In a post earlier this week I previewed three sessions at the upcoming Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015; in this post I’m going to look at four particularly interesting sessions at the Atlanta Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 event running the week after Brighton, on May 13th-15th 2015 at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, Atlanta GA. As well as an optional one-day masterclass on big data development by myself and Jordan Meyer on the 13th, the main event itself has keynotes and product update sessions from Oracle’s BI product management team, a data visualisation challenge and a guest talk by John Foreman, author of the book “Data Smart” and Chief Data Scientist at Mailchimp; in terms of the main sessions though there are four that I’m particularly interested in, starting with one by a speaker new to the BI Forum, Qualogy’s Hasso Schaap, who’ll be talking to us about their use of Oracle’s new BI Cloud Service in his session “Developing strategic analytics applications on OBICS PaaS”

“In this session I’ll tell how we use the Oracle BI Cloud Service in our development plans for a strategic analytics application. Focussing on Strategic HR Planning there’s so much you can do with your data that we decided to put it in a packaged app. I will discuss the important parts of the development process and show how we fixed the issues we came up with. Developing in the BI Cloud is different and expectations are also different. 
As an example there’s the part of prediction. How do we predict based on data in the BI Cloud and what are other possibilities. With prediction we were able to tell our customers a different story. A story that was different than before using old-school tools and techniques. In this session I will uncover some of the most appreciated functionality and will happily elaborate on the story behind ‘The present, the future, development and scenario planning’.”

My second featured session is by someone very-well known to previous BI Forum attendees, and to the wider Oracle BI+DW community: Stewart Bryson. Stewart of course used to head-up Rittman Mead in the US and then went-on to become our first Chief Innovation Officer, before leaving to start his own company Red Pill Analytics with Kevin McGinley, another old friend of Rittman Mead and the BI Forum. We’re very pleased to have both Stewart and Kevin delivering sessions at the Atlanta BI Forum, and for Stewart’s session he’s talking about something very close to his heart – “Supercharging BI Delivery with Continuous Integration”:

“One of the things I’ve never understood about the lifecycle features in most BI tools is why the designers feel the need to roll their own source control and DevOps features. Instead of focusing on deeper integration with tools and processes that exist in the other 90% of development paradigms, BI vendors instead start with a clean palette and create something completely siloed and desperately alone. 
In this presentation, we’ll take a look at how some of these other development paradigms approach DevOps — paying perhaps the closest attention to the world of Java development and other JVM languages. We’ll see how approaches such as continuous integration and continuous delivery play a part in rapid, iterative delivery, and how we can apply some of those approaches to the world of OBIEE development.”

My third session is by another speaker new to the BI Forum, but someone who’s well-known in the BI and data warehousing world and who I met in-person for the first time at last year’s Oracle Openworld: Sumit Sarkar. Sumit works for Progress Software, makers of the DataDirect ODBC drivers that powers OBIEE’s connection to Hadoop, for example, as well as connectors to MongoDB, Salesforce, Oracle RightNow and Eloqua, and as he’ll explain in his session “Make sense of NoSQL data using OBIEE”, NoSQL databases : 

“NoSQL databases have stormed the top 10 db-engines rankings with MongoDB at #4 and Cassandra at #8.  It’s inevitable that these NoSQL databases, storing unstructured data without a standard query language, will have BI requirements for unarmed OBIEE teams.  Not even a complete Oracle stack can save you with the release of Oracle NoSQL.This will be the first session of its kind to tackle standards based NoSQL connectivity.  
So join me at BI Forum ’15  to take control of NoSQL data with your RPD and expand big data skills and thought leadership within your organization.  Learn how organizations are using SQL access to NoSQL databases for integration across existing business intelligence platforms. We’ll talk about common challenges and gotchas that shops are facing when exposing unstructured NoSQL data to OBIEE.  It can get out of hand pretty quickly otherwise …”

My final selection is from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and home of course of the Large Hadron Collider (and who announced on April 1st the first unequivocal evidence for The Force, almost upstaging our announcement of Oracle E-Business Suite being ported to Hadoop and MongoDB). There’s several session at both the Brighton and Atlanta BI Forums on Oracle’s new Big Data Discovery tool, and in this session CERN’s Manuel Martin Marquez will be talking about their work in this area, in his session “Governed Information Discovery: Data-driven decisions for more efficient operations at CERN”

“The European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN, is running the world’s largest and more powerful particle accelerator complex in order to shed light on how the Universe works and which are its main building blocks.  CERN’s particle accelerators and detectors infrastructure is comprehensively heterogeneous and complex. A number of critical subsystems, which represent cutting-edge technology in several engineering fields, need to be considered: cryogenics, power converters, magnet protection, etc. The historical monitoring and control data derived from these systems has persisted mainly using Oracle database technologies, but also other sorts of data formats such as JSOM, XML and plain text files. All of these must be integrated and combined in order to provide a full picture and better understanding of the overall status of the accelerator complex.
Therefore, a key challenge is to facilitate easy access to, flexible interaction with, and dynamic visualization of heterogeneous data from different sources and domains.  In our session, we will share our experience with a potential solution for finding insights within our data, Oracle Endeca Data Discovery. In addition, we will feature practical examples relating to future possibilities for improving the control and monitoring of CERN’s accelerator complex, optimization results for accelerator operations and a demo of the implemented solution”

Full agenda details on the Atlanta Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 can be found on the event homepage, along with details of the optional one-day masterclass on Delivering the Oracle Information Management and Big Data Reference Architecture, and our first-ever Data Visualisation Bake-Off, using the DonorsChoose.org dataset. Registration is now open and the event takes place between May 13th and 15th April 2015, at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, Atlanta GA.