Days 3,4 and 5 of ODTUG Kaleidoscope

Mark Rittman

Jun 23, 2006 • 6 min read

Time to catch up on the second half of the week at ODTUG Kaleidoscope. Tuesday was the one day that I wasn't due to present, but due to my rather over-enthusiastic volunteering I was still down to be an ODTUG Ambassador for three presentations. This basically involved giving out the handouts and evaluation forms when people came into the presentation, introducing the speaker and then collecting the forms in at the end, not too gruelling a task but it does mean you're "on duty" all day without much of a break. In the end I "ambassadored" twelve sessions, a bit of a record I think and a number that I'll probably cut down if I come again next year. Anyway, the first presentation I looked after was Jean Pierre Djicks talk on "Why You Should Consider OWB for Data Modelling", which was basically about using OWB to model your logical objects - dimensions, measures etc - and the physical implementation - tables, partitions, indexes and so on. The thinking here is that OWB 10gR2 supports far more of the physical data warehouse features that are now present in Oracle Database 10g - though not Index-Organized Tables, as a decision was taken not to include them due to the performance benefit not being sufficient - and therefore it makes sense to do all your modelling in OWB, rather than use it just for ETL and use a tool such as Designer or Erwin to do the modelling instead.

I broadly agreed with the crux of JP's argument, certainly you can make the project a lot more "agile" if you use the same tool to model, deploy and build your ETL routines; the only bit of feedback I gave was that it'd help if OWB clearly separated the logical model (dimensions, measures, hierarchies etc) from the physical model so that you can create a clear separation between the two phases of development - also, Kent Graziano made the good point that it'd also help if OWB came with a proper diagrammer similar to the one in Designer, such that you could create a blank canvas and then include logical or physical objects in the diagram as required.

Next up was the main presentation on Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition. This was probably the most useful presentation of the week for me, as it went into a lot more detail about the architecture of the Oracle BI Server, how it processed queries and how it brings together data from heterogeneous sources. Probably the most valuable thing though - and this is where the value in attending events like this comes in - I spent a fair bit of time with some of the guys who came over from Siebel, and in fact worked for nQuire before that - and had a chance to discuss how the product works, where the "value" is and so on. I also spend a bit of time on the following day in the hands-on labs talking about the best way to put together the Enterprise Semantic Layer, and picked up some good tips and techniques to take back to the office and pass on to our customers.

The next presentation was Keith Laker's talk on reporting against the OWB repository. Keith, like the rest of the OWB team, is a pretty smart guy and he came up with some interesting approaches and scenarios for reporting against the public views over the Warehouse Builder repository. He talked about two types of reporting - static "point in time" reporting that provides information on the number of mappings within a project, how many invalid objects are in the repository and so on - and more sophisticated time-based reporting, that adds a time dimension to the information in the repository and allows you predict, for example, how long your batch will take to run at some point in time in the future. Keith went through some examples of where Application Express and SQL Developer can be used to provide the static reports, and a Discoverer Business Area that provided access to time-series based calculations. Apparently the code examples and Discoverer Business Area will go up hopefully on the OWB Code Exchange area on OTN, and maybe also on the BI SIG area of the ODTUG website.

I had originally agreed to do one more ambassador session later on in the day, for Keith Laker's second OWB presentation, but in the end I decamped over to the hotel bar with a few other people and watched the England game. So far I've watched the first game against Paraguay in Greece, the second on against Trinidad in England, and now this third one in the United States, and I must say it was pretty surreal to hear American commentators commenting on an England game - lots of statistics on the screen (what does "0-1-1" mean next to a team name?) and some very garish sets and excitable commentators throughout the game. Of course in the end we drew, but went through, and I ended up staying in the bar until the evening's entertainment started - I'd been "on duty" since Sunday so I decided to give myself a break for a few hours. The entertainment sounded beforehand like a bit of a nightmare - "Capitol Steps", an American musical political satire troupe, which sounded to me of something like a cross between Richard Stilgoe, Pam Ayres and Rory Bremner - actually turned out to be rather good; jokes about George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are fairly universal these days although I'm sure six pints of Sam Adams beforehand didn't do any harm. Anyway, a pretty good afternoon and evening although it did lead to a bit of a hangover the next day.

Wednesday started off with a fuzzy head, and what better to wake me up than being the ambassador for Don Burleson's talk on the Cost-Based Optimizer. Don warned us at the start that he was also a licensed auctioneer and therefore he could go on for an hour without stopping talking (very loudly), and he certainly didn't let us down. Unfortunately I had to bring my laptop in and do some work on my demos for my presentation later on that day, but it was good to catch up with him and Janet and certainly he had the biggest audience that I'd seen all week. I also did the ambassador thing again later on that day for Mike Ault's ETL Techniques for Developers presentation, a very good presentation and again a good-sized audience who gave him some pretty good scores on the evaluation forms.

My final presentation of the week was at 1.00pm on the Wednesday, on "Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture using OWB10gR2". I had the usual problem with demos not working quite as they should do just before the presentation, but when the time came they worked pretty well OK and I think I gave a more relaxed performance than my XML Publisher one earlier in the week. Thanks again to all those who came along, and if you've not got the papers and slides already, you can download them from here:

Going on to today now, I spend a few hours this morning catching up with work things, and then got the metro down to the city centre to do the tourist thing. I took the Red Line down to Union Station, then walked over to the Capitol to start a slow walk through the National Mall to see the monuments.

Over about three hours, I went to the Old Post Office Tower (thanks to Scott Spendolini for that tip) to take in the views, then walked down to the Treasury, the White House and then over to the Washington Memorial.

Then, finally, after walking from the Washington Monument through the World War II Memorial, up along the Reflecting Pool and along to the Lincoln Memorial, I finally found a stall selling water round about five minutes before I passed out with heat exhaustion - it was about 95ºF in the afternoon and it's very humid in Washington. Still, it was good to get out of the hotel at last and you can't come to Washington and not visit the Mall.

That's it for now though. I've got my BI Suite Enterprise Edition training CD loaded up on my laptop ready for the flight back tomorrow, the alarm set for 4.45am (ouch) and a flight to catch at 8.00am in the morning. It's goodbye to Washington, and hello to the Brighton to London train next Monday morning.

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