I’m just back now from Atlanta, having been over there for the past week helping run the second week of the RM BI Forum 2012. Around 55 BI professionals from around the USA (and with a few from Europe) got together over four days to network, share tips and techniques around Oracle BI development, meet the Oracle PMs, and enjoy themselves downtown in Atlanta, GA.

The format of the US BI Forum followed the same structure as the UK one, with Kevin McGinley providing the masterclass on the Tuesday, the main conference running on Wednesday and Thursday, and the NDA BI Developer day on the Friday organized in conjunction with Oracle. Kevin’s session was if anything even better received than in Brighton, with topics ranging from the Action Framework through Oracle Scorecard & Strategy Management, UI customization and of course BI Mobile. Thanks again to Kevin for taking the time to develop the materials, and then join us over two weeks to deliver the masterclass and then take part in the event itself.

The main conference then kicked-off with Tim and Dan Vlamis talking about dashboard best practices, then went on to cover Endeca, OBIEE performance tuning, security, Exalytics, RPD data modeling, big data and the new 11.1.1.6.2 SampleApp. As with Brighton, we ran a number of 10-minute sessions over the two days, including some Ignite-style sessions that had slides that auto-advanced every thirty seconds, and TED-style sessions where the speaker covered a controversial or counter-intuitive topic with minimal slides and sometimes props. Here’s Christian Screen, from Cap Gemini and ArtofBI.com, delivering his Ignite session on how to become an Oracle ACE.

The Best Presentation Award went in the end to our own Jordan Meyer, who talked about the wider world of data visualizations including examples such as the Billion Dollar Gram, a facebook network visualization created using R, and other examples created using Oracle’s R toolkit and embedded in Oracle BI dashboards. Jordan had a great relaxed but engaging presenting manner, covered some hot new technology and even managed to create a visualization based on Stewart’s comments about Apple on our internal mailing list, shown in the photo below along with the subject.

Although the event is primarily community organized, we had some exceptional support from the Oracle BI product management/development team again this year in Atlanta, including Matt Bedin who heads-up developer outreach for Oracle BI, Philippe Lions who demonstrated the new 11.1.1.6.2 SampleApp and provided a beta version for delegates to take away with them, and Pravin Janardanam who recently joined the product management team and is responsible for the metadata elements of the BI Server. We were also privileged to be joined for the second year by Jean-Pierre Dijcks who ran a whiteboarding session on big data, and Adam Ferrari, ex-CTO of Endeca who talked about the Oracle Endeca Information Discovery platform and analyzed, live, the tweet stream from this week’s, and the previous week’s, attendees. Thanks again to everyone from Oracle, especially for staying around for all four days and taking part in all of the sessions.

Friday, as with the Brighton week, was a special BI Developer day organized in conjunction with Oracle BI product development and held under NDA (non-disclosure agreement), where we were taken through the product roadmap in more detail and looked in particular at a couple of significant changes/developments in the OBIEE product architecture. Of course I can’t go into any detail now, but thanks again to Oracle for this and watch this space for insight and analysis once things become public.

So that’s it for now. I’ll do one final blog post early next week to post all of the presentation PDFs, and photos from the US event can be viewed in this BI Forum Atlanta 2012 Flickr set. Thanks again to everyone, and no doubt we’ll start planning the 2013 event very soon!

It’s currently Saturday evening and I’m at home in Brighton, tying up loose ends after last week’s BI Forum event and getting ready for next week’s in Atlanta, GA. I think it’s probably safe to say that this week’s event was the best ever, and we’re looking forward to flying over to Atlanta to do it all again!

The Rittman Mead BI Forum this year is running for four days at both venues, with the first day an optional OBIEE11g Masterclass by Kevin McGinley, and the final day being a BI Developer Day, held under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) in conjunction with Oracle BI product development. Around thirty people arrived either on Monday night or early Tuesday morning for Kevin’s masterclass, which covered topics such as the OBIEE 11g Action Framework, Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management and Oracle BI Mobile. Kevin won best speaker award at last year’s US BI Forum event, and leads a team of developers and consultants at Accenture delivering OBIEE solutions around the US. Here’s Kevin delivering his session, talking in this case about use-cases for the Action Framework beyond the typical “invoke marketing campaign from a link on the dashboard”:

A big part of the BI Forum is the social and networking aspect, with in the case of the Brighton event around 75 BI developers from around Europe, the USA and India attending this year. An hour or so after the close of Kevin’s keynote we assembled in the bar for the drinks reception, and then suitably lubricated convened back in the seminar room for the Oracle keynote, delivered this year by Alan Lee (Oracle BI Server PM) and Mike Durran (Oracle BI Principal Product Manager, looking after aspects of Exalytics). It was great to get Alan over as he’s in the past been responsible for Essbase, and now he’s looking after what is arguably the single most important component in the OBIEE architecture. Without breaking too many confidences, there was certainly a lively debate around Exalytics and the upcoming product roadmap, and this was a great venue for candid and informed discussions around Oracle’s product strategy.

The main core sessions for the conference then started on Wednesday morning, with Tony Heljula opening the proceedings with a session on OBIEE 11g security, followed later in the day by Adam Ferrari (ex-Endeca CTO) on Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, Ayse Oztop on Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management, and John Hollifield (Nominet) along with James Coyle and Adam Seed (Rittman Mead) with a customer case study around reporting packs and OBIEE 11g. One new thing we tried for this year’s event was to run a number of ten-minute sessions, using the Ignite format (10 minutes, 20 slides that auto-advance every 30 seconds) on Wednesday and the TED format (10 minutes, no slides) on the Thursday. I think these worked – of course a lot of it was down to the presenter and the topic – but it was an opportunity to cover a lot of topics, and for speakers who didn’t have the time to create an hour’s worth of material but who had an interesting idea to get across. Thanks again to everyone who presented over the two days, and there’s a Flickr photo set here – Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012, Brighton – if you want to take a look at photos of the presenters and the sessions. Congratulations also to Oracle ACE Emiel van Bockel from Centraal Boekhuis in the Netherlands who won the Best Speaker award for the best one-hour session, and Tony Heljula (Peak Indicators) and John Minkjan (Ciber) who tied as Best Speakers for the 10-minute sessions.

Another new idea we tried this year was to have a couple of guest speakers, coming from outside of our normal Oracle BI technical area. On the Wednesday evening therefore, before the main meal and after our main sessions for the day, we had Debra Lilley, Oracle ACE Director, Oracle Alliance Director for Fujitsu and President of the UK Oracle User Group, present to the forum on BI within the Oracle Fusion Applications. Debra has been working closely with Oracle through leading the Oracle Product Development Committee for the International Oracle Users Group Community (IOUC), and had a great story to tell the audience around OBIEE and Essbase are deeply embedded, and central, to the Fusion Apps suite.

I was keen to have Debra talk for a couple of reasons; firstly, I think it’s good to bring in people who work outside the core OBIEE tech area and Debra is an accomplished speaker and advocate for users. Secondly though, it was particularly interesting to hear how all of the Fusion Middleware components that OBIEE 11g has adopted, such as Oracle Platform Security Services, Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Enterprise Manager and the Action Framework that links into them, are actually there because the Fusion Apps are the primary customer for OBIEE and it’s in their set of requirements, with the spin-off benefit for us in that we get all of these enterprise features as part of the standard product. There is a method to the madness, so to speak, in all these new Fusion Middleware components coming into OBIEE, although it has to be said that there were several calls for a more simplified, cut-down version of OBIEE suitable for SMEs (something like the new BI Publisher trial version launched last week), maybe with a lightweight application server and without some of the complexities around security and so on, to compete with vendors such as Qliktech.

Qliktech, and their Qlikview product, came up in conversation earlier in the day when Adam Ferrari, now a VP within Oracle but previously the Chief Technology Officer for Endeca, presented on Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and the Endeca Server (aka MDEX) that powers it. Adam’s a great speaker and stuck around for the whole conference, and he’s also coming over to Atlanta next week to present the same session for the US audience. The development process for the Endeca Server is quite unlike that for traditional BI projects, with much less time spent on the data modeling part and a set of UI components that let you develop “search/analytical” applications using both structured, semi-structured and unstructured (almost) data.

Adam was also able to share a bit of the Endeca roadmap with the audience, including some initial thoughts on how the Endeca Server can leverage OBIEE’s semantic layer, and how the BI Server might be able to access Endeca Server data, and how Endeca Latitude’s style of search/analytical UI components are being rewritten to use Oracle ADF DVT technology. If you’re interested in the Endeca Information Discovery story, we put together a week-long series of articles on the product a few months ago including this article on our thoughts on how Endeca will fit into the Oracle BI/DW product line, which also has links to all of the other postings.

Wednesday night was the gala meal, this time at the Havana Restaurant in Brighton, with delegates traveling into town after Debra’s keynote and visiting our new offices on the way for a champaign toast. Thanks to Becky, Alex and everyone else back in the office for organizing the events this night, and also the various social events over the rest of the week. Here’s a few photos from the meal, and from events during the rest of the Brighton BI Forum:

Our second guest speaker was on Thursday, and in a bit of a departure from our normal topics we had Chris Webb, a Microsoft MVP and owner of Crossjoin Consulting and Technitrain, to talk to us about the Microsoft BI stack. I’ve followed Chris’ blog for some time and we’ve had kind-of parallel careers, with Chris specializing in Microsoft Analysis Services and Microsoft BI, whereas of course I’ve focused more on Oracle BI. I thought it’d be interesting to have someone come along and show how they do a similar job to us but with a different set of tools, and tell us what they thought was good about the product, what didn’t work so well and how they typically approached projects. It was a bit of a gamble as to whether it would work, but it was actually one of the best received sessions of the week and helped us put Oracle’s product direction, explained in detail during the final session on Friday, in context. I was particularly interested to hear Chris’ take on the various changes happening to Analysis Services metadata over the past few years, introducing more relational and in-memory features, something Oracle of course did with Oracle OLAP / Oracle Express back in the 9i days, with mixed success (to put it diplomatically).

So the main BI Forum sessions finished on Thursday evening, but for around twenty of the delegates plus around five or so Rittman Mead staff, there was an extra day at the end which we’d organized in conjunction with Oracle BI product management. Held under non-disclosure, Alan Lee and the product team took us through a more detailed look at the product roadmap, and looked at a couple of particular focus areas that are going to be key to the product going forward. Apologies to anyone who wanted to come to this day but missed out because of number restrictions, but we’re running the same thing again at the Atlanta event next week, and hopefully on the Friday after this year’s Openworld – thanks again to Oracle for making this possible, it was very well received.

Anyway, we’re off to the States on Monday to do the same thing again, running the US BI Forum at 200 Peachtree in downtown Atlanta. Once both events are over we’ll post all of the presentations for public download on our website, and you can follow the proceedings using the Twitter hashtag #biforum. See you all in Atlanta!

It’s just a few weeks now until the 2012 BI Forum events in Brighton and Atlanta, so for anyone who’s still not booked but is thinking of attending, here’s what you’ll miss if you don’t sign up soon.

As in previous years, the BI Forum runs over two weeks, first in Brighton UK (May 8th – 11th, Hotel Seattle) and then in Atlanta, GA (200 Peachtree). The first day is an optional OBIEE 11g masterclass by Accenture’s Kevin McGinley, who won the “best speaker” award at last year’s US BI Forum, and is well known to the US OBIEE community. We’re delighted to have Kevin come over to the UK as well, and looking forward to hearing his advice, tips and tricks on OBIEE 11g development.

After the masterclass is an evening keynote from Oracle BI Product Development, followed by meals in the hotels. The main event then follows on the Wednesday and Thursday, with highlights of the UK agenda including:

• Adam Bloom, Oracle Corporation : “Oracle BI 11g Diagnostics”
• Antony Heljula, Peak Indicators : “OBIEE 11g Security : It’s as easy as 1-2-3!”
• Steve Devine, Hitachi Consulting : “Effective Dashboard Design”
• Mike Durran & Mark Rittman, Oracle Corporation/Rittman Mead : “Exalytics – All you ever wanted to know”

whilst over in the US, some sessions you’d not want to miss include:

• Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Oracle Corporation : “Big Data Architecture Deep Dive”
• Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead : “Reporting Against Transactional Schemas with OBIEE 11g”
• Sunil S Ranka, FCS : “Deep Dive in OBIEE 11g Performance Tuning”
• Tim/Dan Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions, Inc. : “Data Visualization in Oracle BI 11g”

In addition to the regular one-hour sessions, we’re also running lots of 10-minute TED and Ignite-style sessions, to get more speakers involved and vary the format a bit, and there’s lots of opportunities for questions, discussions and sharing ideas. We’ll also be joined by several members of the OBIEE / DW product development and management team, including Mike Durran, Adam Bloom, Adam Ferarri and Nick Tuson (OBIEE, UK), and Philippe Lions, Matt Bedin, Adam Ferrari, Jean-Pierre Dijcks and Pravin Janardanam

One of the features of the BI Forum events is that most of the delegates stay together in the same hotel, to maximize opportunities for networking, and to allow you to catch up with your colleagues in the industry. So, there’s about five places left for the UK event, and about ten for the US event, so if you’re thinking of registering, here’s the links:

• Booking form for UK BI Forum Event (Brighton, May 8th – 11th 2012)
• Booking form for US BI Forum Event (Atlanta GA, May 15th – 18th 2012)

Hopefully see you all in Brighton or Atlanta in May!

Just a quick note to say that places are going fast at the two BI Forum events in Brighton, May 8th-11th 2012 and Atlanta, May 15th-18th 2012. At the moment, 30 out of the 50 places for the UK event have gone with a similar number gone for the US event.

I blogged about the two events here, but as a quick recap:

• Kevin McGinley from Accenture is doing the one-day masterclass on the Tuesday
• The main BI Forum events run on the Wednesday and Thursday
• The Oracle keynote is on the Tuesday evening, with gala dinners on the Tuesday and Wednesday nights
• On Friday, we’re co-hosting an NDA BI Developer day with Oracle BI Product Development, free to attend

This really is our biggest and best BI Forum events ever, and based on previous years we’ll sell-out a few weeks beforehand. Full details of the two events are on the BI Forum 2012 website, with links to registration forms. Don’t miss out!

Last week I was very proud to present at the Hotsos Symposium 2012, in Dallas, Texas, on the new Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. It’d always been a personal objective of mine to speak at the Hotsos event, as I’d seen it as the “ultimate” technical Oracle conference albeit focused on the database, rather than anything to do with BI, but when Exalytics was announced and I could see the obvious interest most data warehouse DBAs would have with the new product, I thought it’d be worth submitting an abstract.

In the end, it all got a bit hairy towards the end as the box I’d planned on testing against doesn’t actually arrive until later this month, but I was able to create a demo on a VM and show the principles, and I think the session went down pretty well. Thanks to all of those that attended, and gave me encouragement before I presented, and if you’re interested the slides are downloadable here, and also viewable online below, using Slideshare.

So apart from my talk, I spend most of the week doing research and writing for the book, and also attending as many sessions as I could. I was particularly glad to see Doug Burns‘ two sessions – one on statistics for partitioned objects that was particularly useful for the DW work that I do, and another on “ASH” analytics and new database performance visualisations that are available in Enterprise Manager 12c.

For anyone who doesn’t work with the Oracle Database day-to-day, ASH is short for Active Session History, and is a sample-based real time view of the “wait events” that are contributing to the response time of your queries. By using some of the features shown by Doug in his session, you can analyse ASH data over time, and over other dimensions, to view what contributed to the time taken by a query to run in the recent past. The beauty of using ASH data, rather than trace data that you have to specifically enable for a session or application, is that it’s there for situations where you didn’t know there’d been an issue, but then someone comes and tells you that, at a certain time yesterday, queries against the data warehouse were running slow. If you’re interested in understanding more about this topic, there’s a Youtube video (not by Doug, unfortunately) that shows how ASH Analytics works.

Of course, I was also pleased to catch up with some more colleagues and friends from the Oracle Database world - Jonathan Lewis (pictured above, about to hypnotize some volunteers from the audience), Bryn Llewellyn, Doug and Maria Colgan from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland respectively, Cary Millsap, Alex Gorbachev, Tom Kyte and Tim Gorman from the States and Canada, and people like Wolfgang Breitling who’s articles I’ve read in the past but never really got to meet in-person.

One nice surprise for me though was to meet Tanel Poder for the first time, along with another chance to speak with Kerry Osborne, who along with some other colleagues from Enkitec ran the excellent first-night reception and “Exadata vs. Oracle Database Appliance” debate. I can see lots of parallels between how Enkitec and Rittman Mead run our businesses, so it was great to catch up with both of them and have a good chat about technology and business. Here’s the Enkitec guys taking part in the panel, with Tanel about to say something clever but subversive about Exadata:

Well I’m back now from Dallas and back working on the final chapter of the book, and going up to London and further afield next week for client meetings. Then I’m off to the OUG Ireland Conference in Dublin to talk about Oracle Data Integrator for OWB Developers, then straight over to Oslo for the OUGN Annual Conference, which once again is being held on the Color Magic cruise liner traveling between Oslo and Kiel. Quite a few of the Hotsos presenters are also going to the OUGN event, so it’ll be nice to catch up with everyone again, and do my first in-depth talk on Exalytics, over one-and-a-half hours.