Friday, June 3, 2011

BI Forum: Day 2 (Atlanta)

Part I, Day 1 is here.

Agenda
Jean-Pierre Dijcks - Memory MADness: How to Apply Big Speed to Big Data Analysis
Shyam Varan Nath - Tips and Tricks from OBI Application Implementations
Panel Session 2 - Should all BI projects by Agile?
Jacques Vigeant - Overview of Oracle Scorecard & Sneak Peak at 11.1.1.4
Greg Vlahos - How-to Tips for Integrating Essbase in OBIEE

Jean-Pierre Dijcks
I met JP at the Exadata SIG, and I've been reading his blog ever since. Super smart, witty, and funny, all combined to make for an interesting presentation. First off, you'll note there is no link to his presentation, that's because the contents are top secret; we were all forced to sign multiple NDAs. OK, maybe I'm dreaming there.

His presentation got my vote for best speaker (yes, that's kind of mixing things up, sue me).

Shyam Varan Nath
Shyam is Mr. Everything. He's running (or was, not sure) the Exadata SIG and the BIWA SIG. Same as JP, I met him at the Exadata SIG last year in Las Vegas.

I haven't gotten into OBIA much just yet, kinda of sitting on the edges watching for now. From my understanding, OBIA is a set of pre-built reports on top of a pre-built datawarehouse that is loaded with pre-built ETL (Informatica). The value proposition is that it gets you up and running very quickly. Naturally, if you have a lot of customizations in your source systems (PeopleSoft, EBS, JD Edwards, etc), you'll have more work on your hands.

The latest release of OBIA, 7.9.6.3 was mainly to integrate with OBIEE 11g; 7.9.6.2 was supported but not certified.

Panel Session 2
This was essentially a continuation of Stewart Bryson's presentation the day before, Agile Data Warehousing with Exadata and OBIEE11g. Mr. Bryson was the "impartial" moderator.

A lively discussion with one panelist, no 2 (shaved head) panelists taking both sides, Waterfall and Agile. I think the final answer is "It Depends." Unfortunately I don't remember the actual winner.

Jacques Vigeant
Mr. Vigeant presented on Scorecard; this was my first exposure to the tool (Scorecard, not Jacques). I'm still a little hazy on what it does, my impression is that it essentially allows you to create Goals and then set alerts based on certain conditions. Pretty slick stuff, but I'm not even close to that yet.

Greg Vlahos
First off, poor Mr. Vlahos, he had the last slot of the conference...it was down to 75% capacity, if that.

Topic: Essbase

Quite a hot topic too, if demand is an indicator, and it is.

I'm still not sure of the difference between Essbase and Oracle OLAP cubes, but that's a different question.

Mr. Vlahos described the Essbase cube as "Aggregate tables on steroids" which sounds about right. If you're using Essbase, definitely a good read.

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