After the seminar finished, I took a walk down from the venue to the historic part of Bucharest. I can see why Bucharest is called the “Paris of the East” – it’s got some fantastic architecture and at least, where I was walking through, some beautifully preserved old churches and historic buildings.

This one was just around the corner from the venue.

A bit further down the road, towards the city centre.

Some lovely old churches as well.

This looked like a rather important-looking miltary building.

There was also a fair bit of monumental-size big civic buildings, such as this one.

The building I was most interested in seeing though, was the famous “Palace of the Parliament”. In actual fact, it turned out to be a bit smaller than I expected, if only because I was sort of expecting an absolutely huge building, in the end it was just very very large – I’d been walking at this point for just over an hour (with my laptop in my bag, clever move) so I didn’t venture around it, but I got a few photos of the palace and the surrounding area, which was all pretty impressive.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded the photos to Flickr, take a look if you’re interested. I have to say I was pretty impressed with my short stroll around the city, it’s got some lovely historic old buildings and so far, it’s managed to hold on to a lot of its history. Very nice.

We’re delighted to announce that, as from February 1st 2008, Borkur Steingrimsson is joining us as a partner and Principal Consultant. Borkur will probably be known to a lot of Oracle BI developers as an expert on OBIEE, Oracle Warehouse Builder and Oracle Discoverer, has run an OBIEE blog for the past couple of years and presented at events such as ODTUG Kaleidoscope and the UKOUG Conference. We’ve worked with Borkur on a number of projects up until now, and we’re very pleased that he has joined us officially as one of the team. We’re in the process of moving Borkur’s blog postings over to our site, once that’s done he’ll be resuming his blogging over here. Borkur in particular brings a whole bunch of product knowledge and development skills to the team, including Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle Discoverer and Oracle BI Publisher, and he’s also a regular on the OTN forums. Welcome to the team!

I’m presenting at a number of events over the next few months, both in the UK and around Europe. Next week is the first of the Red Database Symposium events, with the first being at The Hague and one later in the year in Munich. I’m running a one-day seminar on Oracle 11g BI & Data Warehousing, it’s some of the best bits of the OU Masterclass I’ve been running this year plus a “new features” session on Oracle 11g data warehousing and an introduction to Oracle OLAP 11g and Oracle Essbase. This is a paid-for event over three days with other speakers such as Julian Dyke, Graham Wood and Daniel Fink.

Another event I’m speaking at is the UKOUG BI & Performance Management Event in London on March 18th. This is a special event put on by the UKOUG in conjunction with Oracle, it runs over four streams and has speakers from around the UK, Europe and the USA. I’m presenting a paper on “A Future Oracle BI Architecture” where I’ll be bringing together the various strands around the Oracle Database, Oracle BI tools and the Hyperion tools into a coherent architecture that you can use going forward on projects.

As well as speaking at the event, Rittman Mead Consulting is also one of the three sponsors of the event, so you’ll be able to come along to our company stand during the various breaks to meet all of us. This is the first event of this kind that we’ve sponsored, so we’ve got a new exhibition stand, a bunch of new literature and a new corporate ID that you’ll see gradually unveiled on this site over the next few weeks. If you want to talk to me about Oracle BI development, Peter Scott about data warehousing, Jon Mead about Oracle Warehouse Builder or Borkur Steingrimsson about OBIEE, pop along and we’ll be pleased to meet you.

Apart from the UKOUG event, I’ll also be presenting at the Norwegian User Group Conference and the Swedish/Finnish User Group conference in May, on Future Oracle BI Architecture (I might even have built a working example by then) and on Oracle OLAP/Oracle Essbase. Both of these conferences are over three days and held on cruise liners, these should certainly be interesting events and a good opportunity to meet up again with some of the Scandinavian BI developers I’ve met during the OU masterclasses.

Finally, Peter Scott and I will be traveling over to Denver later in April to speak at Collaborate’08, the multi-user-group conference organized by the IOUG, OAUG and Quest (and with a mini-Hyperion conference running alongside). Peter will be presenting on Cube-Organized Materialized Views, I’ll be presenting on using Real Time Decisions for automating business decisions, we’ll also be attending various sessions and getting to meet some of our American partners and customers. Again if you’re around, drop us a line and we’ll try and hook up with you.

Later on in 2008, once OBIEE 11g becomes available, I’m looking to put together a new two-day event, again through Oracle University, on this new release. Keep an eye out on this site for more details, the aim is to start running with the new material towards the end of 2008, assuming that’s when the 11g release will be out.

Last time I was over in Bratislava, there was a huge contingent of Express and Oracle OLAP developers that attended the event, and so I’ll also be adding a section on the 11g release of Oracle OLAP (including the ability to use AWs as substitutes for materialized views), together with an overview of Essbase and how you develop using it, and then I’ll talk about how both OLAP servers will interface in to OBIEE and the pros and cons of both tools. Should give me something to do on the flights to and from Open World…

If you’re interested in coming, the bookings are handled via Oracle University, and you can access the seminar details here.

We’ll be covering OBIEE data modeling and dashboard development, ETL using Oracle Data Integrator, Identity Management, OBIEE and Service-Orientated Architecture, Real-Time Decisions and a new section on BIEE and BISE interoperability and migration. If you’re interested in coming, there’s a few spaces left with all bookings handled through Oracle University. If you’re over in Ireland and you can make it, that’d be great.

I was interested to see how this seminar went down, as I consciously cut out all of the previous content on Discoverer and OWB to allow me to focus on OBIEE and it’s related tools – Oracle Data Integrator, SOA Suite, Real-Time Decisions and so on. I was aware that there was a danger that I’d end up covering technologies that no-one would even realize they were interested in – OBIEE and SOA, for example, or Real-Time Decisions and BPEL – but my thinking was that people came to my event to see what’s coming up and to discuss best practices on implementing these new tools, rather than a substitute for formal, classroom-based training on tool basics, so I thought it worth taking the risk on covering more cutting-edge BI technology.

What I also did was send out an email after the event to get one-to-one feedback from people on what they thought went well, what they’d change and what they’d like to see covered. My objective in all this is to help the rest of the BI developer community get to grips with the more cutting-edge BI technology so it’s imporant for me that we hit the right spot: not so complicated and new that people have no point of reference, but advanced enough that it provides real value above and beyond the standard 3 and 5-day OU courses.

As a recap, the agenda for the two days goes like this:

• Day 1: Introduction, Advanced/Best Practice data modelling techniques using Oracle BI Server, Oracle Data Integrator, OBIEE integration with Oracle Identity Management
• Day 2: OBIEE and Service-Orientated Architecture, Dashboard and Answers development & best practices, Oracle Real-Time Decisions, wrap-up and summary.

In reality, at the London event we spent most of Monday on Oracle BI Server data modeling, with a short bit at the end on Oracle Data Integrator. On Tuesday, we spent the first half of the morning on OBIEE and IdM, then covered Dashboards and Answers up to lunch. After lunch we covered OBIEE and SOA bit, then RTD, and finished around 4pm. Looking back, we overran on Oracle BI Server (although this was because of group interaction, so still of value), spent too little time on ODI and OBIEE and SOA, and probably a bit too much time on RTD.

Discussing the event afterwards with the attendees, the feedback I got was along the lines of:

• They’d have liked to have covered more on OBIEE and SOA – I showed them a BPEL project that called OBIEE functionality, but next time I’d like to build at least part of it from scratch, as “the devil’s in the detail” – particularly in how you pass variable values around, how you deal with rowsets returned by Answers and so on.
• They’d have liked to have seen more on ODI – again, I showed them a project, but next time I’d like to build it live – it’s based on the ODI work I wrote about on OTN so it shows off CDC, real-time integration and so on.
• RTD was a bit too left-field for them. It’s useful to cover, but not for a whole hour-and-a-half/two hours – especially as setting up an RTD project is a fairly complex task, covering it in just a bit of detail actually makes it seem even more intimidating. In future, I’ll do a technology overview but not go in to detail on how a project is set up.
• They wanted to see more on how you can go from the Standard Edition products – Discoverer, Reports, Portal and so on – to the new Enterprise Edition products. I thought this myself actually at the end of the seminar – we talked about all this new stuff, but in a way it was too distant from where people actually are today. Some sort of “link session”, where we talk about migration, interoperability and so on – would be useful. I’m working on this now, we might be limited in terms of what Oracle will let me present on prior to the software coming out (I think much of what’s coming is due with the 10.1.3.3 release of OBIEE, and the Delivers and Dashboard integration is most likely to be coming with the 11g release of Disco + OBIEE, so I understand) but even if we do an overview, that’d be good – we can use some of the time otherwise allocated to Real-Time Decisions, or just cut the BI Server data modeling section down a bit, to cut out the stuff on basics at the beginning.

Anyway, it was a good session and the feedback afterwards was invaluable. The next two events are in Utrecht, the Netherland in the first week of September, followed by Switzerland at the end of September. Hopefully I’ll have the Interoperability and Migration material ready by then; certainly I’ll be in a position to demo the OBIEE and SOA/BPEL stuff, together with the ODI material, live by that point, plus I’ll have some new material on OBIEE and Oracle Single Sign-On.

The main driver for this has been the next round of masterclasses I’m running for Oracle University. The theme for this year’s masterclasses is OBIEE, going beyond the basics and integrating it with the wider world of Oracle Fusion Middleware. In response to some requests from readers earlier this year, I’m having a common thread going through the entire masterclass, where we take the data provided in the SOA Suite “Order Bookings” demo, extend it a bit to create a customer data warehouse, then modify the Order Bookings BPEL process to call out to OBIEE reports, conditions and iBots to add “intelligence” to the business process.

Last week, we built out the bits where the request for customer information, which previously was obtained through a database adapter against an Oracle database, is instead retrieved from an Oracle BI Answers report. The credit check, which in the original Order Bookings demo was performed by checking that the credit card checksum was correct, is instead obtained by running an Answers report that either returns rows (customer is valid) or doesn’t (customer is invalid). At the end of the process, an iBot is triggered which checks inventory and emails a “low stock” report to the inventory manager if stock needs replenishing.

All of this is accomplished through the Web Services interface provided by OBIEE, and is intended to demonstrate to the developer audience how this integration process works. In terms of customer benefits, it allows you to “externalize” decision about customer validity, get customer data, say, from an integrated BI Server data store, all of which can be modified by a report builder and enhanced to add intelligence to the business process.

Now that the basic invokation of OBIEE Web Services is built out, the next thing we’re doing is integrating an Oracle Real-Time Decisions decision engine in to the BPEL process, removing a set of static rules and replacing them with a self-learning decision process that assesses customer feedback, prices offered and past order preferences and picks a supplier based on which is likely to be most profitable for the company. I’ve got all the code together and the decision process, so next week I’ll be folding this into the enhanced Oracle Bookings process and integrating the whole lot.

Apart from all the SOA and RTD goodness, I’m also working on some data modeling issues (see previous postings a week or so ago around ragged hierarchies, fragmentation and aggregate persistence), some dashboard and alerts tips (including calling a BPEL process from a guided analytics link), and a whole section on OBIEE and Identity Management. If you’re interested in attending, here’s the current set of dates:

One of the Oracle team and I are also working on an article for OTN on integrating OBIEE and SOA, which we’ll probably submit after the first seminar in July and hopefully see up on OTN around August or September.

So, what, I hear you ask, about the escaped parrot? Well, just before I went down to Bristol, we’d heard this rustling sound in our chimney but put it down to bits of our chimney falling off (we’ve got an old Victorian house in Brighton).

Well after I got back, I was lying in bed on Friday morning just happening to look at the fireplace, when a bird’s head popped out of the chimney flue, looked round at me, and then fell from the flue into the fireplace. Bizarrely, rather than being a pigeon (or a seagull, as it’s Brighton) it was a rather puzzled-looking parrot; whilst it was a bit flustered at first, it then took up residence on our bed, let us feed and water us, and then just sat there for around four or five hours whilst we tried to think what to do with it.

Looking in the phone book, there is an actual “Sussex Parrot Rescue” service, but in the end we bundled it up in the cat transporter box, took it to the vet and left it with them to rehome. The parrot itself took it all in it’s stride – it just sat there looking philosophical, shuffled about a bit and so on, unlike my wife who was rather understandably rather freaked out by a parrot falling down our chimney. Our cats however knew nothing of what was going on, although given the size and un-flappability of the parrot, I don’t know who would have come off worse.

UPDATE: Unbelievably, as I just finished writing this blog posting, another parrot fell down our chimney – not the same one (a homing parrot?) but presumably it’s mate, who presumably also was nesting in our chimney. This one looked a much tougher proposition, flapped around the bedroom a bit and then flew through the (rapidly opened) window. As if things couldn’t get any stranger.

If you came to my previous round of seminars last year, this new seminar is all-new and follows on from the material I delivered last year. This time around, it’s aimed squarely at Oracle BI EE developers who are looking for advanced techniques using the BI Server and BI Presentation Server, and who are looking for practical advice on integrating Oracle’s BI tools with the wider world of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

The seminar starts off an overview of Oracle’s current BI tools offering, and sets the scene for the rest of the seminar with an introduction to the concept of “enterprise” business intelligence, integration of BI with Oracle Fusion Middleware and concepts such as decisioning, data integration, dashboards and service-orientated architecture. We then go through a scenario where an organization wishes to implement BI across the enterprise, and uses Oracle BI server to create a BI model that brings together data from disparate data sources. During this session, we go through some advanced BI server techniques such as integrating real-time and historical data, handling ragged hierarchies, persisting aggregates and creating analytical and time-series calculations.

In the following session, we use Oracle Data Integrator to bring relational, event and service-based data to the BI Server, both on a batch and real-time basis. The final session of the first day looks at how OBIEE interacts with Oracle Identity Management, both in terms of “traditional” SSO and the new heterogeneous environment tools Oracle recently purchased that provide SSO and identity federation across disparate platforms.

The second day starts off with creating a role-based interactive dashboard using Oracle BI Dashboards and Oracle BI Delivers, and goes through some advanced techniques that builds on the material covered in my first seminar. We then go on to an introduction to Oracle Real-Time Decisions, where we integrate a self-learning decision service in to our data model, and use it to recommend a choice of supplier based on previous customer satisfaction scores, costs and whether the customer returned to purchase further products.

Following on from this, we turn to BI integration with Service-Orientated Architectures, where I show a technique to call a BPEL process from a dashboard or Delivers iBot, and to call BI Server content from a BPEL process. Later on in the seminar series, I’ll incorporate Oracle Business Activity Monitoring content into the BPEL process, to show how this complements the BI provided by the regular OBIEE tools. Finally, we’ll wrap up by bringing all the examples together into an integrated example, showing how Oracle’s BIEE tools, together with Oracle Application Server and SOA Suite can be used to deliver a complete, next-gen BI environment.

I’m pretty fired-up about the material in this course, as it corresponds with a long-term vision I’ve had about leveraging the “next-gen” features in Oracle BI EE and using them to add insights and intelligence into the rest of the organization’s operational systems. I’ve worked closely with a number of product management and development teams within Oracle to put this material together, and in most cases this’ll be the first time such detailed, developer-focused material on OBIEE and Fusion Middleware integration has been delivered outside of Oracle; I’ve also got some great tips and tricks on working with Answers, Dashboards and Delivers, together with some good material on how Oracle Data Integrator can be used alongside the OBIEE toolset.

If you’re interested, here’s the current line-up of dates:

• UK, London, 24th/25th July
• Sweden, Stockholm, 8th/9th October
• Ireland, Dublin, 16th/17th October
• Netherlands, Utrecht, 25th/26th October
• Slovakia, Bratislava, 22nd/23rd November

I’ve also got bookings for Switzerland (26th/27th September) and Hungary (11th/12th October), and also it looks likely we’ll be running a condensed version of it in six ASIAPAC cities in September this year (Hong Kong, Singapore, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland), so watch this space for more details and links.

In the meantime, expect some blog postings on BI Server, Data Integrator, Real-Time Decisions and BI and SOA Suite as I work through the examples in preparation for the first event next month in London, which means I’ll be holed-up in the hotel at Daytona Beach whilst everyone else is eating ice creams and sitting by the ODTUG hotel bar.

I was very impressed with the effort everyone had made for the event – we started off with an introductory talk on the platform for around a hundred or so attendees, then forty of so of them stayed on past the introductory talk to take part in the hands-on. This was actually the first hands-on I’ve done with the tools – so far, the seminars around Europe have always been “show-and-tell”, but although it took a lot of effort on Oracle’s part (setting up the room, software and so on) and mine (creating the hands-on examples) I think it went very, very well actually – actually getting your hands on the tools and working through examples is often a lot more fulfilling than just watching someone demo them, and bearing this in mind I’ll probably offer Oracle University the option of hands-on sessions for the next round of seminars I’ll be running from July this year. As I said, it’s a lot of work upfront for me and on the day for the local team, but if it can be done, I think the overall benefit of the seminar is much enhanced. I’ll have to see if I can talk OU in to doing this for the next round of seminars proper.

Anyway, as I said the event went off pretty well, and credit to Oracle in Johannesburg for going to all the trouble of setting up the event, getting me down there, and laying on this “test-drive” for their customers, who were also, I have to say, excellent and picked things up really quickly. Although I could only stay for a day, I’d be keen to go back later this year with the new “BI and SOA” seminar, and maybe get a chance to catch up with some of the people I spoke with who are planning to roll out BI EE on their next project.

As for me now, I’m up and running with the SOA Suite Order Bookings demo, and getting my head around all the new SOA technologies such as Enterprise Service Bus, Business Process Execution Language, Web Services and Rules engines. It’s not completely new to me – I’ve kept an interested eyed on SOA and the new loosely-coupled development paradigm over the past few years, and I’m fairly comfortable with the world of Java application servers, J2EE, JNDI, JDBC and so on – working with Oracle Application Server over the past few years, plus tools such as XML Publisher, Oracle Business Rules and so on gets you exposed to the world of Java and enterprise software fairly quickly. For me though, not being totally familiar with all these SOA tools is the whole point of the next seminar – I’m writing it from the perspective of a business intelligence developer who’s read about all these new opportunities to embed BI in applications and business processes, and wants to know enough about these new SOA tools such that they can plumb Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, Oracle Real-Time Decisions and so on in to existing applications and business processes, i.e. it’s about integration rather than writing applications from scratch. With this in mind, I’m working through the SOA Suite Order Bookings demo, and looking for opportunities to embed BI functionality in it, and also to spot occasions where business processes and other SOA functionality might be callable from a BI dashboard.

So far I’ve got the demo installed, and I’ve worked through the first set of examples where you first browse items for sale using the SOA Demo Web client application, and then create an order for 10 items totaling $1300.

Then, when the user places the order, the Web client sends a message to Enterprise Service Bus saying an order has been initiated, which then calls a BPEL business process to handle the order.

The BPEL business processes then goes off and retrieves a new order ID, stores the order in the database, checks the customers credit card is valid and then determines, using the Oracle Rules engine, whether the order needs manual approval.

Now in the demo, the rule is static – if the order is under $1000 in total, or the customer is a “platinum” customer, then the order goes through automatically, otherwise it requires manual approval. Now here’s somewhere where we could start to use BI functionality – instead of customers statically being platinum, or gold, or whatever, we could dynamically calculate the customer’s worth, perhaps by placing the customers in to segments based on profitability on a real-time basis, or by working out based on the last, say 10 transactions, whether they’re above-average profitable or not. We could work this out using an Oracle Answers report, make the report available as a Web service, and call the report on demand for a given customer ID from the business process.

We could also try and make the business rule itself more dynamic – instead of a hard limit of X dollars or a certain status, we could set more broad business objective rules, such as “keep the order process profitable” or “make sure we keep fraud below X dollars per month”, and have BI Enterprise Edition – perhaps Real-Time Decisions – work out the most appropriate set of order approval rules based on these overall goals.

Moving on in the demo, there’s a manual approval process for those orders that according to the current business rules need them, and then the BPEL process goes and gets quotes from two suppliers for the items ordered by the customer.

Now at the moment, the decision on which supplier to use is purely down to who provides the lowest quote, but of course in reality when you come to select a supplier, other factors come in to play – how reliable are they, what sort of customer satisfaction scores have they ended up with, and so on. Now if could replace this “pick the cheapest supplier” rule with “pick the supplier that overall has contributed most to our profitability”, perhaps with some sort of feedback loop in to the process where we can enhance our decision making with the actual result of assigning the work – did the customer return the order, did they complain, did they repeat order afterwards – we could hone the process further and make it “self-optimizing”.

So, I can think of at least three situations where BI, and Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, could come in to play. Firstly, as a way of providing a better, more real-time measure as to whether the customer is good for a large order, and secondly perhaps as a way of fine-tuning in real-time the rules on whether an order is referred or not. The third opportunity is to use a tool such as Real-Time Decisions to enhance the supplier choice process to take into account other factors, and to make the decision process self-learning and modifying based on the outcome of previous decisions.

The area I haven’t really looked at so far is doing things the other way around – having Oracle BI Suite EE calling a business process, either through an iBot calling a BPEL process, or having the user trigger a BPEL process manually based on some insight they’ve had when working through their dashboard. Ideally, I’ll re-use the Order Bookings demo with this, I think the key to it is working out how to get an Delivers iBot to call a BPEL process, and how to create a link on a report that again calls out to a BPEL process. I’m meeting up with some people the week after next to try and build this all out, once it’s up and running I’ll post another blog article on how it all works.

On a final note, one bit of SOA Suite that I did find interesting was Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). What ESB appears to do is route messages, with the ability to inspect the message payload to determine where to send it, transform the data en-route and have it available to all end-points on the bus at the same time – which to me, sounds a abit like a real-time ETL process. In the demo, ESB is used to route the order through to the an appropriate distribution company based on the order value, and to register that the order has been shipped, like this:

Now I think if you were to compare, say ESB with a real-time ETL process built using Oracle Data Integrator, you’d say that ESB is all about messaging, routing the message based on rules (which can involve inspecting the message payload), and some limited transformation using XSL of the data as it goes across the bus, whilst a real-time ETL process is more event or batch driven, moves the data via (in ODI’s case) an agent and takes it from point-to-point. I wonder though whether ESB might be an alternative to a to trying to build a near real-time ETL process using, for example, ODI, when all you need to do is move data from an application or database to the reporting environment and do a bit of data transformation on the way? I suspect there’s some key reason why ESB isn’t realistically an alternative ETL tool, but it does seem to perform a somewhat similar function and I’ll keep the idea in my back pocket should a suitable situation arise in the future. For now though, it’s 23:30, and time I tried to get a few hours sleep, so I’ll sign off now and hopefully connect up again when I get back to the UK.

First of all, like a few people I was disappointed to see the EOUC event over in Amsterdam cancelled late last week. I had three presentations to give and I was particularly looking forward to writing the one on Discoverer migration to Oracle BI EE. The cancellation itself got covered on a few news sites and it looks like it was down to low registrations. Although I’ve lost out on the cost of flights, luckily I’d only prepared one of the presentations, and hadn’t yet booked the hotels, so it’s not the end of the world, and as a SIG volunteer myself, I know these things sometimes just happen. A shame, although the cancellation has prompted my colleague Jon to sign up for the Miracle Scotland Database Forum instead, so something positive has come out of it.

Apart from the EOUC event, there’s already a whole bunch of other conferences and events that I’m going to over the next few months. Apart from the Miracle Event, I’m off to Collaborate’07 at the end of next week, which this year is being held at the Mandalay Beach Hotel in Las Vegas. Due to leaving the flight booking too late, I’m having to go on Virgin Atlantic (shudder) and change in Los Angeles, which means I’m going to have to get up to Heathrow dead early and try and pay for one of the exit seats (£50 each way). If I manage to bag one of those, I’ll be ok, otherwise it’ll be a nightmare. Apart from that though, it’s a week in Las Vegas which isn’t bad, and I’m going as part of the UKOUG delegation so I should get to meet some of the IOUG, Quest and OAUG folks as well.

Later on in June is ODTUG Kaleidoscope, but before that is the next UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG on May 25th in London. If any SIG attendees are reading this, and if you’ve either got a presentation or speaker request, or you’d like to present yourself, drop me a line and I’ll try and oblige.

Next, here’s a few links and news items that I’ve bookmarked recently. The first one on the BIWA Summit looks particularly interesting:

• The Oracle BIWA SIG are running an international summit in Reston, Virginia on October 2nd and 3rd and are accepting presentation proposals at Conference@OracleBIWA.org. I meant to go along to the BIWA SIG meeting at the last Oracle Openworld, but it clashed with the ODTUG BIW SIG meeting (both on at the same time…). What looks interesting about the BIWA SIG is the partipation by senior Oracle PMs and development leads. Looks like a very interesting user group, sounds very similar in fact to our UKOUG BIRT SIG but with a North American focus. Certainly Jon and I will be looking to go over in October if we can get a paper accepted.
• The latest Oracle OLAP Newsletter is available, which includes a link to some Oracle-by-Example exercises on plugging Oracle OLAP in to Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition – something I coverered late last year but not in as much detail – take a look if you want to find out how to ‘transparently’ boost the performance of your star schemas when using BI EE.
• Nigel Pendse and Carsten Bange recently wrote an article on A Dozen Next Big Things that Didn’t Happen In BI. As usual Nigel (and Carsten’s) bang on although I suspect one or two within Oracle won’t agree with the database-embedded OLAP bit…
• This is one I keep meaning to follow up. Phil Bates from Oracle mentioned something called Continuous Query Language to me at the last Open World, and this posting on the IT-Eye blog has been in my bookmarks to follow-up for a long time. Continuous Query Language is something you use with streams of data, business activity monitoring, situations where there’s a continuous stream of data and you want to “dip in” to it from time to time to take a sample. Sounds very interesting from a BI perspective, and something I’ll dig in to more when I get a spare day or so.
• Here’s an interesting one if you fancy seeing what the other lot are up to. The Microsoft TechNet SQL Server 2005 Virtual Lab is a fairly complete, free set of tutorials on SQL Server 2005 and in particular the BI components. Again, time stops me from taking a look myself, but if you’re interested, it looks like a neat resource, a bit like the OBE examples on OTN.
• “So What is Better, ETL or ELT” is a nice round-up of the pros and cons of the two data extraction and integration techniques. Useful to have up your sleeve if called on to justify a data loading approach, although of course bear in mind the author’s an advocate for Informatica and Datastage (and of course I’m an advocate for OWB and ODI…)
• “New Features in Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3″ is a white paper from Oracle on the new features in the Maui release of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, the one that’s currently available for download on OTN.

Finally, thanks to all the readers who sent in comments and advice on content for the next round of Business Intelligence Masterclasses to be run via Oracle University later this year. I’ve taken the feedback on board and worked out a final agenda now, and it’s with Oracle to work out when and if they want to schedule it. Once I get some dates confirmed, I’ll post details of them on the Events page of this site, but until then, have a great Easter weekend.