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Job Vacancy for Training Material Developer
We’re looking for a talented technical writer to come and join us at Rittman Mead. You’ll be helping produce our industry-leading training material. We run both public and private courses, off the peg and bespoke, to consistently high levels of approval from those who attend.
You need to have excellent written English, with a particular skill for clear communication and a keen eye for detail in presentation. We run a lean team here and all material you produce must be “print-ready” without the need for further review and editing.
Technically, you must have solid knowledge of OBIEE and preferably ODI and BI Apps too, with additional products such as Endeca and GoldenGate a bonus. Experience of cloud technology and administration will help but is not mandatory. We use a variety of tools in preparing our training material, so you need to be able to adapt quickly to new software (hint: Powerpoint is not the best presentation tool ;-)).
The role is full time, and can be based remotely. If you are interested, please get in touch through this link. We’d like to see an example of your recent writing, such as a blog entry. If you’ve any questions, you can email me directly : robin dot moffatt at rittmanmead dot com (but to register your interest in the role, please do so via the link).
My Journey to ODI 12c
Most readers of this blog probably know me for my time spent with OBIEE (especially my work in repository development), but I’m guessing some of you long-time readers know that I grew up working with the Oracle Database. Many and many a year ago, I was a fledging Oracle DBA getting all my answers from the AskTom posts by Tom Kyte and the white papers by Carey Millsap. It wasn’t too long before I got my first chance architecting a data warehouse. I was hooked. Single-row lookups no longer interested me… it had to be millions. Then I started writing ETL… first using Perl (as a wrapper for generating SQL and executing it through DBI), and then later using PL/SQL. Finally, I got my hands on Oracle Warehouse Builder. The waters parted. I was home.
What did I like so much about OWB? It generated awesome code. It used smart Oracle loading techniques such as multi-table inserts, MERGE statements instead of UPDATE statements, partition-exchange loading, etc. It generated the kind of set-based, pure SQL that I had been wrapping in languages such as Perl and PL/SQL for years. What did I not like about OWB? Those times when the code wasn’t optimal, or the GUI simply didn’t allow me to do the things I wanted to do (SQL Analytics anyone?) I ended up writing logic in views, or crafting complex pre- and post- processes in PL/SQL, which ironically gave birth to the Transcend product that Rittman Mead offers today.
Then Oracle purchased Sunopsis and Oracle Data Integrator was born. At first… meh. There was a lot to like about ODI, I’ll grant you that. But it took me a while to get past the “different” user interface, and the confusing Topology. But once I wrapped my head around it… I found the yin to OWB’s yang. I couldn’t believe the power I had discovered in the Knowledge Module framework. ODI still generated set-based SQL code because of the similar EL-T approach as OWB, but I was now able to modify how the code was generated without stepping outside of the tool. Additionally… I started to understand and appreciate the Topology, drawing a comparison to the OBIEE sematic layer with the capability of abstracting the logical from the physical, and building more logic into the model instead of the processes that used it. But we were still left in a bit of a between-state. Oracle had two very good ETL products, but neither one felt complete. One tool gave me the standard “operator” paradigm and accompanying flow-based design. The other gave me the power to move mountains by affecting the generated SQL working directly at the source. If only Oracle could bridge the gap… and deliver one product that ticked all those boxes.
Ladies and gentleman… I give you ODI 12c.
One of the best parts of working for Rittman Mead is that I am constantly under NDA with Oracle and get to see new features, product roadmaps, and generally get an insider’s look at what’s coming in future releases. But I have to tell you… the ODI 12c release is one of the hardest secrets I’ve ever had to keep. Years ago, I was asked by Oracle (mostly by David Allan, I think, in retrospect) to participate in usability studies they were conducting on some of the early wireframes of what eventually became ODI 12c. The first time I saw the new flow-based design… all the metal pieces clicked into place for me. This is what we have been waiting for… and what David referred to when he recalled my demand to “just have a mapper”.
So I know you guys want some technical posts form me on ODI. Don’t worry… they’re coming. I won’t try to duplicate the excellent post by Jerome Francoisse delineating the new features. The first one I’ve already started writing is on JEE agents in 12c… if I can get it done before Michael Rainey or Mark Rittman beat me to it. I also want to spend some time with the new Component KM’s, a feature which I think is on equal footing with the flow-based design. So keep your eyes peeled, watch the blog for new ODI content, and let’s enjoy the victory.
UKOUG Apps 2013: Analytics Sponsors & Sessions
The UK OUG Apps 2013 conference is a must attend for users of Oracle Applications. Held at the Brewery in London, there are three full days of content with 10 streams and over 150 speakers.
Rittman Mead are proud to be the Analytics Sponsor for the event and have two speaker sessions at the event.
Click on the details below to view the session abstracts and more details
Session: How to use Oracle’s BI Tool set to Improve Customer Experience
Speaker: James Knight – Head of Advanced Analytics
Date: Monday 14th October at 16.40 in the Queen Charlotte Hall
Session: Oracle BI Applications: Giving Users The Reports they really want
Speaker: Mike Vickers
Date: Tuesday 15th October at 10.20 in the King Vault Hall
We look forward to seeing you there
The Rittman Mead Team
Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, Text Enrichment and Customer-Defined Lists
One of the data visualisations that you can use with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the “tag cloud”. You’ve probably seen tag clouds used in newspaper articles and other publications to show the most commonly found words or phrases in a document, the screenshot below shows a tag cloud in Endeca built on data sourced from comments in a social media feed.
The component within Endeca Information Discovery that extracted the bank names from the data feed is called the “text enrichment engine”, which actually uses technology that Oracle license from a company called Lexalytics. When you use the text enrichment engine, one of the things it does is to extract “entities” such as people, companies, products, places, email addresses and dates, along with themes and any quotations mentioned in the text.
However, as you might have noticed from the tag cloud, several of the banks and other institutions that this process extracts have a few different variations in their name – for example, Amex is also shown as AmEx, AMEX and so on – but obviously these all actually refer to the same company, American Express. So how can we display tag clouds in Endeca but deal with this data issue in the background?
Another issue that can occur is that some words may be ignored or mistakenly allocated to the wrong group of entities. For example, I had “OMG” picked up as a company name, which is correct, but by checking the data itself it proved to be a shortening of “Oh My God” in the text!!
One solution to these kinds of problems is to use the Text-Tagger component within Endeca Information Discovery, the data-loading tool that is used to load Endeca Server data domains. Using this Text-Tagger component, you can prepare a list of in this example, companies of interest in advance, and the component will find and tag any record with the pre-defined tag, including ignoring case if required.
In some circumstances you will want to create a new list based on the application that you are working on. An example related to the displayed image is a list of all bank or financial institutes and their acronyms. It could be the case that we want to exclude company names that are not related to banking, rather than as shown in the image above where Amazon appears for example.
To solve any of above cases, the text enrichment engine supports customer-defined lists (CDL). In the example below, I’ll create one of these lists and use it to clean up the organisation naming so that my tag cloud shows the correct names for each organisation.
1. First Create a Customer-Defined list and save it as custom.cdl postfix in ..\Lexalytics\data\user\salience\entities\lists. As a rule, the file format must be similar to this:
Amex<tab>AMEX
amex<tab>AMEX
AmEx<tab>AMEX
American Express<tab>AMEX
Lloyds TSB<tab> Lloyds
Lloyds<tab>Lloyds
Amazon.com<tab>Amazon
Amazon<tab>Amazon
Barclay<tab>Barclays
Barclays<tab>Barclays
BarclayCard<tab>Barclays
British Broadcasting Corporation<tab>BBC
BBC<tab>BBC
BBC News<tab>BBC
…
2. Update the Text Enrichment data directory. The default directory is normally Lexalytics\data but after applying the cdl file it should point to Lexalytics\data\user instead.
3. Update the Salience.properties file within Oracle Endeca Information Discovery ETL tool, Integrator designer. By default the property “te.entity.types” contains Company, Person, Place, Product, Sports and Title. Add “List” to include user-defined entities.
4. Update the ETL Graph in which the text-enrichment has been done and change the text-enrichment out-edge metadata in order to include “EntitiesList” of type string and multi-or assign.
5. Running the new graph and configurations, here is the new tag cloud using the new entity I created:
Thank You for Voting for Rittman Mead
Earlier in the year I announced that we had been nominated in 5 categories for the UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards. The award ceremony was last night and I’m proud to say that we received an award in each of the categories we entered and won two of them, results below:
- Business Intelligence – Gold
- Emerging (New Products) – Gold
- Engineered Systems – Silver
- Training – Silver
- Managed Services – Bronze
This is great recognition of the work everyone has put in at Rittman Mead across the group, from the Managed Services team we set up last year, to the investment we make in our training courses, the work we have done with Exalytics and the work we do with some of the new products, such as Endeca, R and RTD.
We very much appreciate the support of everyone who voted for us, it means a lot to everyone working at Rittman Mead.
