A Busy Next Week

Mark Rittman -

After being away all last week, next week's going to be a bit nicer, with two days working for a client in the record industry in London, the UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG on Wednesday and then two days working out of Brighton. The record industry client is a particular favourite of mine - they're based in Soho, they're a really nice bunch of people to work and the work, using OWB, is pretty interesting - and as it's the record industry, you can wear jeans in to work, which is a nice change. As I said, the SIG's on Wednesday, then I've got a couple of days at the end of the week to spend on producing some new material for the BI Seminar, with the next occurrences being Lithuania and Estonia the week after, and Denmark the week after that  (with Mogens and his family offering to put me up for the two nights, which is incredibly kind of them.)

I've had a look through the feedback from the first time I ran the seminar (in Holland), and some people have emailed me with ideas and requests for when I run the event in their country. Going through these and applying some sort of priority, areas I'd like to add into the seminar include:

  • A section on the new architecture for OWB in 10gR2, particularly how the Control Center works and how you should set up the new (combined) design and runtime repository
  • How to migrate from one environment to another using OWB10gR2 (dev to test, to prod and so on). I've got a pretty good handle on this for earlier versions, but I need to check out whether it's changed in 10gR2
  • A demo of performing grouping using XML Publisher - I've published this online but I didn't include it in the previous seminar
  • A demonstration of how SCD2 and 3 works using OWB10gR2, especially considering some of the observations made by Roelant Vos in this blog posting. Same goes for this other posting by Roelant on role dimensions - I need to look at this myself and see how it's implemented.
  • Perhaps a demonstration of how match-merge works with OWB10gR2 - although this might be a bit of a minority interest.
  • A demo of the guided analytics, dashboard prompt, view selector and column selector features I blogged about after the last seminar.

I'd also like to work through my demos of adding an Excel data item to an existing BI Suite Enterprise Edition fact table, and incorporating OLAP data - unfortunately I didn't have my notes printed out last time and I had to skip through these two demos - they're pretty interesting and I'd like to work them through again in my mind before the next session. Finally, going on into the future, I'd like to bring in some data from a Microsoft Analysis Services cube and integrate it in with relational data, whether I'll have a chance to do this before Lithuania I don't know, but I'd like to get this in by mid-October.

All of this is going to mean I'm going to have to leave my aggregation testing for a week or so, after I've incorporated through GROUPING_ID elements that David and Pete mentioned in yesterday's blog comments. Expect a few blog posts next week as I work through the new seminar elements.