OBI-ForumLive, and Gerard Braat on the BI Server and BI Apps

I'm currently waiting in the departures lounge at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, coming back from Utrecht after speaking at OBI-ForumLive, an OBIEE experts event organized by Ciber and Scamander in the Netherlands. Thanks to Rene and John from Ciber for inviting me over, and this was a similar event in scope and focus to the BI Forum event we organized back in May. It was great to see John Minkjan again, hear some great presentations on OBIEE and to meet some of the Dutch guys who came over to Brighton in May, and thanks again to Rene in particular for organizing my trip over. Thanks also to Emiel van Bockel, who together with several OBIEE enthusiasts has launched OBIEE.nl, a Dutch portal for OBIEE of which we are proud to be one of the sponsors.

For me though, the best part of coming to the event was the chance to meet Gerard Braat again. Gerard is one of the original Siebel Analytics guys from Europe, works for Oracle in the Netherlands heading up the technical aspect of their consulting organization, and writes a great blog on OBIEE and BI Apps architecture and concepts over at An Eye on Oracle BI. Gerard's a great guy to talk about BI Server concepts and data modeling, and I sat through a new presentation of his on "how the BI Server thinks" and how you can construct data models that it can use most effectively. After the session we agreed to continue the discussion, in particular I'm looking to work with Gerard and similar interested people in really looking to get to the bottom of the BI Server, how it "sees the world", how it parses queries and constructs execution plans, and how as an OBIEE designer you can leverage features like multiple logical table sources, fragmentation and federation to map the BI Server metadata on to complex enterprise data models. More on this soon.

Seeing Gerard also reminded me to post a link on the blog to a recent blog post of his, entitled "BI Applications 2.0: Buy and Build Less". This is a great article that looks at the realities of working with the BI Apps in that even though it's positioned as "buy vs. build", the reality is that even if you buy the BI Apps, there will still be some build element, albeit more around configuration rather than the traditional "start with a blank piece of paper"-style development exercise. Gerard's article sets out a reference architecture for the BI Apps, explains why some build will always be required (because customers always customize the underlying source system, and the supplied metrics will never be a complete fit for what the customer wants), and also puts forward the concept of a BI Applications "Competency Center", based on the Gartner idea, together with specific BI Apps-specific tasks and focus areas for this center. It's a great article for anyone looking to understand just what's really involved in implementing the BI Apps, I'd recommend reading it as it's written by a swichted-on BI architect who's delivered over 20 such systems himself.