Oracle BIWA User Community

While we had a Panel focusing on the Critical Success Factors of BI Implementations, I though I would list the CSF's of the BIWA conference here. Since, this was the second BIWA Summit, we had some history behind us. However, just like Jeanne Harris said the biggest fallacy "if you will build a DW, they will come" - the conferences have to deal with the same issues. With a fairly successful inagural BIWA Summit in 2007, we kind of assumed the same attitude, you organize a BIWA Summit and the attendees will come. As we got closer to the event, we had to re-look the strategy and go out and "Push" the information to attract more attendees. Finally, we managed to attract attendees from all over as shown in the visual that Dan Vlamis created for the opening ceremony. We realised there is no substitute for experience in hosting a conference. To list a few we had Dan Vlamis the conferece chair with 26 years of experience in the field related to Oracle technologies. D

Last Year Mark Rittman was a keynoe speaker and he blogged the event, this time Peter Scott created some blog entries . However, unlike blogging by the speakers themselves, we encouraged media to blog about the event. Here are a few of these blog entries: The blog by James Taylor Links: Live from BIWA Summit - Competing on Analytics Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM) Critical Success Factors for successful BI and analytic implementations From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets Getting to the Right Price with Oracle Data Mining Oracle's BI Strategy Intelligent OLAP: Data Mining and OLAP Fraud Detection with Oracle Data Mining

First of all Thanks to all the attendees, speakers and Sponsors/Partners for making this event a success! The BIWA Board deserves an applause for working for close to an year to organize this event. While it is hard to single out any particular Board member, we decided to award Mark Hornick and Tony Jedlinski - the BIWA 'Haydu' Contribution Award for 2008. BIWA SIG as a user driven group, tries to balance the voice of the actual users, vendors and the Oracle Product managers, VP's etc. Being not too long after the announcement of Oracle HP Machine with Exadata storage, it was inevitable to avoid the presence of Exadata in a far too obvious way. It is indeed a "BIG" invention, just to highlight how big is the 'X' box, I took the picture with me in the frame! However, is the real word ready for Exadata, or there are other choices for the companies in 1-25 TB range? Our Platinum Sponsor IBM, helped ot fill that space. They showcased their tight relationship

Dec 2, day 1 of the Summit is over. Three keynotes, BI Panel, Lightening round by the Exhibiting sponsors and the IBM Platinum reception, along with the countless Sessions and the hands-on labs! As BIWA SIG is totally run by volunteers, it is important to take time to thank them for their efforts. Last year at Reston, BIWA awarded John Haydu, the BIWA Contribution Award 2007. This year, John would be again a worthy recipient so instead of giving him the award, we decided to name the award as BIWA 'Haydu' Contribution Award. The recipients for this year are: Mark Hornick and Tony Jedlinksi Both, were instrumental in implementing the BI to run the BI conference. They together devised the system that managed the abstract submission and selection progress. Then as we got closer to the event, we used the Admin's dashboard with critical reports to monitor the registration sources and numbers to keep a strict eye on the conference and take remediation steps to steer it towards a

As we get close to the event, the weather is likely to stay mostly dry, at least compared to the heavy rains from the prior week. The low will be 45F, so if you are from a warmer place, please be prepared with some jacket. We are requesting help from all speakers and attendees of the BIWA Summit, to compete the speaker survey forms, this will help us bring you the speakers that you liked the most in the future years as well. The speakers will receive an envelop with the speaker evaluation forms, all attendees are requested to fill these out and hand over before they leave the room. Please bring along your pens, hopefully the exhibiting sponsors will have pens as giveaways if you did not bring your own... We have posted the public transit information to the Oracle campus to help keep the event green. However, if you prefer to rent a car, the goos news is there are places selling gas for below $2 in this area. If you still are looking for hotels, Sofitel is very close with a shuttle to

It's now only a week! All the session abstracts and details at posted at this site: http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/f?p=219:77:139866668583012::NO So if you are heading there, please make your personal schedule as the event will be packed with 4 keynotes and sessions in 6 || tracks along with the hands-on-lab. This year IBM is the Platinum vendor who will showcase their Optimised Warehouse Initiative i.e. how to run Oracle DW's very fast on the IBM hardware. While there will be a fair amount of focus on the Oracle HP Database Platform, each one has its own niche. If you are a 1 TB to say 25 TB customer and have standardised on a non-HP hardware platform, then you will look at the Optimised Warehouse Initiative (OWI) space. You will find all major H/W vendors such as Sun, IBM, HP etc shipping you a reference or tested configuration with Oracle instance ready for use in DW. Typically, if you have standardised on HP hardware or are pushing over 25 TB, then Oracle HP Databas

Now we stand 4 weeks from the Summit, 4 keynotes, 50+ sessions, ~ 10 hands on Labs. Attend a Webcast on Wed Nov 5, 2008 to learn why you should attend the BIWA Summit. See details at http://OracleBIWA.org Learn about Oracle BI, Data Warehousing. Learn about Optimized Data Warehouse, Learn about Exadata (Oracle HP Database Platform) Still time to grap good flight deals, or the hotel near the Oracle Head Quarters. Spend 2 days at the conference, speand some time visiting San Francisco Downtown or the nearby beaches.

So did Larry miss the boat again? Gates introduced the X-box years ago and its a house hold name. So what's fascinating with this new 'X' box? Joking aside, let's look deep into the Oracle/HP Database Platform based on the Exadata. Larry compared it to Teradata and Netezza in his keynote. No doubt DW appliances have been out for a while and were giving Oracle run for money in the very large DW environments. Oracle's history has been as a key database player for transactional/OLTP systems. While the database features like partitioning, bit-mapped indexes, support for upto 32K block size etc have slowly tried to transform the DB for DW market, till now Oracle was never really looked upon as a DW player in the same league as Teradata or Netezza... and the key note is a proof of that. Interestingly, what about HP. "Operational business intelligence drives business outcomes HP Neoview has industry unique, patented capabilities to make it the premier enterprise data

I googled Exadata last night after Larry's keynote and it returned 934 hits, this morning it was in 3000's, right now its 3440 and sure anything that Larry Ellison has said or done in past, becomes an instant hype... So what is that makes Oracle Exadata storage or the Oracle HP Database Platform unique? It is the Smart Scan technology that reduces the amount of data to be sent from the storage system to the database server. For general description of the new technology, I suggest reading the White Paper: Oracle Database 11g for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence The new Storage Server returns a query result set of the SQL, rather than entire tables. This reduces the network bottlenecks and frees up database server resources. When analyzing data stored in their data warehouses, Oracle claims, that the performance improvement can be 10X or more. Whaty if you are still not satisfied? Well Oracle's advanced compression, can typically reduce the data volumnes on the

Convergence of hardware and datab ase soft Larry Ellison announed the database machine today in his keynote, a machine build on radicle new ideas. He used the sail boat analogy on the out of box thinking needed to overcome the bandwidth limitation between the storage system and the database. The large DW's are tripling in size every two years and are plagued with the data bandwidth problem. There is a disk to Database choking. Storage disks can easily store 100TB but movement of data is the biggest. Most hard configurations slow down at even lesser values 1-10 TB range. The largest storage systems show the exponential increase in scan time at 10TB. This problem can be solved in two way, as a data problem, reduce the data - compression or indexing the data or partition pruning etc. The other way it to enhance the amount of data travelling over the data pipes. Make the pipes faster and increase their number. This lead to the announcement of Oracle's first hardware product called

Dan Vlamis started the day...about 100 attendees, well received talk, was in parallel with Mark Rittman's talk. Mark had arrived at 4 AM and said he was jet lagged... Next session was Ian (his story is he lost his wallet on the way to San Francisco), he spoke on Master Data Management. This was in parallel Matt Vranikar's talk. After lunch, was my talk on Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator, Carl Daniels from the Oracle Development, ran the demo during my talk. They will also be on the demopod L23 in Moscone west. Richard Solari and Teresa Wong's tag team talk was very powerful and very well received. It ran amost full 90 mins. The final event of the day was the BI Panel, moderated by Joe Thomas, participants, Charlie Berger, Dan Vlamis, Jon Mead, Matt Vranikar, myseld and Rich Solari. The Q&A was quite interactive at the end, followed by some post Q&A discussions, one on one...

I am sitting in the keynote session, Sunday evening, the first big event. Today BIWA had 7 sessions, ending the in the BI panel. Bareley made it in time this keynote. This time a see reserved tables for bloggers, and I am in one of those. Safra started the evening, announced >43K attendees, over 450 exhibitores, 300 oracle demos. Safra joked that no way Oracle say show all its 9000 applications! She told that Michael Phelps will be in tomorrow. Although the green theme is being emphasised this year, the confernece book is only offered in print and not on the USB stick like last year! Safra introduced the San Francisco mayor, the youngest mayor ever...Gavin Newsom. Gavin said that SF's bond rating was increased recently, highest ever. The next speaker was Ed Begley and actor and activist. He talked about the "sustainable conference"

TOday was the last working day before the Openworld kicks off. The stock market had a good 2 day run, and Oracle stock ORCL came postive from the 52 week lows, so the stage is all set for a bigger, better OOW. BEA will be there on the red side of the fence for the first time. Last two years, the BI folks (Siebel and Hyperion) got the spot light, this time its middleware, let's see what is new in Fusion this time. An interesting trend though is "fusion" of BI and SOA. Oracle is well placed in both the segments. The new paradigm is to think of BI components as "services" in the enterprise SOA architecture. This has a lot of potential as SOA so far has lacked "content" and growing popularity of BI can provide that missing "content" to the service oriented architecture. So I would be airborne in 12 hrs, getting there middle of day on Sat to Bay area, so that I am all set of the marathon 7 seven session for BIWA SIG on Sunday. Actually two of the

This is the last week before the Openworld starts on Sep 21, 2008. The Wall Street has really pushed the panic button, 500 and 400 points in the red, in last two days! Will the state of the economic union have any impact at an event like OOW? Well the Oracle stock ORCL was at its 52 week low today at $18.07, the earnings call is tomorrow and the guidance had been less than optimistic. However, Larry is known to announce new products, offerings every time at Openworld. So what is the speculation this time? Oracle database guru Mark Townsend says it's going to be the biggest one ever! Over 50,000 are expected to participate online apart from 43,000 attending in person. The Extreme Weekhand starts on the weekend and will feature how to setup RAC cluster, Data warehousing, JD Edwards hands-on and other stuff with pizza and beer in the room. The Oracle Develop event runs in the Hilton...with purely development focus. Google and others will talk in this event and his event will cover

Oracle BIWA SIG presents to you, 7 sessions at SIG Day - Sunday Sep 21 at Oracle Openworld Building Cubes and Analyzing Data with Oracle OLAP 11g (IOUG) S301022 8:30 AM, Dan Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions, Moscone West 2001 Be the Master of Your Domain: MDM Explained (IOUG) S301156, 10:00 AM, Ian Abranson, IAS Inc. Jeremy Fitzgerald , Dimensional Strategies, Moscone West 2001 A Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator: Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail (IOUG) S301009, 1:00 PM, Shyam Varan Nath, Deloitte Consulting, BIWA SIG President, Moscone West 2001 Case Studies: Implementing Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition in Three Environments S301190, 2:30 PM, Richard Solari, Teresa Wong, Deloitte Consulting, Moscone West 2001 The State of Oracle Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing: BI Discussion Panel (IOUG) S301191, 4:00 PM, Joe Thomas Oracle Corporation, other Panelists, Moscone West 2001 Note Different Room Extending and Customizing the Oracle Business Intelli

Dec 2 is coming up faster than I thought...the Second International BIWA Summit will be held on Dec 2-3 in Oracle HeadQuarters! (Redwood Shores, CA). If you are inerested submit your abstract at http://BIWASummit08.org If you are not ready to speak but attend the event, go ahead and register to take advantage of the early bird pricing ($200 for IOUG members). Please also tell us what topics would you like to hear in the summit, your feedback will be vital to the abstract selection committee. Thanks Shyam http://OracleBIWA.org

Seems like the last 4 days flew away, I reached my first ever Kaleidoscope on Sat June 14, and now its Tuesday on my way back.... Sat ODTUG Brigade - Voluteer work for Reconstruction School District (incidentaly my talk at the event a Case Study of BI for K-12 Sunday - Essbase Developer Symposium... Tom Kyte's keynote, welcome reception Monday - My talk at the 4:00PM and the speaker reception Tuesday - attended some of the BI talks and way back... more to come...

Day 2 My presentations were related to Total Recall and Database Development Best Practices. The day ended with the invitation only Geek meet that also had the Linux installfest managed by the OTN staff. Day 3 The Grand BI Debate, Topic was: Are Pure Play BI Vendors on Road to Extinction? The pro team was Joe Thomas, Matt Vranikar and Dan Vlamis The against team was Steve Lemme, Scott Rappoport/Steve Stein and Shyam Varan Nath. The debate was moderated by none other than Ian Abramson who will be the next IOUG President. Both sides gave good arguments such as pro side stated that Larger companies only can afford to invest in the integration of BI technologies with the Applications and Database. An example is IRI the owner of Oracle Express or the root of modern day OLAP was in heavy debt when Oracle bought it and helped revive the OLAP technology on Oracle platform. The against side pointed out the cannibalization of products by Oracle such as OLAP/Essbase, Discoverer/OBIEE and poin

Day 1 we had the first Unconference session in PowerPoint free zone followed by the BIWA SIG meeting. The SIG meeting was very interactive dicussion between some of the BI industry experts and Oracle PM's and touched different aspects like ETL, BI tools and Oracle's direction in the BI space. I delivered the hands on lab on Oracle Text and Oracle Text Mining in the state of art hands on lab. James Liu has done a wonderful job managing the nuances of the onsite 50 PC lab. I was forced to move the lab to 11g as I could not create text index in 10.2.0.3 where the fix was not available on the OS I used. The attendees loaded unstructured data in Oracle database, ran text queries, setup SQL Developer and Oracle Data miner on the fly to get a good feel of it. The Keynote by Chuck Phillips at 4:45PM was well attended and lead to the Exhibition hall night but that was not the end. The evening ended with Oracle Tuning Coffeehouse....

Monday morning started with opening key note by Andy Mendelson who talked about the DB features that provide Oracle the edge in the world of DB vendors. He highlighted features like Real Application Testing (for realistic testing), Information Lifecycle Management to save on storage costs, on the features for compliance like Total Recall, Database Vault etc. The IOUG voluteer award were also awarded, Tom Kyte got the Ken Jacobs award for contribution to the User Community (they called it IOUG Oracle Contribution award till last year when I got it!). It was nice to hear Ken's recorded video, he was the first recipient of this award, of cource we would have love to see Dr DBA in person but as he joked the technology to cyber port people or replicate people is not there yet! Today we also had the first Unconference session (power point free zone) for BIWA SIG, next is the formal SIG meeting at the Korbel ball room at 11:45 EST. I am using the conference center wireless so connectivi

On Satthe all the user groups were seen actively setting up their head quarters, registration desks and so on. The hands-on labs are being setup. The conference committees are taking the guided tours to give them membership base a superior experience. The entire Denver Conference center will be used for the conference and the spill over sessions go to Hyatt, which is right next doors on the big blue bear side of the convention center. The convention center has three levels, the street level where you register, the upper exhibit level and the lower level where labs etc will be held. The unconference is the new feature this time and BIWA SIG will host the Business Intelligence case study related session.

Here I am in the mile high city with the mile high spirit! At the Denver airport it is nice to see the banner about Collaborate from the city, reconfirms that you took the right flight and landed in the right city for the next week full of excitement. After getting to Denver and checking in early to the hotel (one of the perks of being a Platinum member of that hotel chain), contacted my former Oracle colleague who lives here. He is conducting the ful day OBIEE training tomorrow, of late any OBIEE related talk has been a big crown puller, we experienced that in BIWA Summit as well. Also getting ready for the conference committee meeting today at 4:00PM. Saw a bit of snow after landing in the city, the airport is about 20 miles NE of the city which means a lot of such will be cutting it close on Thursday on way back home. There are fewer red eye flights out of Denver to East coast than say out of SFO or LAX, so you kinda have to leave at mid day and reach home late night, for those fro

The Collaborate is almost here.... This year we have to go there with "mile high" spirits, it's in Denver, CO. The snow is melting, too late to ski! ... so time for some serious stuff next week. I look forward to the keynotes by Chuck Philips and Andy Mendelson. There are a lot of BI/DW and Advanced analytics sessions, you can get to a list of these at BIWA site. There will be a debate on Pureplay BI vendors: are they on road to extinction, where debators are from different segments of the industry including from Oracle. Watch out for more details out here....

Find the BIWA Newsletter Also attend the Webcast on Oracle WarehouseBuilder tips and tricks on March 19, 2008 at http://OracleBIWA.org BIWA SIG will be at Collaborate 2008, attend our sessions...see the BIWA site for details. Thanks

As Collaborate 2008 preparations are underway, the debate on what is the future of Pure-PLay BI vendors, is heating up. If you are attending Collaborate, please stop by to attend this debate in person. Recent times have seen Siebel, Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos lose their "independence" to the "giants" but what does it mean for other BI vendors, in ETL space, in BI presenatation tools, in advanced analytics space etc. What does it mean for SAS, Microstrategy, Informatica, Information Builders etc.? Thanks Shyam http://OracleBIWA.org

Its been a while since I posted here. At BIWA SIG we had two webcasts recently, on Data Mining + BI Publisher and on BI Project Management. However, the overall industry scene continues to throw curve balls! While Oracle's bid for BEA this time is no surprize but seeing My SQL go to Sun and Yahoo being chased by Microsoft did catch some of us in the left field. What does it mean for Yahoo? Yahoo uses Oracle databases internally (though for data mining it uses propriety algorithms). This is unlike Google who has less dependence on Oracle databases. So going forward is SQL server going to power the Yahoo sites? Will Yahoo inceasingly use Microsoft BI stack for its marketing initiatives like to power its Yahoo Search Marketing offerings? Let's wait and see how it unfolds... will the next release on Windows OS have the yahoo toolbar natively? So what happens to msn searches? Will the MSN IM and Yahoo IM unify... Bill Gates sure has a lot of questions to answer.