Well the two BI Forum 2012 events in Brighton, and in Atlanta, are both now over, and as usual we’re now making the presentations available for download. Thanks again to all of the speakers, and in particular Kevin McGinley who provided the masterclasses, for putting the time in to create these presentations and share their knowledge at the two events. If you missed them when they were posted, here’s the two blog posts recapping Brighton and Atlanta 2012:

• The Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012 : Brighton’s Over, Now off to Atlanta!
• Week Two of the RM BI Forum 2012, in Atlanta

All presentations are in PDF format and, unless otherwise stated, are copyright of their respective authors/companies. Congratulations also to Emiel van Bockel and Jordan Meyer, winners of the best presentation awards for Brighton and Atlanta respectively, and to Antony Heljula and John Minkjan, who tied for best speaker in the 10-minute session category in Brighton.

Kevin McGinley Masterclass slides:

• The Action Framework : A Practical Guide to the Galaxy
• Oracle Scorecard & Strategy Management : The Un-Scorecard Manual
• Oracle BI Mobile : Where are we Now?
• OBIEE 11g Customized : Beyond the Whitepaper…

These are the presentation slides from the rest of the conference, from both Brighton and Atlanta:

• Alan Lee, Matt Bedin, Oracle Corporation : “RM BI Forum 2012 Opening Keynote”
• Steve Devine, Hitachi Consulting : “Effective Dashboard Design”
• Antony Heljula, Peak Indicators, “OBIEE 11g Security - It’s as Easy as 1-2-3″
• Adam Ferarri, Oracle Corporation : “Introducing Endeca Information Discovery”
• Tony Selden, PlayTech (Virtue Fusion) : “Whistlestop tour of a greenfield DW/BI Development (…When you really don’t need an ETL tool)”
• Daan Bakboord, Ebicus : “Oracle BI Applications: Can we make it worth the Purchase?”
• Antony Heljula, Peak Indicators : “Disabling your session logs will make no difference!”
• Mike Vickers, Rittman Mead : “The Rise of the Data Scientist”
• Ayse Oztop, GTech : “You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure”
• Adam Seed, James Coyle, John Holifield, Rittman Mead / Nominet : “BI Reporting Pack in the Real World”
• Adam Bloom, Oracle Corporation : “Oracle BI 11g Diagnostics”
• Emiel van Bockel, Centraal Boekhuis : “Go agile all the BI way”
• Mike Durran & Mark Rittman, Oracle Corporation/Rittman Mead : “Exalytics – All you ever wanted to know”
• Chris Webb, Crossjoin Consulting : “Introduction to the Microsoft BI Stack from a Microsoft MVP”
• Michael Wilcke, sumIT AG : “From reports/spreadsheets to OBI”
• Tim/Dan Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions, Inc. : “Data Visualization in Oracle BI 11g”
• Sunil S Ranka, FCS : “Deep Dive in OBIEE 11g Performance Tuning”
• Rene Kuipers, VX Company : “Groups, Roles and Issues”
• Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead : “Reporting Against Transactional Schemas with OBIEE 11g”
• Matt Bedin, Phillipe Lions : “Real-Time / Low Data Latency Analytics with Oracle BI and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine”
• Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead : “Inside Oracle Exalytics and Oracle TimesTen”
• Dan Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions, Inc : “OLAP Is Different From What You Think”
• Jordan Meyer, Rittman Mead : “Designing Eye-Catching and Effective Dashboards” and in web-based, interactive format (press right-arrow on keyboard to page through)
• Ramke Ramakrishnan, MarketSphere : “A Deep Dive into OBIEE 11g Security”

Finally, I put together two Flickr photo sets of the Brighton, and Atlanta, events, which you can access here:

• Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012 Photo Set, Brighton
• Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012 Photo Set, Atlanta

Thanks again to everyone who attended, spoke or helped organize the event. Now to start planning 2013!

Although it’s great fun to travel the world speaking at events such as Oracle Openworld, Collaborate and ODTUG KScope, Rittman Mead in the UK still consider the UK Oracle User Group Conference, held in Birmingham in November or December each year, to be our “home” conference and our main showcase for what we’ve been up to in the last year. Like most of the big annual conferences, the UKOUG event has multiple streams and the one we’re particularly interested in is the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing stream, covering topics and products such as OBIEE, ODI, Essbase and Oracle OLAP, BI methodologies and the BI Applications.

Jon Mead is on the board of directors for the UKOUG, and both Jon and I have chaired the Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG within the UKOUG in previous years. I’m particularly keen that we get some good, new and in-depth content around Oracle BI, DW and ETL for this year’s event, and I’d imagine papers on the following topics might go down well:

• OBIEE development methodologies and best/right practices
• OBIEE metadata modeling techniques, particularly against OLTP sources, OLAP sources and federating disparate data sources
• Dashboard design best practices, and anything around effective / innovative visualizations
• Presentations around data mining, Oracle R, big data and Hadoop
• Tips and techniques around ODI, including migrations from OWB and Informatica
• Papers around mapping, mobile, scorecards or any of the other OBIEE extensions introduced with 11g
• Techniques to get the best out of the BI Apps, including handling upgrades, preparing for the Fusion Apps, and combining packaged data models with custom ones

I’ll be putting a paper in on real-world use of the Exalytics In-Memory Machine, based on testing we’ll be doing over the summer along with feedback from customer PoCs. All speakers get a three-day pass to attend all of the other sessions, and if you get accepted you’ll be presenting at Europe’s biggest Oracle conference as well as knowing you’re contributing to a great event. There’s also a number of great social events and awards over the three days of the conference, and the photo below is of Debra Lilley (UKOUG President) and Lisa Dobson (Vice President) giving the awards whilst Vikki Lira (OTN and the ACE Program) stands in the foreground.

The call for papers website is here, and you’ve got until the 1st of June to get your abstracts in. Hopefully I’ll see some of you attend, and maybe present,

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!