Recently, I sat down (virtually) with Kevin McGinley of Accenture to discuss the upcoming ODTUG Kscope 12. I was on the content selection committee, and immediately recognized how lucky ODTUG was to have Kevin coordinating this process. We had tough choices to make around content — this is always the case, as I’ve participated in this capacity before in the past. But Kevin always took us in the right direction, and after the process was over, I knew I wanted to have a discussion with him on the blog so our readers could see what awaits them at Kscope 12.

Kevin recently blogged about Kscope 12 on the ODTUG Blog, so perhaps that is a nice introduction to our interview here. I’d like to thank Kevin for taking a little time to do this interview, and I’d also like to thank Accenture for allowing him to appear here.

[Stewart Bryson] This is only your second Kscope, but already you are a winner of the Editor’s Choice award for your whitepaper at Kscope 11, and now, are the BI content lead for Kscope 12. What do you think it is about ODTUG and Kscope that you have connected with?

[Kevin McGinley] I was amazed by three things at Kscope 11.  First, the ODTUG community is a very warm, welcoming community of people who were very easy to engage with, both on a professional and personal level.  Second, I was pleased with the type of content presented at Kscope versus a larger conference like Open World.  The sessions feel very real, the presenters are very approachable, and the level of discussion/interaction is much higher.  Lastly, I was very impressed with the level of organization at Kscope.  The conference flowed very smoothly, there were a lot of interesting activities outside the core sessions, and the entertainment was top-notch.

[Stewart Bryson] For those folks who have never attended Kscope before, how would you describe the event, perhaps drawing comparisons or differences with other conferences?

[Kevin McGinley] As I alluded to above, Kscope is much more communal than a larger conference like Open World.  Open World is a mad dash against 40,000+ strangers to get from place to place.  You are exhausted by the end of the week, and the practical knowledge you take away can be limited.  Kscope is a more manageable pace, the practical knowledge you gain from the sessions is much higher, and there is greater emphasis on interaction and discussion.

[Stewart Bryson] Thinking specifically about the BI Stream, what would you say to Kscope Alumni about the BI Stream this year that might encourage them to give the conference another try?

[Kevin McGinley] I would say two things to this.  First, BI keeps growing at Kscope – we have about 50% more sessions than we did last year!  This is great because you get to offer more variety in the content and you also get to balance the “intro” audiences against the “technical” audiences – satisfying both.  Second, Kscope has a tremendous EPM presence – quite possibly the biggest EPM conference around – and with BI and EPM converging the way they are, this offers attendees a tremendous opportunity to start looking at how to maximize their Oracle investments in these two areas and expand the value they provide to their businesses.

[Stewart Bryson] What can you tell us about the content selection process? Did you have a particular focus or goal in mind when selecting and scheduling the presentations?

[Kevin McGinley] Because OBIEE 11g was introduced before Kscope 11, it had a very strong presence that year due to the sheer magnitude of the release.  It was necessary to insure that the ODTUG community was well informed about OBIEE 11g.  Now that OBIEE 11g has settled in the marketplace, we can explore/return to other areas like the packaged BI Applications, data integration with ODI and Golden Gate, EPM integration, more BI Publisher, and the recently announced Exalytics.  We tried to make sure we still covered relevant areas of OBIEE, but left room to cover more of the Oracle offerings around OBIEE, since it’s rarely used by itself in a vacuum.

[Stewart Bryson] Any particular BI sessions that you are looking forward to?

[Kevin McGinley] I see what you’re trying to do here, Stewart – you’re looking for me to plug your two presentations! In all seriousness, there are a lot of great sessions that I’m excited about.  I also love that we have a great balance between customer speakers, boutique consulting companies, large consulting companies, independents, and Oracle ACEs.  I think that’s important.  To answer your question, though, I’m really excited to hear from customers like JC Penny, Eaton Vance, General Dynamics, and Clark Construction covering topics like OBI/EPM integration, rolling-out mobility to executives, and project testing strategies.

[Stewart Bryson] Being involved with content selection can be very time-consuming. How supportive has Accenture been with your dedication to Kscope?

[Kevin McGinley] Accenture has been great.  I think no matter where you work, you’re often pretty busy, so it helps to have an employer who is supportive with the extra time required to make sure Kscope is a great experience for everyone.  Accenture really recognizes the value of a smaller, more intimate conference like Kscope – we host a similar conference for our Oracle customers – and encourages its employees to engage in the industry community where possible.

[Stewart Bryson] Personally, I think Kscope provides a great opportunity to step outside my usual focus on BI and see some sessions in other streams. Last year I attended sessions on Exadata, PL/SQL development, and APEX. Has anything outside of the BI stream caught your eye?

[Kevin McGinley] The great thing about BI is that it complements other tracks nicely.  You can’t get very far in BI without a data store of some sort, so both the Database track and the Essbase track offer sessions that would be attractive to BI attendees.  Both data stores require optimization for BI to perform, and each track has very practical sessions on how to accomplish this.  I’m excited about that.  Another track I find interesting is the EPM Business Content, a new track this year.  Geared more towards a director or senior manager, this track can really help a BI person understand how EPM can fit into their environment and drive additional value.

As you can see, Business Intelligence is in good hands at Kscope 12. Hopefully, we’ll see you there!

The well attended conference gave BI/EPM users the opportunity to listen to some of the world authorities in their chosen field as well as some locally grown speakers who added their own experiences and flavour to the event. The slides from the presentations can be found on the ODTUG website.

Being the first time ODTUG has held an event here it was a great way to gauge the usage and interest in BI. We don’t have a great deal of bloggers here so from the conversations had during and after the event, many users may start sharing their ideas and development technics.

I have to be slightly bias and mention that personally my favourite presentation was that of Stewart Bryson, the Oracle Business Intelligence Server Versus Oracle Optimizer talk was brilliant (Sorry boss, I hope that doesn’t put me in the bad books) and worth the read so please have a look at the slides.

Mark had great attendance and full dancecard over the two days, (giving the Friday keynote and 5 of the 10 presentations) with some of the most relevant and engaging subjects with the OBI 11g product.

• OBIEE 11g Integration with Essbase
• OBIEE 11g RPD Modelling New Features & Best Practices
• Getting Started with OBIEE 11g Dashboards, Scorecards and Mapping
• OBIEE 11g Deployment and Change Management Best Practices
• Upgrading from OBIEE 10g – 11g – Technical Project Tips and Tricks
• Integrating OBIEE and ADF using the Action Framework

Hopefully we can have Mark and Stewart here again sometime soon.

On Saturday after the event, Mark, Stewart and Pamela Bryson, Tim and Darlene Tow gave one of the major Sydney attractions a go by walking up the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a good way to view Sydney in it’s entirity, and the weather did not dissapoint. After that walking some rehydrating beverages were needed which lead well into the evening.

Thankyou again to you all and a safe journey home.

Rittman Mead Oceania was also represented a few days earlier at the New Zealand Oracle User Group conference in Auckland.

Our national airline Qantas suddenly changed the plans of thousands of passengers by closing the doors to workers the day before I was to leave and I thought I was not going to make it and leave Richard to fend for himself who managed to leave a day earlier. Luckily that  situation was rectified and all in all it was a very succesful event which I was glad to attend. We did not present at this conference unfortunately but next time we shall. I look forward to it again in 18 months.

The event will have over 100 speakers presenting over the 2 days, including ‘yours truly’ representing
RittmanMead at its first Australian run event.

The schedule of speakers and topics can be viewed from this link:

http://www.insync-conference.com.au/web_documents/InSync11_working_programme.pdf
InSync11s’ theme this year is “Innovate, Educate @ Connect” and I personally look forward to meeting many of you I’ve made contact with recently since the opening of RittmanMead Oceania.

Of course, Mark Rittman will be there in his capacity as Rittman Mead Technical Director and Evangelist, Oracle ACE Director, and also, as an ODTUG officer. Marks sessions and events are listed here:

Sunday: 8.30am – 4.30pm, Room 202B: BI Symposium (Organizer)
Monday: 1.15pm – 2.15pm, Room 101A: OBIEE 11g Answers, Dashboards, Scorecards & Reporting New Features (Presentation)
Tuesday: 12.15pm – 1.45pm, Room Promenade B&C: BI & EPM Lunch & Learn with the ACE Directors (Panelist)
Wednesday: 9.45am – 10.45am, 101A: OBIEE 11g Architecture & Internals (Presentation)

From Rittman Mead America, we have Charles Elliott, our Senior OBIEE specialist delivering an OBIEE 11g Hands-On Training (HoT) session where attendees will learn to use New Report Prompts, Action Links, Custom Groups, and Hierarchical Columns. If you haven’t yet experimented with the new front-end features in OBIEE 11g, then this is the HoT for you:

Wednesday: 1:45pm – 5:15pm, Hyatt Seaview: HoT Session F, Oracle BI 11g Answers and Dashboards (Hands-On Training)

I’ll be attending as well. I’ll be in the room with Charles for the HoT Session F, but I’m also doing a presentation as well as participating on the EPM/BI Experts Panel moderated by Natalie Delemar. This was interesting to me in that it apparently takes four Hyperion/Essbase panelists to adequately represent that side of the house, but only one OBIEE expert is required: me. All joking aside, I know this panel will be heavily attended by the Hyperion-minded, and I may be a straw man for frustration they’ve had with OBIEE over the years, but I’m ready! There’s a much better story to tell now with OBIEE 11g and OLAP, and hopefully they’ll at least give me a chance to speak before they start throwing the fruit:

Tuesday: 11:15am – 12:15pm, Room 102AB: EPM/BI Expert Panel (Panelist)
Wednesday: 1:45pm – 5:15pm, Hyatt Seaview: HoT Session F, Oracle BI 11g Answers and Dashboards (Hands-On Training)
Thursday: 8:30am – 9:30am (Seriously?), 101A: Agile Data Warehousing with Exadata and OBIEE11g (Presentation)

As usual, we are always happy to speak to attendees, customers or other community members, so if you see Mark, Charles or myself around, feel free to stop us and say hello. In case you’re unsure… I’m the short one.

The main focus of the event was Exadata (Exadata is the answer to every question, it turns out). With the release of OBIEE 11g there has been a lot of focus on the reporting tools recently, so it was a real pleasure to spend a couple of days listening to and thinking about some of the leading Data Warehouse implementations in EMEA.

We got to see what some pretty large organisations, predominantly in the telco and financial services areas, were doing with Exadata and hear the performance gains, reduction in TCO and general consolidation stories. We were also given an insight into how FIFA were using Data Warehousing to analyse betting fraud in world cup games, which watching the news this evening is pretty relevant. 

Probably the take aways from the event for me were:

• How mature Exadata is becoming; we are now effectively on the third release of the product – the other side of this is that clients were definitely reporting some hardware issues on the V1 boxes – something we have witnessed through a client of ours.
• Exadata genuinely seems to win-out in proof of concepts.  Obviously you don’t see the cases where it did not win, but its not just the Oracle marketing machine making this stuff up.
• Database consolidation is a major win for implementers. Having a consolidated database platform is an relatively obvious gain, however the compression Exadata gives means that a lot of database can be hosted on one server, compression ratios of between 4x and 10x were reported.
• The volume of data that can be processed by Exadata, and the performance gains are undoubtedly impressive. Throughput numbers like 50GB/s, and real time processing of 1m records a second, from this Exadata would really support the big data world.
• There are some very smart people implementing large databases on Oracle in EMEA and I think a lot of them were at this event

So thanks to Reiner and his team, and to everyone we met, it was a great event and we look forward to the next one.

Counting the BI/EPM Panel that I participated on (thanks to Shyam for including me, and for attending two of my sessions), I had four presentations for the two-day conference. All my sessions were well-attended, and there were a number of participants that came to every single talk. As a conference speaker and community advocate, I can’t tell you how gratifying that is, so a very special thank you to the multi-session attendees.

Some of the sessions that I really wanted to see ran concurrently with mine, such as Alex Gorbachev’s Exadata talk, and Jean-Pierre Dijcks Parallel-Execution talk. However, I did get to see an excellent talk by Maria Colgan on Optimizer Plan Management (the successor to Stored Outlines and Stats Profiles), which was really, really good. Also, Gary Garrison’s presentation “Because Daddy Didn’t Buy You an Exadata for Christmas” had to have the best title I have seen in years. Gary discussed Query Rewrite… a subject near and dear to my heart, and one that I covered in my “Delivering a Dimensional Model on the Oracle Database” talk. Gary focused more on Oracle Dimension Objects than mine does, so it had a different twist and I learned a few things I didn’t know.

All and all… another great time in Denver. Thanks to Rock Bottom for an excellent meal and a few great pints, and Jean-Pierre and Maria for a nice night on the town.

On Thursday, I’ll be giving three technical presentations, each with a strong database and data warehousing focus:

Thursday, 9:00 AM, 402/403: Resuming, Restarting, Restoring: Three R’s of Data Warehouse Fault Tolerance
Thursday, 1:30 PM, 404: Real-Time Data Warehousing with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g and the Oracle Database
Thursday, 2:45 PM, 406: Deploying a Dimensional Model on the Oracle Database

If you are planning on attending RMOUG, let me know in the comments of this post, or drop by one of my sessions and introduce yourself afterwards. We should have some very nice weather in Denver, so I’m planning on getting out and seeing a bit of the city.

Mike Durran’s talk on Monday about the new OBIEE 11g features was enlightening. We’ve seen some of the features in the beta release, but having Mike demonstrate the OEM integration, security improvements, and general industrialization of OBIEE was eye-opening. As Rittman Mead has been instrumental in implementing the 10g release of OBIEE for clients over the years, and working with those clients (and the world at large via the blog) to try and circumvent some of the limitations in the current product, it’s good to see that Oracle is listening to the needs of their clients. Mark’s presentation on the internals of the BI Server was great as usual. I’ve seen this content before, but it was enjoyable to revisit. The academic approach Mark took in trying to define the sometimes undocumented behavior of the BI Server shows the right way to approach product-discovery.

Also good to see was David Allan’s presentation on “right-time” loading with Oracle OWB 11gR2. David knows this product as well as anyone, and he has a handle on what the product can do now as well as what clients want to see in the future. David demonstrated that OWB can make use of GoldenGate in a (reasonably) uncomplicated way. He also knows his way around a pint of Guinness (Scot’s drink Irish stout?), and though I got less sleep than I should have, I had more fun than I deserved. I also learned quite a bit from Holger Friedrich’s presentation on Pushing the Envelope with OWB. I always get questions from clients about how to properly do SCM with OWB, and I think now I just might start handing them a copy of Holger’s presentation. Really, really good stuff Holger.

My session on New Data Warehousing Features in 11gR2 was well-attended, and I think it delivered some good content around parallelism-enhancements, summary management improvements, and cool new tricks with SQL Analytics. I think the LISTAGG function was of particular interest… so that old workhouse STRAGG now has a shorter shelf-life. That’s OK… I’m sure Tom is tired of answering questions around it anyway. I’d like to thank Tim Tow of AppliedOLAP for giving me a great introduction.

I enjoyed the BI Panel moderated by Mark, and all the panelists and attendees had a good chance to discuss the future of BI within Oracle. Again we had Mike Durran, together with Bob Ertl, Joe Leva and Holger Friedrich. The contrasting perspectives of implementors and product managers rounded-out a great discussion, and I saw Bob take numerous notes about what customers are hoping for in the future direction of OBIEE.

Finally was the OWB Deep-Dive this morning with myself, Mark and Holger. It was a last-minute replacement for a cancelled session, but I think the content was very good and well-received. We rarely get a chance to go in-depth in our sessions, nor answer questions for half an hour either. The attendees were all familiar faces from our other sessions for the whole week, and we appreciate their dedication for seeking out the session even though it wasn’t in the session catalog, for getting started with us at 8:30 in the morning, and for sticking with us for three hours.

Thanks to Maria Colgan, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Holger Fiedrich, Mike Durran, Mark Rittman and David Allan for the extra-curricular activities. I think I’ll sleep in late tomorrow.

The title of my presentation is The OLTP DBA’s Guide to Delivering a Dimensional Model. I gave this presentation for the first time at few years back at the UKOUG conference, which was my first time to attend there. I’m working on updating the material for 11g so it’s topical and current, and in doing this, it reminds me how much I LOVE this content. My entry into the world of Oracle BI was as a data warehouse architect and ETL developer, and as much as I love working with OBIEE and a lot of the front-room products, I’m still most passionate about the database, and what separates Oracle from the rest. Whenever I do high-level assessments for clients, I still devote a portion of the documented deliverables to some of the principles I discuss in this presentation: how best to deliver the core objects in a standard dimensional model: fact tables, dimension tables and aggregates. I’ll look at issues such as index and constraint management, partitioning, compression, and enhanced database optimization strategies in the Oracle database when querying a star schema (hint: star transformation and query rewrite).

As Mike mentioned in the meeting details, I offered to speak on a variety of topics, and though this was the one chosen, I’ll be happy to address other topics in the QA session afterwards. If you plan on attending, please RSVP on the link provided. Also, drop me a line via the comments on the blog and introduce yourself, and I’ll be sure and look out for you at the meeting.

On Tuesday I gave an OWB 11gR2 Hands-on lab as a part of the BIWA SIG, and it was very well attended. I’d like to thank Shyam Varan Nath and Dan Vlamis for including me in this worthwhile program, as every single lab seemed to be attended with max capacity. In the OWB lab, we walked through creating files, external tables, relational tables, and in the end, mappings, and everyone seemed to get along very well with the somewhat accelerated nature of the course. After all, there’s only so much we can do in an hour. Today, I had two sessions back-to-back. The first was “Getting Real”, a look at real-time data warehousing, This presentation was supposed to be given by Peter Scott, one of the world’s foremost experts on real-time data warehousing, and it’s a shame that he couldn’t make it to Collaborate. Pete and I have worked closely on the principles on real-time data warehousing on previous projects, and that really paid off, as I gave the presentation to a large crowd who seemed to benefit from the information. Pete did a great job putting the slides together… but next time I’ll try to persuade him to bring all the bullet points in at once for each slide. Sorry you couldn’t make it Pete… but the content was excellent, and the attendees thought so as well.

My next session was “The Three R’s of Data Warehouse Fault Tolerance”, where I talked about Resuming, Restarting and Restoring. This was also a virtual event, where remote attendees could watch the presentation over the internet in real-time. However, the technology used for this had not been fully vetted on the Mac, and from the feedback I received, Keynote wouldn’t allow the remote viewers to see my slides, but I think they could see the demonstrations I did on the Linux VM as well as in SQL-Plus. For those virtual attendees, I really apologize for the inconvenience, and if you have questions, or need collateral material around the presentation, feel free to reach out to me at stewart.bryson@rittmanmead.com.

Jon Mead made an unsuspected appearance in Vegas, which was excellent. While Pete was stranded in the UK, Jon was stranded in the US, and it was good to talk “Managing Director” shop with an excellent businessman from the UK. All in all, I really enjoyed catching up with Mark and Jon, and wish that Pete and Venkat could have been here to have the full Rittman Mead experience.

Next up… ODTUG Kaleidoscope. Watch the blog for details.