My ODTUG webinar cup runneth over

You’d think they’d know better, wouldn’t you?

Over the next three weeks I will be participating in two webinars for ODTUG.  Whether this strikes joy, terror, or simply gives you a bad case of avoir le cafard I cannot say.  

I will share with you that actually writing the content for these sessions has been a bit of an exercise in pain but I am now all done and if I do say so myself, what I have is not half bad.

All kidding aside, I am very excited about this opportunity to share some of what I know and the subjects are two that are near and dear to my Oracle EPM heart.

The Most Awesome Planning Calculation Manager Hack the World Has Ever Seen

The most awesome? World-beating? That's mighty big talk for a webinar. Is this presentation hyperbole or fact? It's fact--cold, hard, “Just the facts, ma'am,” fact. This webinar deserves those adjectives because it will demonstrate the incredibly clever Planning Calculation Manager hack that Christian Musci and his team invented. It answers the problem the common Planning Focused Aggregation technique could never resolve--Focused Aggregations based on Planning form row and column selections. Did I mention it is a hack? And that it is awesome because it solves a problem that had no solution? And that the hackiness and the awesomeness combine and become a must-see webinar? Maybe I just did.

Join me as I explain the genesis of my understanding of the Focused Aggregation technique, a step-by-step illustration of how it works, its superiority to generic aggregations, the seemingly insolvable problem of Planning not passing row and column selections to Calculation Manager, and finally the beyond-awesome hack that solves this problem. It is an awesome hack; I may have mentioned that previously.  Maybe.

With this last bit of the Focused Aggregation puzzle, applications that simply couldn't work, or could only work in a crippled manner through administrative aggregations that robbed Planning of its real-time nature, now quite simply do work. Yes, it's that good and it's easy. All will be revealed in a step-by-step process that will allow you to make your "too big" Planning application "just right.”

Yes, I have covered this subject in this blog and (somewhat) at conferences but this is the first time where I present on the theory behind the technique, show comparisons in performance against other code techniques, and then show off a totally awesome hack that makes it all worthwhile all at once.  This is a deep, deep, deep dive into the technique.  If you are not using this technique, or not using the latest version of it, you really should block off the hour to hear about how this works.

The when and the where

25 February 2014, 2 to 3 pm, Eastern

Sign up right here.

Getting (even more) Serious about Data Quality and Governance

A few things I must mention right off:

1. This is a webinar panel, not a traditional presentation like the above one on Focused Aggregations in Calculation Manager.
2. I am but 1/3 of the team.  Ron Moore and Joe Caserta are the heavy hitters.  Think of me as the comic relief.

Nothing is more important than data quality. But if the steps to insure high data quality aren’t fast and easy people won’t do them – or at least they won’t do enough of them. It was always a difficult job and it consumes a lot of resources even with traditional data sources such as ERP that are relatively well behaved. Now analytics is spreading to more users and to data that’s far less well behaved. What should we be doing and how can we make it as fast and easy as possible?

In this webinar we will put those questions to our panelists and we will invite your opinions and questions. Some of our topics will include:

• Is data quality really a problem? Where and how much?
• Who has responsibility for data quality?
• What techniques can we apply at the data source?
• What techniques can we apply within Essbase and Planning?
• Can we adopt some “simple stupid rules” for DQ?
• What is the role of documentation?
• What documentation is effective and worth the effort?

The when and the where

11 March 2014, 3 to 4 pm, Eastern.

Sign up right here.

That’s all for now

The topics are interesting, the content is good, and as always ODTUG provides all of this to you for free, nothing, zero, zilch, etc.  How can’t you win?

Join us, won’t you?