Tag Archives: User Groups & Conferences
Preview of the Rittman Mead BI Forum in Atlanta
Mark has done a great job of previewing the upcoming content for both BI Forums, the one running locally for us in Atlanta, as well as the one in Brighton, UK. We have an exceptional Master Class this year with Lars George from Cloudera, including an introduction to the Cloudera Big Data stack with full details on building, loading and analyzing Hadoop clusters. The exact details of what’s covered, as well as the timetable for all speaker presentations, is listed here. Additionally, Mark posted on the two special presentations occurring at the two events: Maria Colgan on the In-Memory database option in Atlanta, and myself and Andrew Bond covering the latest iteration of Oracle’s Information Management Reference Architecture in Brighton. And finally, Mark also covered three presentations for the Atlanta event covering Advanced Visualizations and Mobility. Instead of rehashing all of that, I wanted to do a blog post diving a bit more into the Atlanta event, and some of the content not previously mentioned, especially those by Oracle. We’ve always had incredible representation from Oracle at the BI Forum, and we are very appreciate that the different teams consider our event to be so important in the community.
I wanted to start off by discussing the venue a bit: the Renaissance Hotel in Midtown Atlanta. It’s a modern, upscale Atlanta hotel in Midown that also has the amazing Rooftop 866 bar with incredible views of the city (those of you that have “socialized” with me over the years know I’ll be spending some time up there). I’m confident this will be our best venue to date.
Before diving into the sessions that Oracle will be presenting in Atlanta, it seems prudent to give those folks a “warm and fuzzy” feeling, show our appreciation, and make them feel safe and sound. So here’s an image that many of our readers will already recognize; for those who don’t, I’m sure you’ll know it by heart when the two events conclude:
Philippe Lions will be back again this year previewing the newest version of Sample App. For customers and partners who are like us at Rittman Mead, Sample App is a pivotal part of your OBIEE methodology. It allows us the ability to demonstrate anything from simple OBIEE analyses and dashboards, to some of the crazy mad-scientist stuff that Philippe’s team comes up with. If Oracle and Philippe didn’t design and build Sample App and keep it current, then we would have to build it ourselves. From my understanding, this will be the first time Philippe has previewed this content external to Oracle, so we are pleased and honored that he chose the BI Forum as the venue for this. It’s also worth noting that Philippe is a BI Forum veteran… he has never missed the Atlanta event since it’s inception four years ago.
We also have Jack Berkowitz, VP of Product Management for Business Analytics at Oracle, speaking on “Analytics Applications and the Cloud”. He’ll be discussing Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) in detail and the roadmap Oracle has for deploying those applications in the Cloud. I imagine that Jack will be giving the Wednesday night Keynote (as he did last year with Philippe), which is always a crowd-pleaser. Jack also spoke on the new Mobile Application Designer last year, so I imagine he will also be able to update us on that product even though his focus at Oracle has shifted. Also from Oracle we have Matt Bedin (another BI Forum veteran) talking about Oracle BI and Cloud, but with a focus on Oracle’s roadmap with regular Oracle Analytics in the Cloud, which equates to having a Cloud-optimized OBIEE running in Oracle’s Public Cloud. As this product is not yet generally available, attendees will get the scoop on where this product is going… and we might even get some hints on when to expect it.
We are excited to have Chris Lynskey, Senior Director, Product Management and Strategy at Oracle, making his first appearance at the BI Forum. He’ll be speaking on “Endeca Information Technology for Self-Service and Big Data”, so we’ll see Endeca’s positioning for structured and non-structured reporting on an adhoc basis. We’ll have several presentations that delve into Endeca, but it will be good to hear from Chris on this topic, as he was with Endeca prior to the acquisition by Oracle, and has been deeply involved with the 3.1 release. Rounding out Oracle’s participation is BI Forum newcomer Susan Cheung, Vice President of Product Management for Oracle TimesTen. Susan will be speaking on “TimesTen In-Memory Database for Analytics – Best Practices and Use Cases”. So it will be interesting to have both Susan and Maria Colgan at the Forum, so attendees will have a chance to see Oracle’s complete In-Memory strategy and roadmap at one setting.
The final session I’d like to discuss is an entry from yours truly on “ExtremeBI: Agile, Real-Time BI with Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate”. I know… it’s an incredibly long title… but I had to get in all the buzz words. I also rely heavily on the Information Management Reference architecture that Andrew Bond and I are presenting at the UK BI Forum, so my Atlanta session will be based around this newest release. I love this content, and I think it shows with my excitement level every time I present it. I describe an Agile methodology that utilizes Oracle’s BI stack to the fullest: integrating OBIEE, ODI and perhaps the most beneficial element: Oracle GoldenGate. For those organizations who are investigating ways to deliver content rapidly while also making the end user central to the development process, then this session is for you.
Their are still slots available at both venues, so feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about either event.
Previewing Three Oracle Data Visualization Sessions at the Atlanta US BI Forum 2014
Many of the sessions at the UK and US Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 events in May focus on the back-end of BI and data warehousing, with for example Chris Jenkins’ session on TimesTen giving us some tips and tricks from TimeTen product development, and Wayne Van Sluys’s session on Essbase looking at what’s involved in Essbase database optimisation (full agendas for the two events can be found here). But two areas within BI that have got a lot of attention over the past couple of years are (a) data visualisation, and (b) mobile, so I’m particularly pleased that our Atlanta event has three of the most innovative practitioners in this area – Kevin McGinley from Accenture (left in pictures below), Christian Screen from Art of BI (centre), and Patrick Rafferty from Branchbird (right), talking about what they’ve been doing in these areas.
If you were at the BI Forum a couple of years ago you’ll of course know Kevin McGinley, who won “best speaker” award the previous year and most recently has gone on to organise the BI track at ODTUG KScope and write for OTN and his own blog, Oranalytics.blogspot.com. Kevin also hosts, along with our own Stewart Bryson, a video podcast series on iTunes called “Real-Time BI with Kevin & Stewart”, and I’m excited that he’s joining us again at this year’s BI Forum in Atlanta to talk about adding 3rd party visualisations to OBIEE. Over to Kevin…
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told someone that I can’t precisely meet a certain charting requirement because of a lack of configurability or variety in the OBIEE charting engine. Combine that with an increase in the variety and types of data people are interested in visualizing within OBIEE and you have a clear need. Fortunately, OBIEE is web-based tool and can leverage other visualization engines, if you just know how to work with the engine and embed it into OBIEE.
In my session, I’ll walk through a variety of reasons you might want to do this and the various approaches for doing it. Then, I’ll take two specific engines and show you the process for building a visualization with them right in an OBIEE Analysis. In both examples, you’ll come away with a capability you’ve never been able to do directly in OBIEE before.”
Another speaker, blogger, writer and developer very-well known to the OBIEE community is Art of BI Software’s Christian Screen, co-author of the Packt book “Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial” and developer of the OBIEE collaboration add-in, BITeamwork. Last year Christian spoke to us about developing plug-ins for OBIEE, but this year he’s returned to a topic he’s very passionate about – mobile BI, and in particular, Oracle’s Mobile App Designer. According to Christian:
“Last year Oracle marked its mobile business intelligence territory by updating its Oracle BI iOS application with a new look and feel. Unbeknownst to many, they also released the cutting-edge Oracle BI Mobile Application Designer (MAD). These are both components available as part of the Oracle BI Foundation Suite. But it is where they are taking the mobile analytics platform that is most interesting at the moment as we look at the mobile analytics consumption chain. MAD is still in its 1.x release and there is a lot of promise with this tool to satisfy the analytical cravings growing in the bellies of many enterprise organizations. There is also quite a bit of discussion around building new content just for mobile consumption compared to viewing existing content through the mobile applications native to major mobile devices.
The “Oracle BI Got MAD and You Should be Happy” session will discuss these topics and I’ll be sharing the stage with Jayant Sharma from Oracle BI Product Development where we’ll also be showing some cutting edge material and demos for Oracle BI MAD. Because MAD provides a lot of flexibility for development customizations, compared to the Oracle BI iOS/Android applications, our session will explore business use cases around pre-built MAD applications, HTML5, mobile security, and development of plug-ins using the MAD SDK. One of the drivers for this session is to show how many of the Oracle Analytics components integrate with MAD and how an Oracle BI developer can quickly leverage the capabilities of MAD to show the tool’s value within their current Oracle BI implementation.
We will also discuss the common concern of mobile security by touching on the BitzerMobile acquisition and using the central mobile configuration settings for Oracle BI Mobile. The crowd will hopefully walk away with a better understanding of Oracle BI mobility with MAD and a desire to go build something.”
As well as OBIEE and Oracle Mobile App Designer, Oracle also have another product, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, that combines a data aggregation and search engine with dashboard visuals and data discovery. One of the most innovative partner companies in the Endeca space are Branchbird, and we’re very pleased to have Branchbird’s Patrick Rafferty join us to talk about “More Than Mashups – Advanced Visualizations and Data Discovery”. Over to Patrick …
“In this session, we’ll explore how Oracle Endeca customers are moving beyond simple dashboards and charts and creating exciting visualizations on top of their data using Oracle Endeca Studio. We’ll discuss how the latest trends in data visualization, especially geospatial and temporal visualization, can be brought into the enterprise and how they drive competitive advantage.
This session will show in-production real-life examples of how extending Oracle Endeca Studio’s visualization capabilities to integrate technology like D3 can create compelling discovery-driven visualizations that increase revenue, cut cost and enhance the ability to answer unknown questions through data discovery.”
The full agenda for the Atlanta and Brighton BI Forum agendas can be found on this blog post, and full details of both events, including registration links, links to book accommodation and details of the Lars George Cloudera Hadoop masterclass, can be found on the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 home page.
Preview of Maria Colgan, and Andrew Bond/Stewart Bryson Sessions at RM BI Forum 2014
We’ve got a great selection of presentations at the two upcoming Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 events in Brighton and Atlanta, including sessions on Endeca, TimesTen, OBIEE (of course), ODI, GoldenGate, Essbase and Big Data (full timetable for both events here). Two of the sessions I’m particularly looking forward to though are ones by Maria Colgan, product manager for the new In-Memory Option for Oracle Database, and another by Andrew Bond and Stewart Bryson, on an update to Oracle’s reference architecture for Data Warehousing and Information Management.
The In-Memory Option for Oracle Database was of course the big news item from last year’s Oracle Openworld, promising to bring in-memory analytics and column-storage to the Oracle Database. Maria is of course well known to the Oracle BI and Data Warehousing community through her work with the Oracle Database Cost-Based Optimizer, so we’re particular glad to have her at the Atlanta BI Forum 2014 to talk about what’s coming with this new feature. I asked Maria to jot down a few worlds for the blog on what she’ll be covering, so over to Maria:
“Given this announcement and the performance improvements promised by this new functionality is it still necessary to create a separate access and performance layer in your data warehouse environment or to run your Oracle data warehouse on an Exadata environment?“At Oracle Open World last year, Oracle announced the upcoming availability of the Oracle Database In-Memory option, a solution for accelerating database-driven business decision-making to real-time. Unlike specialized In-Memory Database approaches that are restricted to particular workloads or applications, Oracle Database 12c leverages a new in-memory column store format to speed up analytic workloads.
This session explains in detail how Oracle Database In-Memory works and will demonstrate just how much performance improvements you can expect. We will also discuss how it integrates into the existing Oracle Data Warehousing Architecture and with an Exadata environment.””
The other session I’m particularly looking forward to is one being delivered jointly by Andrew Bond, who heads-up Enterprise Architecture at Oracle and was responsible along with Doug Cackett for the various data warehousing, information management and big data reference architectures we’ve covered on the blog over the past few years, including the first update to include “big data” a year or so ago.
Back towards the start of this year, Stewart, myself and Jon Mead met up with Andrew and his team to work together on an update to this reference architecture, and Stewart carried on with the collaboration afterwards, bringing in some of our ideas around agile development, big data and data warehouse design into the final architecture. Stewart and Andrew will be previewing the updated reference architecture at the Brighton BI Forum event, and in the meantime, here’s a preview from Andrew:
“I’m very excited to be attending the event and unveiling Oracle’s latest iteration of the Information Management reference architecture. In this version we have focused on a pragmatic approach to “Analytics 3.0″ and in particular looked at bringing an agile methodology to break the IT / business barrier. We’ve also examined exploitation of in-memory technologies and the Hadoop ecosystem and guiding the plethora of new technology choices.
We’ve worked very closely with a number of key customers and partners on this version – most notably Rittman Mead and I’m delighted that Stewart and I will be able to co-present the architecture and receive immediate feedback from delegates.”
Full details of the event, running in Brighton on May 7-9th 2014 and Atlanta, May 15th-17th 2014, can be found on the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 homepage, and the agendas for the two days are on this blog post from earlier in the week.
Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 Registration Now Open – Don’t Miss Out!
Just a quick reminder to say that registration for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 is now open, with the speaker and presentation list now up on the event website. As with previous years, the BI Forum runs in Brighton on the first week, and then moves over to Atlanta on the second, with the dates and venues as follows:
- Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 – Hotel Seattle, Brighton, May 7th – 9th 2014
- Rittman Mead BI Forum 2014 – Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, May 14th – 16th 2014
We’ve got a fantastic line-up of sessions and speakers, including:
- Oracle ACE and past BI Forum best speaker winner Kevin McGinley, on adding third-party visualisations to OBIEE
- Sessions from TimesTen PMs Chris Jenkins and Susan Cheung on what’s coming with TimesTen
- Wayne Van Sluys from InterRel, on Essbase optimisation
- Oracle’s Andrew Bond, and our own Stewart Bryson (Oracle ACE) with an update to Oracle’s reference BI, DW and Big Data Architecture
- Dan Vlamis on using Oracle Database analytics with the Oracle BI Applications
- Sessions from Oracle’s Jack Berkowitz, Adam Bloom and Matt Bedin on what’s coming with OBIEE and Oracle BI Applications
- Peak Indicators’ Alastair Burgess on tuning TimesTen with Aggregate Persistence
- Endeca sessions from Chris Lynskey (PM), Omri Traub (Development Manager) on Endeca, along with ones from Branchbird’s Patrick Rafferty and Truls Bergersen
- And sessions from Rittman Mead’s Robin Moffatt (OBIEE performance), Gianni Ceresa (Essbase) and Michael Rainey (ODI, with Nick Hurt from IFPI)
We’ve also got some excellent keynote sessions including one in the US from Maria Colgan on the new in-memory database option, and another in Brighton from Matt Bedin and Adam Bloom on BI in the Cloud – along with the opening-night Oracle product development keynote in both Brighton and Atlanta.
We’re also very exited to welcome Lars George from Cloudera to deliver this year’s optional one-day masterclass, this year on Hadoop, big data, and how Oracle BI&DW developers can get started with this technology. Lars is Cloudera’s Chief Architect in EMEA and an HBase committer, and he’ll be covering topics such as:
- What is Hadoop, what’s in the Hadoop ecosystem and how do you design a Hadoop cluster
- Using tools such as Flume and Sqoop to import data into Hadoop, and then analyse it using Hive, Pig, Impala and Cloudera Search
- Introduction to NoSQL and HBase
- Connecting Hadoop to tools such as OBIEE and ODI using JDBC, ODBC, Impala and Hive
If you’ve been meaning to take a look at Hadoop, or if you’ve made a start but would like a chance to discuss techniques with someone who’s out in the field every week designing and building Hadoop systems, this session is aimed at you – it’s on the Wednesday before each event and you can book at the same time as registering for the main BI Forum days.
Attendance is limited to around seventy at each event, and we’re running the Brighton BI Forum back at the Hotel Seattle, whilst the US one is running at the Renaissance Midtown Hotel, Atlanta. We encourage attendees to stay at the hotel as well so as to maximise networking opportunities, and this year you can book US accommodation directly with the hotel so you can collect any Marriott points, corporate discounts etc. As usual, we’ll take good care of you over the two or three days, with meals each night, drinks receptions and lots of opportunities to meet colleagues and friends in the industry.
Full details are on the BI Forum 2014 web page including links to the registration sites. Book now so you don’t miss-out – each year we sell-out in advance, so don’t leave it to the last minute if you’re thinking of coming. Hopefully see you all in Brighton and Atlanta in May 2014!
Congratulations to Stewart Bryson, and Welcome to Edel Kammermann
Stewart’s too modest to mention it on the blog himself, but I just wanted to congratulate Stewart Bryson on being awarded Oracle ACE Director status by the Oracle OTN ACE program. Stewart was given the Oracle ACE award a few years ago to recognise past work he’d done for the Oracle BI, DW and ETL community, but this higher ACE Director award recognises the ongoing work he’s since been doing to share his knowledge and experience with the Oracle community. For a taste of what he’s been doing recently, check out this recent article on OTN on migrating OWB to ODI, where he goes through ODI12c installation, and then walks through several scenarios for interoperating with, and migrating to, Oracle Data Integrator 12c.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to share the exciting news that Edelweiss Kammermann, who many of you will know from her work with the Latin American Oracle User Group community, joined us back at the start of this year to work with Robin Moffatt in our training development area.
We’ve known Edel for many years, and she came over to Brighton last year to present on BI and SOA/BPM at our 2013 BI Forum. Edel is initially working with Robin on developing our new ODI12c course, followed later on in 2014 with our new BI Apps 11g course, and she’ll be delivering training in Europe, USA and Latin America later on in the year. We’re incredibly pleased and proud that Edel has joined us, and being an Oracle ACE herself, we’ve now got two Oracle ACE Directors, and two Oracle ACEs, in the Rittman Mead team.
I’m sure you’ll all join me in congratulating Stewart, and welcoming Edel to the Rittman Mead team!
