w00t! One compound word? Mind-boggling!
As a first time OOW participant, when I arrived at Moscone this morning, the sheer size, grandeur and general over-the-top-ness hit me like a brick. Seeing it in pics and on youtube is one thing but experiencing first hand…wow. KScope back in June was a family party in comparison! Which isn’t a bad thing by the way
For me, Sunday was all about getting my bearings and participating – both as audience as well as speaker – in the ODTUG sessions. “Figures” you may say as I’m more on the hands-on and technical side of things rather than sales + marketing presentations and – again – you’d be 100% correct.
First things first though: heart-attack and vessel constricting breakfast with my good friend Robin Moffatt. Because. BACON!
In hindsight I probably shouldn’t have taken the ubercaffeinated version of coffee offered there since combined with the adrenaline of pre-OOW-presentation makes fingers tingle. Lesson learned for next time!
I was part of the ODTUG Sunday Symposium (big h/t to ODTUG in general and Stewart in particular on that one), so let’s jump into the action:
SESSIONS!
Engaging Oracle Business Intelligence Users Through Collaborative and Embedded BI
Christian Screen provided a nice, visual overview of the evolution and life-cycle of BI initiatives from birth to near-death (a state which you hopefully never reach). Accompanying this life-cycle are all aspects of collaboative and embedded BI he showed in the form of biteamwork as well as real-life examples of embedding BI content into any web-portal – literally at the click of a button. Really clever stuff utilizing and extraction and direct referencing of the divs inside the rendered OBI GUI. Neat!
Unfortunately I had to realize about that time that my phone takes really BAD pictures when the lighting is low and you’re in a sombre room.
2014 Swiss Community Brunch
I had to skip this one when I saw just where the Hyatt is situated geographically and how long it would take me to get there and back again (unintended Lord Of the Ring reference) without missing my scheduled sessions.
OOW is huge, OOW is crammed full of content…OOW is tricky in terms of scheduling your activities!
Oracle Business Intelligence Development in the Cloud
Stewart was up next and immediately disappointed some pin the audience since his talk wasn’t going to the BICS – the Oracle BI Could Services – but rather actual OBIEE development work in the cloud. Gotta read the abstract of the session as well, gents, not just the title 😉
Anyhow a presentation not for the faint of heart as things got technical very quickly with MDS XML, Git, Jenkins, push, merge, branch. I loved it and if you’re doing OBIEE dev and don’t know how you could manage it across multi-dev departments? Well have a look what he was talking about. May be an interesting starting point for you.
No Silver Bullet: Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Performance in the Real World
Good old Robin Moffatt! I’ve Stewart had set the techie tone with his then it definitely went “downhill” in a very good sense – the technical one – from there and I think reached the abyss with my presentation thereafter. More and more “Ey?” and “WTH?” faces in the crowd.
I’ve seen this presentation of Robin before and I just love it. Firstly because Robin trashes “best practices”…the only real “best practice” there is, is “use your brain”. I agree 100%. All other so called “best practices” are contextual and need to be adapted to the actual situation, so “it depends”.
His approach of tracking and analyzing performance and capacity issues is neat to say the least and everytime I discuss these subjects with him there’s stuff to add and something new to try out. But I digress.
Performance and capacity tracking isn’t magic but neither is it “follow this 10 point list….oh and by the way disable logging and use caching”. Ah my pet hates. NO! You want to do performance mgmt? Get Robins presentation. Read it. Understand it. Adapt it to your situation. Do it.
I’ll try to add links to the presentations as (if) they become available and do a complete wrap-up after OOW with a link list so you have a single point to go to in order to access all of it.
Neos Voyage in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
My presentation. Was fun, but I lost about 80% of the audience mentally after slide 8 or 9. NQS function calls? Recursive ODBC calls from the BI server through the BI server into its own instantiated RPD in order to have it as a data source within itself?
As promised for those who stuck around until the end and want to dig deeper themselves: shoot me an email on christian dot berg at dimensionality dot ch and I will get back to you with the RPD you need to make this work.
Quick Dive into Big Data ETL with Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle Big Data Connectors
Last content session of the day was Mark Rittman and this also was a presentation I’d seen before but let me just say this: I don’t know how he does it. Mark has this way of just writing slides on the darndest (pardon my french) of topics and make it look and sound like he was writing a grocery shopping list for Friday afternoon. Precise, to the point, gets the information across, not overcomplicated and definitely without all the sales and marketing hubbub.
Best wide-ranging overview of Oracle’s Big Data initiatives in the wider Business Analytics context you can read right now.
Funny addition: after the presentation there was a definite fan-club behaviour going on and I just couldn’t help myself. Apologies again Mark, but here goes:
All in all a very productive day with meeting tons of people. The number of ex-colleagues, fellow community members and ACEs you run into here is just immense.
Gotta rush now to get some breakfast before today’s sessions. I’ll do an extra post on Sundays ACE dinner later.
