New OBIEE Blogger: Bob Ertl

Twitter = Discovery (Part XXXIV)



Read Bob's LinkedIn profile here. According to that profile, he is the Consulting Product Manager at Oracle. Cool.

His blog can be found here. I believe that is his first post as well, Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory.

Lots of other groups or individuals blog at Oracle which is very helpful. I haven't found anyone from the OBIEE group who does so...which sucks for us.

The only other person I know of that is even related is Tim Dexter (and crew) over at the BI (formerly XML) Publisher blog.

While it doesn't appear that Bob is technically on the OBIEE development team, I will say it's a good start.

Rittman Mead BI Forum 2011, Brighton & Atlanta May 2011

Read more about it here. Call for Papers is here.

When/Where
It depends, where are you? While I would love to go to the UK, doubtful I could swing it. I'll be attending in Atlanta:

Emory Convention Center, Atlanta GA, May 25th – 27th 2011

If I were going to the UK, here are those details:

Hotel Seattle, Brighton, May 18th – 20th 2011

What is it?
Actually, it's quite cool. I would imagine it is something like the Hotsos Symposium for Performance enthusiasts, but for OBIEE.

* Its focus is OBIEE, and related technologies (Essbase, OWB/ODI etc)
* It’s run by OBIEE enthusiasts, for OBIEE enthusiasts
* It’s aimed at an intermediate-to-experienced level audience who already know the basics
* All presentations will be either technical or methodology, with no marketing “fluff”
* Numbers attending are limited to 70 (UK) and 50 (US), with a single stream, giving us the ability to focus the event on just the one topic and with a lot of audience interaction.

It's gonna be small, so there will be quite a lot of interaction amongst the people. I'm looking forward to it, heck, I might even do a presentation myself (not about Twitter, this time).

If you're interested, follow the links above. Submit a paper. Attend. Do it.

SOUG: The Tanel Põder Edition

Note how I used the cool "õ" in the title. I learned that it's not really an "o" but the o with a tilde over it. It's the 24th letter of the Estonian alphabet apparently.



Note the casual attire. He was in shorts. Why? Because he was on vacation. In Miami.

Not only did he take time out from vacation to speak to us, he drove 3 or 4 hours to get here. Awesomesauce.

Naturally, it was a packed house.



(That's Dan McGhan there of APEX fame, he's bald too...but not fat)

We got the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting in 60 minutes which turned into something closer to 2 hours. Yeah for us. I went into this meeting thinking I wouldn't get a whole lot from it. I try to read Tanel's blog but much of is just beyond me. I figured this would be more of the same.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I got quite a bit out of it. I think the credit here goes to Tanel...he made the material incredibly easy to consume. Sure, there were moments there talking about latches and buffer cache's and stuff, but I think the message he was trying to convey was a methodology towards troubleshooting. In other words, don't use the shotgun approach. Systematic. That was the keyword. I loved the approach, I just wish I hadn't been so intimidated before now. I've wasted years of time on the shotgun approach.

I think it would be great to have a few hours (days perhaps) (probably over beer(s)) to just pick his brain. Ask questions. Get answers.

Oh...and the modesty. In one of his demos he displayed an OS stack trace (Solaris) listing all the Oracle function calls. Yeah, the "opi" prefix is for Oracle Programming Interface (I think) and this one is for that and so on and so on. You could hear the muffled laughter in the audience...the good kind...because not very many people know those things. It was fun to watch.

In other meeting news, I didn't win any prizes. I did, however, get to meet this guy:



You may recognize the picture, it was up in the top right corner of this page for a few weeks not long ago.

Guess where I met him for the first time? Twitter. Gotta love The Twitter. He and a friend drove down from Orlando just to see Tanel.

It was a great night. Next time Tanel will be staying at my house where I will provide him good beer and my wife will pepper him with questions on his travels and Estonia.

Thanks Tanel for taking time for us. Thanks Enrique for introducing yourself. Thanks SOUG for tolerating my odd behavior.

Google Refine

I can't remember exactly where I found this, probably Twitter.

From the website:

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.

I installed it this afternoon and played around with it a little bit. I was hoping to use it more for analysis, but I just didn't understand what it was built for.

Basically, it allows you to clean up sets of data. You know, you get an excel file from a customer and you want to make sure all instances of State match. Usually, you get a few different variations of it.

- FL
- Fl
- Florida
- FLORIDA
- florida
- FLOR.

I am sure I could go on and on. But you can select all those values and then update them with a single value. Yes, I know you could update those values in a single SQL statement. Perhaps you don't have time to create the table and load the data. This is a simple tool to allow you to do some basic data cleansing.

Check out the video to get a better example of how to use it. Cool stuff.