Each year at the Rittman Mead BI Forum we host an optional one-day masterclass before the event opens properly on Wednesday evening, with guest speakers over the year including Kurt Wolff, Kevin McGinley and last year, Cloudera’s Lars George. This year I’m particularly excited that together with Jordan Meyer, our Head of R&D, I’ll be presenting the masterclass on the topic of “Delivering the Oracle Big Data and Information Management Reference Architecture”.

Last year we launched at the Brighton BI Forum event a new reference architecture that Rittman Mead had collaborated with Oracle on, that incorporated big data and schema-on-read databases into the Oracle data warehouse and BI reference architecture. In two subsequent blog posts, and in a white paper published on the Oracle website a few weeks after, concepts such as the “Discovery Lab”, “Data Reservoirs” and the “Data Factory” were introduced as a way of incorporating the latest thinking, and product capabilities, into the reference architecture for Oracle-based BI, data warehousing and big data systems.

One of the problems I always feel with reference architectures though is that they tell you what you should create, but they don’t tell you how. Just how do you go from a set of example files and a vague requirement from the client to do something interesting with Hadoop and data science, and how do you turn the insights produced by that process into a production-ready, enterprise Big Data system? How do you implement the data factory, and how do you use new tools such as Oracle Big Data Discovery and Oracle Big Data SQL as part of this architecture? In this masterclass we’re looking to explain the “how” and “why” to go with this new reference architecture, based on experiences working with clients over the past couple of years.

The masterclass will be divided into two sections; the first, led by Jordan Meyer, will focus on the data discovery and “data science” parts of the Information Management architecture, going through initial analysis and discovery of datasets using R and Oracle R Enterprise. Jordan will share techniques he uses from both his work at Rittman Mead and his work with Slacker Radio, a Silicon Valley startup, and will introduce the R and Oracle R Enterprise toolset for uncovering insights, correlations and patterns in sample datasets and productionizing them as database routines. Over his three hours he’ll cover topics including: 

Session #1 – Data exploration and discovery with R (2 hours) 

1.1 Introduction to R 

1.2 Tidy Data  

1.3 Data transformations 

1.4 Data Visualization 

Session #2 – Predictive Modeling in the enterprise (1 hr)

2.1 Classification

2.2 Regression

2.3 Deploying models to the data warehouse with ORE

After lunch, I’ll take the insights and analysis patterns identified in the Discovery Lab and turn them into production big data pipelines and datasets using Oracle Data Integrator 12c, Oracle Big Data Discovery and Oracle Big Data SQL For a flavour of the topics I’ll be covering take a look at this Slideshare presentation from a recent Oracle event, and in the masterclass itself I’ll concentrate on techniques and approaches for ingesting and transforming streaming and semi-structured data, storing it in Hadoop-based data stores, and presenting it out to users using BI tools like OBIEE, and Oracle’s new Big Data Discovery.

Session # 3 – Building the Data Reservoir and Data Factory (2 hr)

3.1 Designing and Building the Data Reservoir using Cloudera CDH5 / Hortonworks HDP, Oracle BDA and Oracle Database 12c

3.2 Building the Data Factory using ODI12c & new component Hadoop KM modules, real-time loading using Apache Kafka, Spark and Spark Streaming

Session #4 – Accessing and visualising the data (1 hr)

4.1 Discovering and Analyzing the Data Reservoir using Oracle Big Data Discovery

4.2 Reporting and Dashboards across the Data Reservoir using Oracle Big Data SQL + OBIEE 11.1.1.9

You can register for a place at the two masterclasses when booking your BI Forum 2015 place, but you’ll need to hurry as we limit the number of attendees at each event in order to maximise interaction and networking within each group. Registration is open now and the two events take place in May – hopefully we’ll see you there!

As well as a great line-up of speakers and sessions at each of the Brighton & Atlanta Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 events in May, I’m very pleased to announce our two guest speakers who’ll give the second keynotes, on the Thursday evening of the two events just before we leave for the restaurant and the appreciation events. This year our special guest speaker in Atlanta is John Foreman, Chief Data Scientist at MailChimp and author of the book “Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight”; and in Brighton we’re delighted to have Reiner Zimmerman, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle US and the person behind the Oracle DW & Big Data Global Leaders program.

I first came across John Foreman when somebody recommended his book to me, “Data Smart”, a year or so ago. At that time Rittman Mead were getting more-and-more requests from our customers asking us to help with their advanced analytics and predictive modelings needs, and I was looking around for resources to help myself and the team get to grips with some of the more advanced modelings and statistical techniques Oracle’s tools now support – techniques such as clustering and pattern matching, linear regression and genetic algorithms.

One of the challenges when learning these sorts of techniques is not getting to caught up in the tools and technology – R was our favoured technology at the time, and there’s lots to it – so John’s book was particularly well-timed as it goes through these types of “data science” techniques but focuses on Microsoft Excel as the analysis tool, with simple examples and a very readable style.

Back in his day job, John is Chief Data Scientist at MailChimp and has become a particularly in-demand speaker following the success of his book, and I was very excited to hear from Charles Elliott, our Practice Manager for Rittman Mead America, that he lived near John in Atlanta and had arranged for him to keynote at our Atlanta BI Forum event. His Keynote will be entitled “How Mailchimp used qualitative and quantitative analysis to build their next product” and we’re very much looking forward to meeting him at our event in Atlanta on May 13th-15th 2015.

Our second keynote speaker at the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 event is non-other than Reiner Zimmerman, best known in EMEA for organising the Oracle DW Global Leaders Program. We’ve known Reiner for several years now as Rittman Mead are one of the associate sponsors for the program, which aims to bring together the leading organizations building data warehouse and big data systems on the Oracle Engineered Systems platform.

A bit like the BI Forum (but even more exclusive), the DW Global Leaders program holds meetings in the US, EMEA and AsiaPac over the year and is a fantastic networking and knowledge-sharing group for an exclusive set of customers putting together the most cutting-edge DW and big data systems on the latest Oracle technology. Reiner’s also an excellent speaker and a past visitor to the BI Forum, and his session entitled “Hadoop and Oracle BDA customer cases from around the world” will be a look at what customers are really doing, and the value they’re getting, from building big data systems on the Oracle platform.

Registration is now open for both the Brighton and Atlanta BI Forum 2015 events, with full details including the speaker line-up and how to register on the event website. Keep an eye on the blog for more details of both events later this week including more on the masterclass by myself and Jordan Meyer, and a data visualisation “bake-off” we’re going to run on the second day of each event. Watch this space…!