Looking Forward to the Desktop Conference 2006
I've finished the presentations now for the Desktop Conference 2006 next week; the one on XML Publisher is the one that I gave the other week at the UKOUG BIRT SIG (with the addition of a XML Publisher Desktop demo), whilst the OLAP Best Practices one is a development of the two articles I did last year for DBAZine.
If you're "attending" the Desktop Conference, the dates and time of the two sessions are as follows - the links are to downloadable copies of the slides and accompanying paper:
- "XML Publisher - What's It All About?", Tuesday, February 21st, 7.00pm GMT, 11.00am PT, 2.00pm ET
"Oracle XML Publisher is the hot new Oracle BI and reporting tool that lets you build production-quality reports using a Microsoft Word add-in. This presentation looks at what XML Publisher does, how it works, how you use it, and whether it’s a replacement for Oracle Reports."
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- "Best Practices for the Oracle Database 10g OLAP Option", Wednesday February 22nd, 7.00pm GMT, 11.00am PT, 2.00pm ET
"The OLAP Option to Oracle 10g gives you the ability to store multidimensional cubes in your Oracle Database and perform OLAP queries on them. This presentation and demonstration provides best practices for designing, loading, aggregating, and querying Oracle OLAP cubes and takes a look at what’s in 10gR2."
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The presentation on XML Publisher takes a look at the idea and positioning behind XML Publisher, how it fits in with the existing Discoverer and Portal tools, and takes an in-depth look at the new 5.6 "Enterprise" release of XML Publisher.
As I said, I'll also do a demo of XML Publisher's Microsoft Word integration, and talk about how you might integrate XML Publisher into a full BI Solution.
The Oracle OLAP Best Practices paper is based on the DBAZine articles (here, here) I did last year, with the sections on memory management and sparsity handling rewritten. If you're someone who's downloaded Oracle 10g and Analytic Workspace Manager, built a cube but don't really know what all the options are for, this presentation could be useful as it goes through the significance of dimension ordering, sparsity handling, how Oracle stores the AW data and how you can do things like tracing.
Interestingly, I was hoping to put something together that gave a foolproof, "if the OLAP engine is doing X, then do Y"-type paper, but the OLAP Engine just isn't instrumented enough to be able to do the same sort of tuning that you do with the database, or at least I don't yet understand it in enough detail yet to do this. I'm also due to present the same paper at either the Collaborate'06 event in April or the ODTUG Kaleidoscope event in June, and I'm hoping to expand on the sparsity handling, dimension ordering and partitioning elements of the paper for these events.
I'll put an article together after the two presentation and report back on what it's like to present at a virtual conference; I'll also take a look at some of the other presentations that'll be on after me as well - Sue Harper's one on SQL Developer (a.k.a. Project Raptor) looks good, as do Kent Graziano's "Agile Methods and Data Warehousing", Nick Goodman's "OWB10gR2 : Late, but Packed With Features!" and Lewis Cunningham's "Implementing Oracle10g Security". Also, if you didn't get along to Open World last year but you heard me talking about Keith Laker's Oracle OLAP and Oracle Data Mining presentation ("The Cube Factory") then you'll be glad to know that Keith's running it again on Tuesday 21st at 9.00pm GMT; Keith discusses a way of performing OLAP analysis using a large number of customer attribute dimensions, helping the user pick the most appropriate attributes using Oracle Data Mining, and we've used a variation on this approach on the QDecisions product that I'll be showing off at Collaborate'06.
Finally, if you're in the mood for reading about Oracle BI&W, here's a couple of links to the presentations and accompanying papers I put together for last November's UKOUG Conference:
- "Oracle Business Intelligence 10g : The Complete Picture"
"Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, together with the Oracle 10g database, offers an end-to-end solution for business intelligence, reporting and data warehousing. This tutorial uses Oracle Warehouse Builder to build a data warehouse, then analyze the results using OracleBI Discoverer, Oracle OLAP, OracleBI Reports and OracleAS Portal. Aimed at those new to Oracle BI or who want to find out what's new with Oracle 10g, the presentation also looks at what's new for BI&W with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle BI 10gR2 Phase 2."
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- "Advanced OLAP Analysis With OracleBI Discoverer and the Oracle 10gR2 OLAP Option"
"Just what is the OLAP Option, and what extra does it add to Oracle Discoverer? What can you do with it that you can't do with relational reporting? How can you use the calculation and analysis features of the OLAP Option in your business applications?
This presentation and live demonstration looks at what OLAP can do for your organisation, and how you can use Oracle 10gR2, OracleBI Discoverer and Analytic Workspace Manager to extend the features of Oracle Discoverer, and discusses how you can use the calculation and forecasting features of the OLAP Option in your business applications."
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