Tag Archives: User Groups & Conferences
BI Forum 2015 Preview — OBIEE Regression Testing, and Data Discovery with the ELK stack
I’m pleased to be presenting at both of the Rittman Mead BI Forums this year; in Brighton it’ll be my fourth time, whilst Atlanta will be my first, and my first trip to the city too. I’ve heard great things about the food, and I’m sure the forum content is going to be awesome too (Ed: get your priorities right).
OBIEE Regression Testing
In Atlanta I’ll be talking about Smarter Regression testing for OBIEE. The topic of Regression Testing in OBIEE is one that is – at last – starting to gain some real momentum. One of the drivers of this is the recognition in the industry that a more Agile approach to delivering BI projects is important, and to do this you need to have a good way of rapidly testing changes made. The other driver that I see is OBIEE 12c and the Baseline Validation Tool that Oracle announced at Oracle OpenWorld last year. Understanding how OBIEE works, and therefore how changes made can be tested most effectively, is key to a successful and efficient testing process.
In this presentation I’ll be diving into the OBIEE stack and explaining where it can be tested and how. I’ll discuss the common approaches and the relative strengths of each.
If you’ve not registered for the Atlanta BI Forum then do so now as places are limited and selling out fast. It runs May 14–15 with an optional masterclass on Wednesday 13th May from Mark Rittman and Jordan Meyer.
Data Discovery with the ELK Stack
My second presentation is at the Brighton forum the week before Atlanta, and I’ll be talking about Data Discovery and Systems Diagnostics with the ELK stack. The ELK stack is a set of tools from a company called Elastic, comprising Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (E – L – K!). Data Discovery is a crucial part of the life cycle of acquiring, understanding, and exploiting data (one could even say, leverage the data). Before you can operationalise your reporting, you need to understand what data you have, how it relates, and what insights it can give you. This idea of a “Discovery Lab” is one of the key components of the Information Management and Big Data Reference Architecture that Oracle and Rittman Mead produced last year:
ELK gives you great flexibility to ingest data with loose data structures and rapidly visualise and analyse it. I wrote about it last year with an example of analysing data from our blog and associated tweets with data originating in Hadoop, and more recently have been analysing twitter activity using it. The great power of Kibana (the “K” of ELK) is the ability to rapidly filter and aggregate data, as well as see a summary of values within a data field:
The second aspect of my presentation is still on data discovery, but “discovering data” within the logfiles of an application stack such as OBIEE. ELK is perfectly suited to in-depth diagnostics against dense volumes of log data that you simply could not handle within simple log viewers or Enterprise Manager, such as the individual HTTP requests and types of value passed within the interactions of a single user session:
By its nature of log streaming and full text search, ELK also lends itself well to near real time system monitoring dashboards reporting the status of systems including OBIEE and ODI, and I’ll be discussing this in more detail during my talk.
The Brighton BI Forum is on 7–8 May, with an optional masterclass on Wednesday 6th May from Mark Rittman and Jordan Meyer. If you’ve not registered for the Brighton BI Forum then do so now as places are very limited!
Don’t forget, we’re running a Data Visualisation Challenge at each of the forums, and if you need to convince your boss to let you go you can find a pre-written ‘justification’ letter here.
Take Part in the BI Survey 15, and Have Your Voice Heard!
Long-term readers of this blog will know that we’ve supported for many years the BI Survey, an independent survey of BI tools customers and implementors. Rittman Mead have no (financial or other) interest in the BI Survey or its organisers, but we like the way it gathers in detailed data on which tools work best and when, and it’s been a useful set of data for companies such as Oracle when they prioritise their investment in tools such as OBIEE, Essbase and the BI Applications.
Here’s the invite text and link to the survey:
“We would like to invite you to participate in The BI Survey 15, the world’s largest annual survey of business intelligence (BI) users.
BARC’s annual survey gathers input from thousands of organizations to analyze their buying decisions, implementation cycles and the benefits they achieve from using BI software.
As a participant, you will:
- Receive a summary of the results from the survey when it is published
- Be entered into a draw to win one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers
- Ensure that your experiences are included in the final analyses
Click here to take part
Business and technical users, as well as vendors and consultants, are all welcome to participate.
You will be able to answer questions on your usage of a BI product from any vendor and your experience with your service provider.
The BI Survey 15 is strictly vendor-independent: It is not sponsored by any vendor and the results are analyzed and published independently.
Your answers will be used anonymously and your personal details will not be passed on to software vendors or other third parties.
The BI Survey 15 should take about 20 minutes to complete. For further information, please contact Adrian Wyszogrodzki at BARC (awyszogrodzki@barc.de).Thank you in advance for taking part.”
Previewing Three Sessions at the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015
As well as a one-day masterclass by myself and Jordan Meyer, a data visualisation challenge, keynotes and product update sessions from Oracle and our guest speaker from the Oracle Data Warehouse Global Leaders Program, the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 has of course a fantastic set of speakers and sessions on a wide range of topics around Oracle BI, data warehousing and big data. In this blog post I’m going to highlight three sessions at the Brighton BI Forum, and later in the week I’ll be doing the same with three sessions from the Atlanta event – so let’s start with a speaker who’s new to the BI Forum but very well-known to the UK OBIEE community – Steve Devine.
Steve is one of the most experienced OBIEE practitioners in the Europe, recently with Edenbrook / Hitachi Consulting, Claremont and now working with Altius in the UK. In his session at the Brighton BI Forum 2015 Steve’s going to talk to us about what’s probably the hottest topic around OBIEE at the moment in his session “The Art and Science of Creating Effective Data Visualisations”. Over to Steve:
“These days, news publications and the internet are packed with eye-catching data visualisations and infographics – the New York Times, the Guardian or Information Is Beautiful to name but a few. Yet the scientists and statisticians tell us that everything could be a bar chart, and that nothing should ever be a pie chart! How do we make sense of these seemingly disparate, contrasting views?
My presentation provides an introduction on how graphic design principles complement the more science orientated aspects of data viz design. It will focus on a simple-to-apply design framework that brings all of these principles together, enabling you to create visualisations that have the right balance of aesthetics and function. By example, I’ll apply this framework to traditional BI scenarios such as operational and exploratory dashboards, as well as new areas that BI tools are just beginning to support such as commentary and storytelling. I’ll also look at how well Oracle’s BI tools address today’s data visualisation needs, and how they compare to the competition.”
On the topic of data visualisation, I’m also very pleased to have Daniel Adams from Rittman Mead’s US office coming over to the Brighton BI Forum to talk about effective dashboard design. Daniel’s been working with Rittman Mead clients in the US and Europe for the past year helping them apply data visualisation and dashboard design best practices to their dashboards and reports, and he’ll be sharing some of his methods and approaches in his session “User Experience First: Guided information and attractive dashboard design”:
“Most front end OBI developers can give users exactly what they ask for, but will that lead to insightful dashboards that improve data culture and escalate the user xperience? One the biggest mistakes I see as a designer, are dashboards that are a cluttered collection of tables and graphs. Poorly designed dashboards can prevent users from adopting a BI implementation, diminishing the ROI.
In this session, attendees will learn to design dashboards that inform, instruct, and lead to smart discussion and decisions. This includes learning to visualize data to convey meaning, implementing attractive visual design, and creating a layout that leads users through a target rich environment. We will walk through a series of “before” and “after” dashboards that demonstrate the difference between meeting a requirement, and using proven UX and UI design concepts to make OBIEE dashboards insightful and enjoyable to use.”
Finally, someone I’m very pleased to have over to the Brighton BI Forum for the first time is Gerd Aiglstorfer. I first met Gerd at an Oracle event in Germany several years ago, and since then I’ve noticed several of his blogs and the launch of his Oracle University Expert Sessions on OBIEE development, administration and RPD modelling. Gerd is one of Europe’s premier experts in OBIEE and Oracle BI, and for his inaugural BI Forum presentation he’ll be deep-diving into one of the most complex topics around repository modeling in his session “Driving OBIEE Join Semantics on Multi Star Queries as User”:
“Multi star queries are a very useful and powerful functionality of OBIEE. But when I examine reports developed by business users or report developers I often find some misunderstandings on how it is working and queries are build by OBIEE. As additionally the execution strategy in OBIEE 11.1.1.7 has changed to generate SQL of multi star queries I had the idea to introduce the topic at the BI Forum. Thus, it’s a quite interesting topic to go into technical details of OBIEE SQL generator engine.
I’ll introduce how users can drive join semantics on common fields in multi star queries. You will get a full picture of the functionality for a better understanding of how report creation affects SQL generation. I recognized some inconsistencies during my tests of the new OBIEE 11.1.1.7 logic in January 2014. I will demonstrate the issues and would like to discuss if you would say: “It’s a defect within the SQL generator engine” – as I do.”
Full agenda details on the Brighton 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.
Realtime BI Show with Kevin and Stewart – BI Forum 2015 Special!
Jordan Meyer and I were very pleased to be invited onto the Realtime BI Show podcast last week, run by Kevin McGinley and Stewart Bryson, to talk about the upcoming Rittman Mead BI Forum running in Brighton and Atlanta in May 2015. Stewart and Kevin are of course speaking at the Atlanta BI Forum event on May 13th-15th 2015 at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, Atlanta, and in the podcast we talk about the one-day masterclass that Jordan and I are running, some of the sessions at the event, and the rise of big data and data discovery within the Oracle BI+DW industry.
Full details on the two BI Forum 2015 events 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, the guest speakers and the inaugural Data Visualization Challenge. Registration is now open and can be done online using the two links below.
- Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015, Brighton – May 6th – 8th 2015
- Hosted at the Hotel Seattle, Brighton Marina.
- Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015, Atlanta – May 13th – 15th 2015
- Hosted at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, Atlanta.
We’ve also set up a special discount code for listeners to the Realtime BI Show, with 10%-off both registration and the masterclass fee for both the Brighton and Atlanta events – use code RTBI10 on the Eventbrite registration forms to qualify.
Announcing the BI Forum 2015 Data Visualisation Challenge
The Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 is running in Brighton from May 6th-8th 2015, and Atlanta from May 13th – 15th 2015. At this year’s events we’re introducing our first “data visualization challenge”, open to all attendees and with the dataset and scenario open from now until the start of each event. Using Oracle Business Intelligence 11g and any plugins or graphics libraries that embed and interact with OBIEE (full details and rules below), we challenge you to create the most effective dashboard or visualisation and bring it along to demo on the Friday of each event.
Help DonorsChoose.org Donors Use their Funds Most Effectively
This year’s inaugural data visualisation challenge is based around the DonorsChoose.org project and dataset, an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help public school classroom projects that need funding (Rittman Mead will be making donations on behalf of the Brighton and Atlanta BI Forums to show our support for this great initiative). The Donorschoose.org project and dataset have been used in several hackathons and data crunching contests around the world, with analysis and visualisations helping to answer questions such as:
- Why do some projects get funded, while others don’t?
- Who donates to projects from different subjects?
- Does proximity to schools change donation behavior?
- What types of materials are teachers lacking the most? (eg chalk, paper, markers, etc)
- Do poorer schools ask for more or less money from their donors?
- If I need product x, what is the difference between projects asking for x that were successful vs those that aren’t.
More details on uses of the Donorschoose.org dataset can be found on the Donorschoose data blog, and example visualisations you could use to get some ideas and inspiration are on the Donorschoose.org Data Gallery showcase page.
Your challenge is to import this dataset into your analytical database of choice, and then create the best visualisation or dashboard in OBIEE to answer the following question: “Which project can I donate to, where my donation will have most impact?”
How Do I Take Part?
For more on the BI Forum 2015 Data Visualization Challenge including how to download the dataset and the rules of the challenge, take a look at the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 Data Visualisation Challenge web page where we’ve provided full details. You can either enter as an individual or as part of a team, but you must be registered for either the Brighton or Atlanta BI Forum events and come along in-person to demonstrate your solution – numbers at each event are strictly limited though, so make sure you register soon at the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 home page.
