New Enterprise Business Intelligence Masterclass

Mark Rittman

Jun 13, 2007 • 3 min read

Oracle University have recently published details of my new Enterprise BI Masterclass I'm going to run around Europe, Middle East and Africa. This time around, I'm going to look at the convergence of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, data integration, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Identity Management and Service-Orientated Architectures, on the basis that business intelligence can be even more effective if it's part of your overall enterprise architecture and embedded in your business processes and business applications.

If you came to my previous round of seminars last year, this new seminar is all-new and follows on from the material I delivered last year. This time around, it's aimed squarely at Oracle BI EE developers who are looking for advanced techniques using the BI Server and BI Presentation Server, and who are looking for practical advice on integrating Oracle's BI tools with the wider world of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

The seminar starts off an overview of Oracle's current BI tools offering, and sets the scene for the rest of the seminar with an introduction to the concept of "enterprise" business intelligence, integration of BI with Oracle Fusion Middleware and concepts such as decisioning, data integration, dashboards and service-orientated architecture. We then go through a scenario where an organization wishes to implement BI across the enterprise, and uses Oracle BI server to create a BI model that brings together data from disparate data sources. During this session, we go through some advanced BI server techniques such as integrating real-time and historical data, handling ragged hierarchies, persisting aggregates and creating analytical and time-series calculations.

In the following session, we use Oracle Data Integrator to bring relational, event and service-based data to the BI Server, both on a batch and real-time basis. The final session of the first day looks at how OBIEE interacts with Oracle Identity Management, both in terms of "traditional" SSO and the new heterogeneous environment tools Oracle recently purchased that provide SSO and identity federation across disparate platforms.

The second day starts off with creating a role-based interactive dashboard using Oracle BI Dashboards and Oracle BI Delivers, and goes through some advanced techniques that builds on the material covered in my first seminar. We then go on to an introduction to Oracle Real-Time Decisions, where we integrate a self-learning decision service in to our data model, and use it to recommend a choice of supplier based on previous customer satisfaction scores, costs and whether the customer returned to purchase further products.

Following on from this, we turn to BI integration with Service-Orientated Architectures, where I show a technique to call a BPEL process from a dashboard or Delivers iBot, and to call BI Server content from a BPEL process. Later on in the seminar series, I'll incorporate Oracle Business Activity Monitoring content into the BPEL process, to show how this complements the BI provided by the regular OBIEE tools. Finally, we'll wrap up by bringing all the examples together into an integrated example, showing how Oracle's BIEE tools, together with Oracle Application Server and SOA Suite can be used to deliver a complete, next-gen BI environment.

I'm pretty fired-up about the material in this course, as it corresponds with a long-term vision I've had about leveraging the "next-gen" features in Oracle BI EE and using them to add insights and intelligence into the rest of the organization's operational systems. I've worked closely with a number of product management and development teams within Oracle to put this material together, and in most cases this'll be the first time such detailed, developer-focused material on OBIEE and Fusion Middleware integration has been delivered outside of Oracle; I've also got some great tips and tricks on working with Answers, Dashboards and Delivers, together with some good material on how Oracle Data Integrator can be used alongside the OBIEE toolset.

If you're interested, here's the current line-up of dates:

I've also got bookings for Switzerland (26th/27th September) and Hungary (11th/12th October), and also it looks likely we'll be running a condensed version of it in six ASIAPAC cities in September this year (Hong Kong, Singapore, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland), so watch this space for more details and links.

In the meantime, expect some blog postings on BI Server, Data Integrator, Real-Time Decisions and BI and SOA Suite as I work through the examples in preparation for the first event next month in London, which means I'll be holed-up in the hotel at Daytona Beach whilst everyone else is eating ice creams and sitting by the ODTUG hotel bar.

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