Bright-eyed from Brighton
"Sorry, I'm late". After a real long time I finally have a little time to blog again. Missed it ! And want to restart with an happening which made my eyes look bright.
Oh what a event...
I can only follow my fellow-blogger Christian when I say I had the honor to attend the really great Rittman Mead BI forum which happened the 14th and 15th May in Brighton. So perfectly organized, with tons of informative and interesting presentations, lots of good talks and discussions around OBIEE, Essbase and ODI and with a - in my mind - very harmonizing group of people attending. All in all a very delightful happening for which I want to say thank you very much to Mark&Jon and their team Becky, Jennifer (ladies first !) and Borkur, Ragnar and Peter.
I was invited to hold a presentation about Scripting Oracle BIEE there, which was really fun, because the guys from Rittman Mead opened some bottles of ice cold beer before I started. Hence we had an even better
atmosphere in the audience than already before (see Mark's blog). Relaxed presenting....
The presentation went very good and while standing in front of the audience I even learned something new. That it is NOT possible to paste UDML of repository content from any of the menu points accessible from the manage menu and that the admin tool has an command line option with which you can do a lot of funny things around automation with your repository. Hardly I knew that I blackled (google for energy saver, wanna try ? Click here) around it and found that of course John already blogged on it. And we discussed the new Content Accelerator Framework, which uses XUDML - a combination of XML and UDML. See here some blogs around that, one from Venkat, the other one from @lex. Great, if I learn this much while presenting I will do that again and again.
Talking about presentations. It had very impressive presentations full of comprehensive content on the Rittman Mead BI Forum.
There has been the one from Edward Kroske (he’s THE MAN in Essbase), who wrote some books with very special titles like “Look smarter than you are”, blogs a lot (http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/) and explained in Brighton very detailed and with a lot of passion and the humor of a man from Texas what the differences between ASO and BSO cubes are (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/edward_roske_essbase_internals.pdf). Funny and very interesting stuff though I did not know that ASO is existing, because I just worked with the older versions of Essbase yet. Need to catch up there some time very very soon.
Also a good one was the presentation of Mark himself, who was talking about optimizing the performance of the ETL routine for Oracle BI Apps. I followed this without even knowing how the BI apps look like – unfortunately I do not know of many installations in Switzerland / Germany / Austria.
John Minkjan (http://obiee101.blogspot.com/) completed the first day with a very complete presentation all around the Cache of OBIEE and there is a lot. Not only the well known Query-Cache, but also the presentation services cache and not to forget the browser cache. So, if you want to know something about read his presentation (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/john_minkjan_cache_mgmt.pdf).
After John the legendary Venkat (he’s really the master of blogging around OBIEE and Essbase (http://oraclebizint.wordpress.com/)) held his presentation about Security integration between Essbase and OBIEE. This "geek" has developed a - as he said - “little” piece of Java code which makes the integration an easy catch. Follow his findings here http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/venkat_j_obiee_essbase_security.pdf. Unbelievable !
For those of you more interested in ODI / OWB melting together, there was an outlook how all this should happen from Craig Stewart (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/craig_stewart_biapps_odi.pdf).
Also, there was a good one from Adam Bloom, who talked very informative around what to do, when a customer yells that performance of OBIEE suite is bad and what you can do to find out where it comes from.
Have a look, when working with performance issues in OBIEE this can help you find it faster (http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/adam_bloom_bi_server_diag.pdf ).
And on the second day finally I had the possibility to see next generation of OBIEE. 11g on the table, live in front of my eyes. It looks very good and just 5 seconds after the presentation started we had this humming “Woah” running through the audience. Mike Durran could have talked all day long about 11g and the new features, all of us would have followed his explanations with eyes wide open. But there were others to present.
And it was absolutely worth it. The approach from Emiel in his presentation was kind of different, but I liked it. Hopefully they can follow their strategy also when they have more data in the Warehouse. I think especially the Data Warehouse geeks among you will like his presentation. And if only to find out why it’s not the strategy you would follow / propose to a customer. http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/emiel_bockel_sun_stars.pdf .
Another very good presentation was all around Map integration in OBIEE. Maarten Jan Kampen, a guy from the Netherlands is actually in the middle of implementing that. A lot of customized Java / Java script and whatever else code in this solution. This is what I remember. Take a look: http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/maarten_jan_kampen_obiee_mapviewer.pdf .
Adrian was next, talking about global implementations of OBIEE, mainly focused on the translation features OBIEE provides for the repository and the presentation catalog, but also for the product messages themselves. Funny was that he also mentioned the BI Localizer, the tool I already used at a customer site to implement their language requirements. Check it out: http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/adrian_ward_globalization.pdf.
And then – in my opinion - the best presentation of the Forum was held by Tony Heljula. He talked about SOA integration in OBIEE and demonstrated live how to configure some examples. He demonstrated as if it is the most unimportant minor matter and in a very easygoing way. Great trainer this guy, I just met him last year at a partner event in Frankfurt, where he held the “Modeling the OBIEE repository” course, which I attended.
To be honest it was so interesting to see all the examples, where integration could make sense. Absolutely phenomenal – for me. But decide for yourself: http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/antony_heljula_obiee_soa.pdf
Wow, something totally new. Cube organized MVs, a new feature in Oracle OLAP 11g. Quite interesting, what Peter Brink showed us. But decide yoyurself. Here it is: http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/peter_brink_comv.pdf.
So, all in all this event showed me that it’s good to blog around something. I met a lot of people there and my network is bigger now and this is very valuable for me. But what makes the most is that it is a very good feeling to know that I blogged and that it is read by somebody and - at least sometimes - appreciated by someone out there – and not getting dusty somewhere in a library or so.
The event pretty much reminded me of the Trivadis Tech Event we have two times a year, even just for the OBIEE, Essbase and ODI world. Hopefully I can be at this Rittman Mead BI Forum again next year.
To all a good start in the week.
So long,
Andreas