ODTUG BI, DW & Hyperion Streams Now Announced

One of the events that I'm most looking forward to in 2010 is ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010, to be held in Washington D.C. in June, for which registration has now opened. Next year I'm the session chair for the Oracle Business Intelligence, Hyperion Reporting and Data Warehousing stream, which covers tools such as OBIEE, the Hyperion reporting tools and the ones they'll evolve into over the next few years, tools such as BI Publisher and Discoverer, together with data warehousing and ETL tools such as OWB and Oracle Data Integrator.

For next year's Kaleidoscope we've taken a leaf out of the Hyperion committee's book and really tried to source some excellent presentations, with the plan being to organise a chair for each day's stream and maybe have a social event one of the evenings. Fingers crossed, 2010 should see the release of OBIEE 11g together with ODI 11g, and we've recently had the 11gR2 release of Oracle Warehouse Builder. Given the amount of new releases and the interest this will generate, we decided to focus the presentations on new features and best practices, and from my perspective some of the highlights in this stream include:

• Implementing Right-Time Data Loading with Oracle Warehouse Builder - David Allen
• Oracle Data Integrator 11g - New Features and Directions - Francois-Xavier Nicolas

David Allen is one of the architects behind Warehouse Builder, and I co-presented with him at the recent Open World in San Francisco on the new features in OWB 11gR2. This presentation looks as if it will cover some of the change data capture and trickle-feed features in the new release, and it'll be great to have David presenting at Kaleidoscope and answering questions from the audience. One not to miss for Warehouse Builder fans.

Also, if you've been following the news on Warehouse Builder, you'll know that it's due to merge functionality with Oracle Data Integrator over the next few years. We've recently had a new release of Warehouse Builder that incorporates some ODI functionality, so it'll be interesting to hear what's coming up in the next release of ODI proper, to see where Oracle are taking the product and to see if any OWB functionality makes its way into the product. FX is based in France and was one of the original Sunoposis team, so it'll be great to have him over in DC and to hear first-hand from him what's coming along for ODI in 2010 and beyond.

• OBIEE 11g Integration with Oracle ADF Business Components - Palaniappan Chidambaram
• Web Services and Application Integration with Oracle Business Intelligence EE Suite - David Granholm

I met Palaniappan at our BI Meetup at Open World, and he's heavily involved in some of the back-end development for the new OBIEE release. Integration with ADF business components, either as data sources or for write-back, is one of the lesser-known new features in OBIEE 11gR2 and it'll be great to hear from the developers how this feature can be used.

David is part of the product management team and co-incidentally was the first person I heard present on OBIEE, back at Kaleidoscope in 2006. Like Palaniappan, David's session will be covering integration with the SOA and Java/.NET stack and will be focusing on web service and application introduction. These session should be of value to both OBIEE and Java developers, and I'll make sure I've loaded up a copy of JDeveloper before I come along so I can get some tips whilst I'm at the conference.

• Best Practices for Performance, Scalability and Reliability with Oracle BI Enterprise Edition - Mike Durran
• Oracle BI EE Metadata Modeling Best Practices and Tips for Concurrent Development - Alan Fuller

One of the bits of feedback we got from last year's Kaleidoscope was that people wanted to hear more intermediate, advanced and best-practice sessions. Mike, Alan and the team from Oracle took this on-board and have come up with a number of sessions that address developers who already have a good understanding of the various toolsets. This best practice session for OBIEE should be good, with Mike covering some of the design, administration and architecture practices, and Alan covering data modeling and team development practices, recommended by the product and implementation teams at Oracle.

• Essbase and Oracle Business Intelligence Integration - Real World Case Study - Shyam Nath
• Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Essbase Integrator - Alaric Thomas

You may well have missed it at Open World (and my post on the session slipped out during a weekend just after), but Alaric Thomas gave a very interesting session at the last Open World on a project going on within Oracle to provide integration between the BI Applications, Essbase and SmartView. The BI Apps Essbase Integrator provides metadata and data synchronization between the BI Apps data model and an Essbase database, allowing you to start up SmartView from a link in the BI Apps dashboard and analyze your data using an OLAP cube, and should be released at some point in 2010 for use with current versions of the BI Apps and Essbase. Alaric's talk will be about the technology behind this product, whilst Shyam's will be talking about a recent project that accomplished a similar thing using custom integration. One for the BI Apps and Essbase fans out there.

Other sessions to look out for are one by Toufic Wakim, SmartView product manager, on the new release of SmartView better designed to work with OBIEE; two sessions by Oracle ACE Directors Edward Roske and Tracey McMullen on integrating OBIEE and Essbase, one my colleague Stewart Bryson on new data warehousing features in Oracle Database 11gR2, and two by me on infrastructure and metadata changes in OBIEE 11g, and the new features in Answers, Dashboards and BI Publisher 11gR2.

As well as the BI stream I'm chairing, there is also a database development stream that features two sessions by Jean-Pierre Dijcks on Oracle and Hadoop, and Oracle Partitioning, and separate streams for Hyperion Applications, Essbase and "Hardcore Hyperion", making Kaleidoscope the must-attend BI, DW and Hyperion event in the States in 2010. Registration is open now, and numbers are limited to ensure the "community feel" of the event. I'll be there, and I hope some of you will be able to make it too.