Rittman Mead At Collaborate11 - Roundup and Presentations

Last week several of us from Rittman Mead were in Orlando, Florida for Collaborate'11, the annual joint-conference by IOUG, Quest and OAUG. My two sessions were on KPIs and Scorecards using OBIEE11g, and OBIEE11g Architecture and Internals, and I also co-chaired (with Ian Abramson) the BIWA BI Bootcamp, where we ran two days of "soup-to-nuts" BI content for anyone looking to get skilled up on the OBIEE 11g platform.

Stewart Bryson, our US Managing Director, ran what is turning out to be a very popular presentation on real-time data warehousing using Oracle Database and OBIEE, whilst Borkur gave an overview of the Oracle GoldenGate change data capture and replication platform. Finally, Peter Scott gave a new presentation on Adding Externally Sourced data to a Business Intelligence Solution, focusing on the many ways in which external data can be added to an OBIEE-type system. All of the presentations can now be downloaded from our Articles page, where you'll also find links to the various magazine and online articles we've had published.

From a BI content perspective, I was impressed with what was available at Collaborate, and the behind-the-scenes organization from IOUG and BIWA. I thought the BI Bootcamp concept went down well, and it was good to have some coherency around the content and thought given to attendees who might be new to the platform and want a basic overview of the complete range of functionality. For myself, the highlight of the event was a development update from Balaji Yelamanchili, Senior Vice President at Oracle in charge of all OBIEE development, where we were taken through some of the development goals Oracle are working to for their BI Platform. Some of these highlights included:

• The planned move to a more granular repository, with better support for concurrent development and versioning
• The move of this repository into the relational MDS schema that gets installed with BIPLATFORM by the 11g RCU
• In time, the adoption of the Fusion Development IDE for repository development (as used by JDeveloper and ODI 11g)
• A broad adoption of mobile as a strategic BI delivery channel, initially focusing on IOS (the iPad) and Android (Honeycomb)
• ETL automation, driven by the BI Server and logical-to-physical mappings in the repository
• Improved "speed-of-thought" analysis, driven by in-memory technologies, and with the ability to drive much denser visual analysis

There was a lot more, and it sounds like Open World this year will be a pretty landmark event for Oracle's BI platform. Keep an eye on this blog for more details as they emerge, and if you've not signed up already, Oracle will be giving keynotes on OBIEE futures at our two BI Forum events in Brighton and Atlanta next month. For now though, it's goodbye to Orlando and over to Stewart, who's currently giving a session on Agile Development with OBIEE and Exadata at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event, in London.