Update on the First of the New BI Masterclasses

Oracle University in London ran the first of my new Enterprise Business Intelligence Masterclasses last week, where we focused on the use of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition alongside enterprise software and identity management tools. We had a good turnout and as usual Oracle did a good job in terms of venue, administration and so on.

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.