BI Forum Day 2

I'm sitting in the BI Forum on day two of the event, Antony Heljula is delivering a very good session on Oracle BI EE and Web Services. This is a particular area of interest for me as I worked on an article for OTN on this area; in his demonstration, Antony went through working with the fine-grained OBIEE web services and built a live demo using JDeveloper.

The morning started off with Mike Durran's session on the Oracle BI Roadmap and Strategy, with a particular emphasis on the BI Server, OBIEE and Essbase integration and the new version of the BI Administrator tool. Some of the highlights of this session were a look at how the administration tool handles ragged, skip-level and parent child hierarchies, how it persists business models into Essbase cubes and how Answers+ shows multi-dimensional data using an OLAP-style interface.

After Mike's session was Emiel Bockel's one on business intelligence data modeling. This was an interesting session in that the approach that Emiel advocated was not to create physical star schemas, snowflake schemas and the like to hold your warehouse data, but instead to store data in a third-normal form style using the Oracle BI Server to create virtual stars for analysis. It was certainly a good session and provoked a lot of debate in the audience, and a good contrast to the tools-specific sessions we'd had earlier.

After coffee was Maarten-Jan Kampen, who stood in for Daan Backboord who couldn't make the event in the end. Marten-Jan went through the integration they'd put in place between OBIEE and Oracle Mapviewer, something that was very impressive as he'd hooked it up using web services, javascript and Ajax such that users could drill on reports and have the map change at the same time. Following on from Maarten-Jan was our own Adrian Ward, taking us through the issues and techniques that he'd used to roll out OBIEE across multiple countries.

Adrian, Borkur, Ragnar and I then took a short walk at lunch time down to the pier where we soaked up the hangovers with sausages in batter, chips and those hot doughnuts you get in a bag and dusted with sugar. I am so on a diet now that conference season has momentarily paused. Last night's meal was particularly good (thanks for Becky for organizing it), and after the meal a few others went on afterwards to explore the delights of Brighton's nightlife. For me, I went back home around midnight so that I could see the kids this morning, then I'm off out again tonight with a few people that are staying until Saturday.

So, from the feedback I've got it looks like it's been a successful conference. We've had some excellent speakers, all the delegates have been great and I think we've succeeded in our aim of creating a small, developer-lead Oracle BI conference. We'll probably run the event again next year and I'll be posting the presentations, together with details on who won the "Best of the BI Forum" award, on the blog over the weekend/. Thanks to everyone who came along and I hope the event lived up to everyone's expectations.