BI Forum Day 1

I'm sitting in the back row of the BI Forum in Brighton, the coming-together of Oracle BI, Essbase and ODI experts that we've organized in Brighton. The event started last night with a drinks reception in the hotel, after downing a few beers a few of us went out for a curry afterwards, it was good taking people out in Brighton and showing them our home town.

This morning we started the forum with a session by Oracle's Craig Stewart on the new version of the BI Applications that works with Oracle Data Integrator. Craig wen through this new feature, explained how in the initial release it covered EBS 11.5.10, Oracle data sources and targets and the Finance, HR and Supply Chain Analytics modules. Craig went through the Configuration Manager, the web-based replacement for the DAC and how you performed basic data loads and how you applied customizations.

Following on from Craig was Edward Roske, one of our "guests of honour" who came over to the event all the way from Texas. Edward is an Oracle ACE Director and CEO of InterRel, one of the USA's leading Hyperion implementors, and he took us through a low-level explanation of the internals of Essbase and how you optimize cube designs. For me, Edward's explanation of Aggregate Storage and how now, it should be the default storage option from 11.1.1.1 onwards was the most valuable part, and I was particularly grateful for Edward presenting at what for him would have been 2.30 in the morning!

My session ran after Edwards' one and went through the BI Apps optimization session I ran at Collaborate a couple of weeks ago. After this session was lunch, another opportunity to network with all the great people at the event. We also gave out the second of the souvenir t-shirts, Edward Roske is modeling his here.

Following lunch was John Minkjan on Oracle BI EE Caching. John's basic advice was in fact to not use caching if at all possible, the best idea is to moving caching, indexing and summarization to the database and try at all times to make sure disk I/O and database design is as optimal as possible. After a short break, it was time for Venkat and his presentation on OBIEE and Essbase security integration.

For me, Venkat's session was the best of the forum so far, partly because of his actual presentation in which he went through integration specifics, and also because of the Q&A we had after his presentation on the general area of OBIEE and Essbase integration. Christian Berg was in the audience and after joining in the discussion for a bit, he kindly agreed to come up front and led the discussion with Venkat. To me this was what the BI Forum was really about - we had Christian and Venkat, probably the two most experienced OBIEE and Essbase Integration specialists in the world taking questions and debating the pros and cons with the audience, and we had about another six or so people in the audience who had attempted the integration and had experiences to share.

Following on from Venkat's session was one by Adam Bloom on diagnosing performance issues with the BI Server, a case study on a piece of work he was involved in where a customer hit performance issues caused by issues with their security filters. Again this for me was what the forum was about; developers and implementors sharing their "war stories" and passing on hints and tips to each other.

It's 4.30pm now and Jon has rustled up a few buckets of ice-cold beer to hand around before the last session of the day, Andreas Nobbmann's session on BI Server repository scripting using UDML. After that it's the meal at Due South, on the seafront just in front of the hotel, before we retire for the night and get ready for tomorrow.