I wasn't going to be writing any more blogs about the new SAP Information Steward Metadata Management immediately but confess to being intrigued by the range of third party metadata integrators available when preparing my blog on adding new SAP integrators. In particular, as both an Oracle and SAP BI Partner, I was interested in the potential of integrating in the metadata available within Oracle BI to the SAP Information Steward. It's proven to be an interesting investigation so thought I'd put up a little blog on what's possible and what, frustratingly, seems not to be.

Often, I need to be able to identify whether or not particular values are duplicated within datasets that I am creating. This may be for any number of reasons, e.g. identifying customer accounts that have multiple customers associated, identifying customers with multiple accounts, accounts with more than one type of transaction occurring within a specified period of time or maybe an account that was accessed from more than one geographical area within a 24 hour period. This blog details how I tend to identify duplicates. It's quick to write and flexible.

I was pleased to be back in Linlithgow last week for my first BI event of the year. It's nice and close to home for a quick drive over and, more importantly, had an agenda dominated by actual, real life case studies of Oracle clients from both the Public Sector and Higher Education sectors in Scotland. I wasn't presenting myself but there was a good lot of shared discussion and insight from the attendees so was able to contribute to that as well as the networking sessions. There were some interesting observations made throughout the day so thought I'd put together a quick blog on the key points.

It was a privilege last week to not only attend my second UK Oracle User Group down in Birmingham but also to have actually had a presentation selected to deliver at it as well. My presentation was titled "Bundling the Oracle BI Apps" and detailed some of my concerns about the concept of "fixed price" (i.e. fixed scope) BI in a world rapidly adopting agile delivery methods as the favoured BI delivery model and also our work with Oracle to help package up some of the more commonly deployed Oracle BI Applications in just such a fixed price model. That's all detail for a later blog though. I'm going to use this post to review 'my' UKOUG experience in general.

A quick post to let you know about a couple of upcoming events where I'll be speaking on BI related subjects. I've been busy with the day job for the past few months so have rather missed the public speaking opportunity and the associated socialising they bring. As with those in the early summer however, these events do all seem to come at once so I hope I can avoid any voice-robbing winter viruses beforehand.

Whenever writing SQL, I always recommend that we qualify all column names with their respective table names or aliases. Recently I was sent some code that was causing a customer some problems. The code would run fine, but the results getting returned were clearly wrong. The code seemed to be logically correct at first glance. Here is a (very) cut down sample of what was happening (the actual code was a couple of hundred lines long with multiple sub-queries).

Just found an interesting feature in SQL Developer 3

I created a dataset that contained two columns of numbers that I wanted to quickly get into excel. I choose, export in CSV format to clipboard so that I could quickly paste it into an existing spreadsheet.

Maxima has a wealth of skills in Oracle technology and support many organisations core Oracle systems. As a result, we frequently find organisations with critical business applications developed with Oracle Forms and Reports. These environments were developed years ago, are often unsupported and the customer has minimal in-house skills left to support and develop user requests to keep the solution relevant to modern business processes. Even though the customer has made a valuable investment over many years in the business processes and functionality inherent within the Oracle Forms and Reports application, at this point the customer is considering replacing the Oracle Forms and Reports system with a new “off-the-shelf” fully supported system. Whilst this is the sensible route in some instances, it can be the case that the current Oracle Forms and Reports application largely meets business needs and is sufficiently bespoke or complex to meet unique requirements that there is no obvious ROI in changing along with all the risk and disruption that ensues.

I blogged last week about the free sample PowerPivot applications made available by Microsoft in their BI Labs. Well, Oracle have just gone one better by making a complete pre-built Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) Linux build freely available in their VirtualBox environment. Best of all the image includes the wider sample application content which really does show an astonishingly wide array of OBIEE 11G functionality. It's available to download here and this short blog outlines a few of the highlights.

Deploying a new Repository (RPD) is quite a simple process in OBIEE 10g. It involves moving the new RPD to the default repository location (/OracleBI/Server/Config) and adding an entry in the NQSConfig.ini file for the new repository. The newly added RPD becomes active for BI Presentation Services once you restart the BI Server.

With OBIEE 11g, the process to deploy a new RPD is slightly different. The NQSConfig.ini file which is critical for defining BI server parameters continues to hold similar parameters in OBIEE 11g, but these parameters are now controlled and managed through Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. In my blog, I will take you through the steps to deploy a new RPD using Enterprise Manager Weblogic Console.

I've recently been helping a client understand the use of funnel analysis in Oracle BI 10G and happened to compare it what is now available in the 11G release (I'm using 11.1.1.5, the second public release). There have been some impressive enhancements in the 11G release reflective of the, perhaps understated, general enhancements made to the presentation front end in 11G so thought I'd jot them down in a blog post. It's my way of saying 'thank you' to the Oracle BI developers who have made the Funnel better.

Linlithgow, Scotland is a funny little place to have a world class data centre but that's exactly what Oracle have established there in the old Sun manufacturing plant. Apparently it's only beaten in size at Oracle by the site in San Francisco and Scotland has already hosted customer labs (environments where technologies can be prototyped and proven) to customers from across Europe, Russia and Australia. It's an amazing place – the sheer computational power on display in the customer labs alone was awesome – and, one we're looking forward to introducing to customers on a new initiative we're planning for Oracle BI Applications. Today, though, it was host to the 2011 Scottish Oracle User Group.

A fairly common request in recent weeks at my current Finance client has been to output multiple rows of data as a single, comma separated row, grouped by a categorising column. For example last week, I was asked (as part of a much larger data request) to supply the full listing of 'country of liability' for a list of customers. Each customer can have the liability for their debts spread across multiple countries and rather than have the customer details listed multiple times, one for each country where they had an associated liability, we decided to tidy the output up a bit by leveraging a combination of Oracle's hierarchical queries and analytic functions.

Last week I attended my second Rittman Mead BI Forum down in Brighton.  It’s a highly recommended event because of the enthusiastic and contagious camaraderie of a bunch of BI professionals getting together but also because of the sheer quality of the presentations squeezed into a mere three days.  With an open floor and just the right number of delegates to fit the space without crowding it out, it’s possible for some genuinely useful and productive conversations to take place.  With those then spilling into evening receptions, late nights at the bar and breakfast the next morning it is, all in all, a pretty immersive experience.

The focus of the event is Oracle BI and Data Warehousing but there was also a healthy strand of BI project management techniques, methodology and best practice in there as well.  There’s far too much to fit into one blog post but, to my mind, there were two key themes emerging.  In the first instance, it’s clear that the release of Oracle BI 11G last summer has completely refreshed the technical content and considerations of events like these whilst, secondly, I’m sensing that us BI professionals are focussing in on a single, distinctive and sustainable BI Development Methodology.  Let’s look at each of the technical and methodology themes in turn.