners we are business people first.

On the business side, the most successful BI projects have the highest level sponsors, if the C-level isn’t involved, its hard to drive value and bring about organizational change. A strategic BI initiative has the ability to change and improve the business and if the sponsor doesn’t have sufficient authority to bring about that change then the opportunity may be lost.

While discussing the business requirements with the sponsor I ask myself what information I would want if I were an investor, owner or purchaser of the company. I have found this leads to questions that help identify and clarify hidden requirements such as information we can easily provide that they didn’t think was attainable.

On the technology side my view of an ideal BI implementation is Linux, the Oracle DB, a well designed Kimball dimensional model, and the current best of breed front end tool (OBIEE). Interestingly since, Oracle first became available for Linux over a decade ago, the only technology piece that seems to changed over time is the front end user tool. I expect this to hold into the future as well.

Finding a space to contribute to such an established, well written, famous blog is something I’ve given a great deal of thought. Having spoken with many readers of the blog over the last few months there are two points I’d like to focus on. Some people seem to have difficulty going about establishing their own lab environment to experiment with and recreate the scenarios in the posts. Another group would like to see how these tools and techniques handle larger data sets.

I’m going to follow the MythBusters methodology, establish a test area, test plausibility, and then over load it and see what happens. Fortunately, the existing postings have already proven the technologies and techniques that work. We can build our test area and then proceed to loading say a billion rows. We will begin by looking at hardware and software options for building your BI lab. Then we will give it a couple of warm up tests before really stress testing it. Along the way we’ll develop a couple of dimensional models and implement them from through the whole technology stack.