OWB Training, and Posting from Athens

I'm currently sitting outside in sunny Athens, putting the finishing touches to some exercises I'm going to be using in a training session tomorrow. Jon Mead mentioned in a blog posting the other week that a major part of what we've been up to since forming the company is providing data warehouse healthchecks; the other thing we've been up to is providing custom Oracle Warehouse Builder classes for customers in the UK and Europe.

Today, for example, I've been running an Introduction to Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 course for a client in Athens, where we're starting off from the basic principles of data warehouse design, going on to the architecture and installation of Warehouse Builder, creation of relational and OLAP data structures and mappings and process flows to load them. Tomorrow, we're looking at Enterprise ETL Option features such as Pluggable Mappings, Transportable Modules and Slowly Changing Dimensions, and on the last day we're going to cover error handling, the Data Quality Option, migrating projects between development and production and integration with Oracle Discoverer.

Depending on what the client wants to achieve, we either use our own sample data (based off of the data used in the forthcoming Oracle BI Suite Developers Guide book), or we use data and scenarios provided by the customer. By using our own data and examples, we tend to get more covered in a set number of days, whereas if we use the customers' data, we tend to cover less but spend more time on design issues and debugging mappings - which in reality is where most of the time on OWB projects goes. For this client, they're aware of the design issues but are keen to learn about all of the new OWB10gR2 features so we're using our own data; on the assignment Jon was on last week, we used the clients data and spend the week combining training with building an OWB/Oracle Data Warehouse proof of concept.

The other area of training that's proved popular is training on BI Suite Enterprise Edition, in particular going beyond basic reports and dashboards and starting to take advantage of the data integration features in BI Server and the alerting and guided analytics features in Delivers. We're also working (in the evenings, it's a busy time) on building out the examples for the next round of BI Seminars, which will include elements of Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle BPEL and SOA Suite integration, Identity Management and Real-Time Decisions, which we'll incorporate in to our regular client training lineup once it's ready.

For me now though, it's back to working out the particular examples the client wants to cover (one of the benefits of combining training with consultancy, you can rustle up examples and scenarios based on previous project work) and a nice ice-cold pint of beer whilst sitting on the terrace.