Oracle BIWA User Community

The day started with a Cable car ride from my hotel to the Moscone Center, it is quite an experience as the streets are quite hilly and it is wonder to see how the tram runs on what seems like 30 degrees incline. With my jacket on the weather seems veery pleasant... The first event of the day was Exadata Board SIG Meeting, where we had good discussions about the current and near future state of the SIG. The main action items on the list were to get a proper website for the SIG and a Web conferencing facility. This took place over the breakfast at Mel's. Then we had the Exadata SIG Meeting with over 30 attendees, including Rich Niemiec, Rob Stackowiack, VP for BI, Arup Nanda, Vinod Haval and many others. Then I was in the IOUG BIWA sessions first one by Mark Rittman on OBIEE 11g new features, Rich Solari and Teresa Wong speaking on OBIEE implementation experiences followed by my presentation with Abhinav on De-Mystifying OBIEE and BI Applications. All this was followed by the BI

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.2 is out, major features: 1) Now JD Edwards Supply Chain Connectors are available 2) Peoplesoft 9.1 support is available 3) OBIEE 11g can be used with 7.9.6 by following the infrastructure upgrade guidelines in Doc 1196943.1 ( I can't seen to find it though on support.oracle.com)

Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne and Oracle Develop 2010 Keynote Lineup Sunday, September 19 | 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. | Moscone North, Hall D Join Larry Ellison , Oracle Chief Executive Officer, and other Oracle Executives, as they discuss Oracle's latest innovations and kick start this year's conference. Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, HP Enterprise Business will present a keynote titled "Transformation: From Applications to the Cloud." Monday, September 20 | 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. | Moscone North, Hall D Oracle President Mark Hurd will kick off Monday's activities at Oracle OpenWorld; and Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems John Fowler and Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven will discuss their vision for the next-generation datacenter and the latest innovations in Oracle SPARC, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Solaris and Oracle Server and Storage products. Noriyuki Toyoki, Corporate Senior Vice President, Fujitsu Limited, will give a keynote

As we get close to Oracle Openworld 2010, from Sep 19 to 23, at San Francisco, CA, I will be posting information of interest to the Oracle BIWA, Exadata SIG and related user community. Let us first begin with the events this week leading to the Openworld: Thursday, September 16, 12 noon Eastern, Webcast Series Exadata V2: Porting a Complex Application and Lessons Learne d by Aaron Werman What are the best ways to make an application work well in Exadata and what design choices should be considered? This TechCast will offer substantial advice on porting existing applications to Exadata. We will also review risk areas and aspects worth testing based on migration experience. The reviewed application domain is a large-scale trickle feed ETL for very high volume reporting, also including a variety of smaller transactional and ad-hoc query systems. We'll discuss porting and running a large mature ODS and reporting data warehouse from Oracle 10g to Exadata. We will cover migration strat

OBIEE 11g is launched ! (does not mean it is Generally Available!) Last week at ODTUG-Kaleidoscope the Product Managers from Oracle demonstrated some of the products on the roadmap including OBIEE 11g. Attendees were requested to blog or post about the new features. However, with the formal launch today the user community can learn about the new features from the web. The visual above shows the new looks and feel of the dashboard in OBIEE 11g. The new sliding chart feature is described here : One of the cool features demonstrated was to intiate workflows from the dashboard via the BPEL technology.. Actionable Intelligence: In the above example there is a difference between the blue and orange bars o nthe right, indicating a gap between the ordered quantity and quantity in stock, the user invokes an action and orders to meet the gap....look for some more explanation here Also check out the other screenshots of OBIEE 11g here

The venue is DC this year...for the 2010 Kaleidoscope - the annual ODTUG event. Check out the detailed agenda here . I picked up registration on Saturday which was right after the US- Ghana soccer game... and guess what the speaker gift this year is a soccer jersey that says on the back "ODTUG 10" Sunday is always the day of the Symposium and I have attended the last two years the EPM session so that is where I will be most of Sunday. Looking forward to Robert Gersten's session that is the second one... Well it so happens that Robert Gersten could not make it, so Al Marciante did that part as well. Incidentally, organizers requested no blogging of the content from today as that can put PM's in a spot if some of the shown features are not actually released, so I am going to honor that and will only write about not feature related items, unless the feature is already out. The soccer fever has really caught on the the Brits are in the pub watching the UK game, folks

From the 2010 BIWA Membership Survey, the BIWA Board of Directors received a lot of valuable insight into the interests of BIWA members. While at Collaborate ’10 last week in Las Vegas, we agreed to post these interests to help presenters tailor their TechCast proposals to meet these interests. Even though a particular topic may have received a small percentage interest among members, the BIWA Board of Directors may still consider a presentation on that topic to ensure a well-rounded set of TechCasts for all of our membership. 1) Type of TechCast – percent of members who rated these “very useful” or “moderately useful” Best Practices – 98% Tips and Tricks – 96% Case Studies – 91% Oracle product demonstrations – 79% Oracle product overviews – 73% 2) Database Usage – percent of members who use the specific database Oracle 10g – 83% Oracle 11g – 58% Microsoft SQL Server – 39% Oracle 9i – 30% MySQL – 17% IBM DB2 – 16% Oracle 8i – 13% Teradata – 11% 3) Technol

The major events for Tuesday included the second data of the BI BootCamp that started with my talk "De-Mystifying OBIEE / Oracle BI Applications" at 8:00 AM and ended in the BI Panel at 4:30-5:30 PM slot. My talk was followed by the General keynote where IBM's VP of the Optim group, Al Smith delivered the talk. The BI keynote at 10:30 AM was delivered by Robert Gersten, SVP of BI and EPM at Oracle, who finally managed to fly back from Europe after being stuck due to Iceland volcano. The room was jam packed in Robert Gersten's talk, my estimate is about 110 people. Gaurav Rewari, VP of Product Strategy spoke with Robert and gave an overview of the current product and Robert gave the overview of the future roadmap. He mentioned that OBIEE 11 g is expected this summer! There were a fair amount of questions and discussions after his talk on BI/EPM topics. The data mining and the OLAP bootcamps took place and were well attended. Karl Rexer delivered the data mining lab

The highlights on Sunday at Collaborate 2010 were: 1) Deep Dive into OBIEE by Mark Rittman (9-3 PM) the session was well attended (~30) people who came on Sunday. While I could not attend in person, I looked at his handouts and saw that he covered from the the basics of OBIEE and BI Publisher with product demos. He also covered integrating with Essbase towards the end with details like registering an Essbase cube in OBIEE. 2) Apart from attending the IOUG Conference Committee Meeting and helping in setting up the hands-on-lab for BIWA Track, I was able to attend the IOUG Speaker orientation meeting. As IOUG Conference Committee we got some cool Hawaiian shirt and was able to wear it around. 3) At 5 PM was the SIG Reception that was very well attended. Apart from some food and drinks and the SIG tables, there was also the painting of the Mural in the center of the room. The artwork will be donated to a local hospital. IOUG also gave away the Volunteer awards. The Ken Jacob award went t

Collaborate 2010 Conference starts in a day! BIWA SIG will be present in full force at the event, most of our Board of Directors are speaking at the event under the " Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days " BIWA SIG started in 2006 and now has over 2100 members worldwide. It hosted two BIWA Summits - first one at Reston, VA in Sep 2007 and then in Oracle Headquarters (Redwood Shores), CA in Dec 2008. To take a conference to next level BIWA SIG joined hands with its parent organization IOUG, to be a part of Collaborate Conference. "Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days" is a Conference within a Conference. The highlight of the events are: 1) Sunday Deep Dive session covering OBIEE by Mark Rittman 2) BI Boot Camp spanning over two days Mon and Tuesday (all sessions listed below) 3) Hands on Lab covering topics like OBIEE, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), BI Publisher (BIP), Oracle Data Mining (ODM), Oracle OLAP, Excel Plug-in for OLAP and Oracle Spatial (demo). The

One of the most respected sources of ratings of Business Intelligence platforms (tools/tool-stack) is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Now that the 2010 Magic Quadrant is out, let's take a deep dive into it. Let us focus on the 4th Quadrant. There are 7 players here namely Oracle (Siebel/Hyperion), IBM (Cognos/SPSS), SAP (Business Objects) and Microsoft - the large infrastructure service providers (or mega vendors) and then the independent BI providers like SAS, Microstrategy and Information Builders. All other are essentially in the niche player category...and in my opinion more suitable for specific company needs rather than go-forward strategy for entire enterprise wide BI initiative. Gartner notices that though mega-vendors account for over 75% of BI Platform, the pure-play or niche vendors are not loosing ground and companies are sometimes impatient with results from large BI projects and turn to smaller vendors for more point solutions. Departments acting as independent cost cent