Details on Forthcoming BI Masterclass Seminars

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd signed up to do a seminar series with Oracle Education in EMEA, and I noticed earlier today that the first advertisement, for the seminar in Holland in August on the 29th and 30th, has just gone up on their website. The venue is Utrecht (De Meern), the cost is €1140,-, and you can register using this form.

I've also had dates confirmed for Denmark and Norway in October, the UK has confirmed for 31st October/1st November, Estonia in going to be in September or October, and Slovakia will be in October. The seminar will be a two-day "business intelligence masterclass" where I'll take delegates through the complete Oracle Business Intelligence architecture, starting off with the ETL process using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2, BI publishing using XML Publisher, OLAP analysis using Analytic Workspace Manager and OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP, through to "enterprise" business intelligence using the new Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Answers, Dashboard and Delivers. The seminar is aimed at developers, will be quite technical, and take a good look at some of the more "advanced" business intelligence features that existing users of Discoverer or Reports might find useful.

A seminar series like this is something I've been keen to do for a while now, as most of the presentations I get to do at user groups are generally "here's a new product, here's it's new features", and there isn't time usually to go into too much detail about the subtleties of the technology, how it is architected, what are the best practices and so on. Also, the nature of a single user group presentation is that you present the product in isolation, but from the feedback I've had from the UKOUG BIRT SIG, the thing that many customers are looking for is an understanding of how all the product fit together as part of a BI architecture. This is especially relevant now that you've got options over whether to store your data in relational tables or OLAP cubes, options over whether to take the Core ETL offering with Oracle Warehouse Builder or whether to license the extra-cost options, or indeed whether to license the standard, traditional edition of Oracle BI Suite or whether to move over to the new, Siebel Analytics-derived BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The most appealing bit though is the opportunity to spend two days with BI developers in each country, discuss approaches, talk about the issues and opportunities they're facing on their BI implementations, and do a technical "deep-dive" into some of Oracle's new BI & Data Warehousing technology.

The seminar itself is divided into four 1.5 hour tutorials per day, over two days. Approximately half each tutorial will be slides and lectures, with the remaining half being live demonstrations. There'll be time for discussions and talks throughout and I'm hoping to provide fairly comprehensive notes (more on that later). The structure of the two days is going to be like this:

Day 1 : Architecture, ETL and BI Publishing

• Oracle Business Intelligence Architecture
• Data Modelling and Core ETL using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2
• Enterprise ETL and Data Quality using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2
• Publishing and Reporting using XML Publisher 5.6.2

• Creating OLAP Cubes using Analytic Workspace Manager 10g
• OLAP Analysis using OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP and the Spreadsheet Add-in
• Inside Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition and the Oracle BI Server
• Introduction to OracleBI Answers, Dashboard and Delivers

I'm going through the process now of building the seminar material, some of which will be brand new and some of which will be based on papers and presentations I've given before. I've also got a bit of a hidden agenda in putting this material together, in that it finally gives me a chance to try and put some sort of publication together around Oracle Business Intelligence development. I'll be providing notes with the seminar slides, but I'll also be pulling the various sections together, together with additional sections on operational reporting, data mining, BI portals and offline (disconnected) analytics, and probably put it forward to a couple of publishers to see if there's some interest.

Back to the seminar, going through the various tutorials, the first half of the first morning is going to put business intelligence in context, and explain the architecture and positioning of Oracle's three BI Suites - the Standard Edition, previously known as "Oracle Business Intelligence 10g" that's based around Discoverer and Reports; the new Enterprise Edition, based on Siebel's Analytics technology; and the Standard Edition One, a subset of the Enterprise Edition for SMEs. The key "take-away" here is to understand why you would use one suite over another, and how (and if) you can migrate from one to another, how the products are architected, how they fit in with various data warehousing architectures, and I'll also demonstrate the various suites so you can see how they "look and feel".

Regardless of which BI Suite you choose to implement, you'll usually need to do some data modelling and mapping before your data is ready to report against. The second half of the first morning will then look at basic ETL using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (a.k.a. "Paris"), and will take delegates through the process of defining a project, importing data in, doing some data modelling and taking a look at the new OLAP support in this latest release. There are two key reasons for this section - first of all for completeness, in that there may be some delegates who use Discoverer but haven't used an ETL tool yet, but mainly to take delegates through the new features in OWB10gR2, such as support for MOLAP cubes, more options around partitioning, indexing, partition exchange and materialized views, and finally to set the context for the next session, on Enterprise ETL and Data Quality.

After lunch then on the first day, we'll take a look at the "Enterprise ETL" and "Data Quality" options for Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2. This session will go through some of the "heavy lifting" features in OWB10gR2 such as Transportable Modules, and will also take a look at support for Slowly Changing Dimensions and Pluggable (reusable) Mappings. We'll then go on to the Data Quality features in OWB such as the Data Profiler and Data Auditors, and discuss how these features might be used in real-world projects. This part of the seminar will be largely based on the "Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture using Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2" paper I recently presented at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006, but with an extra half an hour to demonstrate how the features work and spend a bit more time on features such as slowly changing dimension support, especially the "edge-cases" where you still might need to code it yourself.

The final session of the first day will be on reporting and publishing using XML Publisher 5.6.2. My understanding is that XML Publisher is likely to be re-branded soon as Oracle BI Publisher, and therefore it seems a good point at which to bring it into the "fold" of business intelligence applications and take a look at the integration points it has with Oracle's BI technology stack. In this session we'll be looking at how it replaces Oracle Reports Services as Oracle's BI publishing tool, how it compares to Discoverer, and how you can use features such as the Analyzer and Microsoft Excel integration to publish reports and analysis out to users. This section will be partly based on my "XML Publisher - What's It All About" presentation I've given at the UKOUG, Desktop Conference and ODTUG, but with a bit more of a technical focus and more time spent on the integration points with Discoverer, OLAP and BI Suite Enterprise Edition.

The second day is where we'll take a look at OLAP analysis and the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The first tutorial of the day will focus on the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g, and in particular "why build an OLAP cube","what does it give you over regular relational analysis", and "how do you build a cube that performs well and scales up". The tutorial will partly be a walkthrough of building an OLAP cube using Analytic Workspace Manager and Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (as well as why you'd use one tool rather than the other) coupled with a section on building performant OLAP cubes, based on my Collaborate'06 presentation "Best Practices for the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g".

After the break, we'll look at using your OLAP cube with Oracle BI Discoverer Plus OLAP, and the OLAP Spreadsheet Add-in. This section will be based on my "Advanced OLAP Analysis using OracleBI Discoverer and the OLAP Option" and will focus on what additional things you can do with Discoverer now that you've put it into an OLAP cube. We'll be looking at trend analysis, cross-dimensional comparisons and access to highly aggregated data, and also take a look at some of the new features coming up with the Summer'06 release of Discoverer Plus OLAP such as calculated members.

Finally, after lunch on the last day, we'll spend the afternoon looking at the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The first section after lunch will look at the product suite architecture and in particular, the new Oracle BI Server that powers the new tools. We'll look at how it works with the new Enterprise Semantic Model, how it handles queries, caches data and performs calculations, and how it gives users the ability to create queries that span multiple data sources. We'll build a Semantic Model over some Oracle data, set up caching and add some additional data from an Excel spreadsheet. This session will be based on the "Inside Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition" presentation I recently gave at the UKOUG BI & Analytics Special Event, but extended to look at areas such as caching, adding additional data sources and building complex hierarchies.

Finally, in the last session of the day, we'll use Oracle BI Answers, Dashboard and Delivers to build a "next-generation" BI portal. During the tutorial, I'll take delegates through the process of creating requests and views, publish them to the dashboard, add controls to pass parameters to individual requests, and build alerts using OracleBI Delivers. We'll also take a look forward to what's coming up in future releases of the BI Suite Enterprise Edition, including support for OLAP analysis and JSR-168 portlet support.

All in all, it'll be a busy two days and effectively you'll be getting eight extended presentations from myself, with demonstrations and course notes. Again, it's worth stressing that this is aimed at BI developers and it'll be technical in nature, but if you're looking to get a handle on the key parts of Oracle's new BI architecture, keep an eye out on your local Oracle Education website and hopefully it'll be coming to additional countries in Europe, Middle-East and Africa over the next 12 months.

(edited on 4th July to add location, cost for Netherlands event, and confirmed dates for the UK.)