Update on Presentations, Writing and Seminars

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog recently, due to a lot of behind-the-scenes activity going on at Rittman Mead.

Borkur and I have been finishing off our Collaborate'09 papers,with mine on optimizing the Oracle BI Applications ETL process and Queries, and Borkur's on high-availability for OBIEE. For my paper, I've been looking at using Oracle Data Warehousing concepts such as partitioning, materialized views and compression to boost the performance of the BI Apps data warehouse, which has been made possible through a new feature in the 10.1.3.4 release of the DAC Console called "Actions". I'll blog about this more nearer the date, but it's certainly an interesting approach and I've managed to bring the load time, storage requirements and query response time by around 50% in each case.

Another other thing we've been working on is the Rittman Mead BI Forum. We've now got the speaker list and are now opening the event for registrations, so keep an eye out on the blog for more details. We're also running another event, a free half-day seminar up in London on April 1st where I'll go through a subset of my BI Masterclass materials, again if you're interested registration details are here and this event is free to attend.

Other than that I've been writing a paper with Venkat on Essbase and OBIEE that we'll be jointly delivering at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 in Monterey later in the year, we're hoping this will be the definitive paper on Essbase and OBIEE integration and will tackle all the hard-to-do integration points between the tools. From the consulting work I'm currently doing, Essbase and OBIEE together are certainly a hot topic at the moment and I'm particularly looking forward to working with Venkat on this one.

in the background of course is the Oracle Press OBIEE book. We're still waiting on the 11g release of OBIEE to go into beta, once it does then the plan is to get the book in the shops in time for the proper production release. Apologies for the time this has taken to put together, but my thinking now is that with 11g so near (hopefully) it'd be a shame to publish something on 10g that'll be out of date so quickly. Once we make a start though I'll post an update on the blog, and given what's coming in 11g I'm sure the wait will be worth it.