Where in the world is Cameron, day 2, Australasian edition

Day 2, 19 March 2013, 8:55 am NZDST

It’s a good thing I am, seemingly, beyond embarrassment, as I feel asleep last night during dinner.

Actually, it’s a bit worse than that, as I actually fell asleep after the quite excellent NZOUG 2013 dinner, during the music quiz, in a room full of screaming people. With a live DJ. OTOH, I have never in my life awoken to the strains of “Wake up, Little Susie” sung just for me, so there is that. And before you go, “Ah, sloshed again. Get that geek dried out, asap,” I knew Cameron + tiredness + alcohol was a bad combination and very purposely held back from the truly excellent Mac’s Bitter. All to no effect – I might have well had more of that beer than I did for all the good it did me. I will plead the excuse that when I finally walked back to the hotel I was able to figure out that in fact, Cameron-time, it was about 4 am and I had just spent the entire night awake. My buddy Bambi Price, keeps on telling me, “Don’t think about what time it really is”, and my conscious mind doesn’t, but I fear that my body does.

Yr. Obdnt. Srvnt., Slay the evil of bad data in Essbase with ODI, 9:30 am to 10:20 am, NZDST

I really enjoy doing this presentation as I am a huge fan of ODI and of good data in Essbase databases. It is a surprising and mildly shocking fact that many, many, many Essbase/Planning implementations do not handle data quality at all, or rely on 100% manual data validation to tie out numbers.

I am writing this update a half hour before the presentation, so I have no idea what turnout will be. Also, it is quite possible that after yesterday’s Dodeca presentation the word has spread and I will be facing the New Zealand equivalent of a ghost town.

Update – nope, I had a decent number of people show up a wee bit late – was everyone toasting the sleepy American or just out partying? They aren’t telling me and I’m not asking. :)

Charles Naslund, Infrastructure Preparations for Hyperion EPM 11.1.2.2, 10:40 am to 11:30 am, NZDST

Many things in life elude me: why do we vote for politicians that lie to us and they know that we know that they are lying and yet we vote for them again and again; why, really, do all the things that taste so good end up being so bad for us; why is Oracle EPM infrastructure so hard?

Well, lying politicians (as far as I can tell this is true for all parties and all countries) and fattening-yet-delicious food will be with us (and me) forever, but could there be hope when it comes to the complex concept known as EPM infrastructure? Regular readers of this blog know that EPM infrastructure is a continuing challenge for me so I have great hopes for Charles’ session. Maybe my limited knowledge can be expanded. Maybe.

Charles (yea!, fellow Septic) is going through the architecture topology in nice simple to understand terms. Keep it simple Charles, please.

Now we’re onto the topic of virtualization – yup, it’s the same story as in the States – real boxes for Essbase, virtualize everything else, and it would be a really good idea if you went with Oracle VM.

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) – ah, these tend to be somewhat more honored in the breach than in the than the observance. This one particularly frosts my cookies when the Essbase or Planning server (or servers) go KABOOM and no one but no one in IT seems to own the servers.

• Packet size – pre compression. Now I know why Smart View is faster than IE when it comes to forms. Here are the average network bandwidth requirements on a per form basis:
• HFM 64 to 128 k
• Planning 32 to 64 kb
• Smart View 28k This is pretty darn amazing – the SV team has done some magic here.

SANs – Every client I’ve had in the last five years has wanted to run Essbase (and everything else) off of a SAN. Essbase needs fast disk to perform well, memory and CPUs be damned. How to do this – sort of be virtualized, sort of not, by using dedicated LUNs, CPUs, and memory. The data (PAG/IND or tablespace) is on the dedicated LUN – everything else can be on shared SAN resources. This strategy gives you a 20 to 25 percent performance boost.

All in all, a nice session. Maybe if I attend enough of these some infrastructure wisdom will rub off on me. Maybe.

Richard Philipson, EPM Case Study: Rank Group, 2:00 pm to 2:50 pm

Richard as always does an excellent job. Quite how he does Essbase, Planning, HFM, BI, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. is a bit beyond me. Did I mention that he’s a talented graphic artist. <insert envy> Or maybe I’m just stuck in rut.

This is an interesting app – it’s architected so that the private equity firm (Rank Group) can bring in/drop companies really quickly. Unlike most other corporate systems, and because their business is so dynamic, they have both full public internet access (definitely not the norm) and four environments: dev, qual, prod, and archive. The last environment is used to snapshot their business at a given time so they can have a baseline to compare against. Again, that is not the way HFM is typically set up, to put it mildly.

The Teaser

This blog will be updated throughout the day (although looking at my laptop clock I realize it’s 9:30 pm EDST so how much bated-breath refreshing of this blog there may be is open to question) so stay tuned.

Be seeing you.

Where in the world is Cameron, day 1, New Zealand edition

Introduction

Over the next few days (where I am, it’s Monday, so that’s a hint) I’m going to use my blog to highlight my travels through Australasia. This series is basically my take on Where In The World is Cameron (some wonder where I am, intellectually, all of the time, let alone when I’m on the other side of the world) for the next week. Hopefully for those of us not from the Antipodes, this will give you an American’s/Yank’s/Septic Tank’s/Seppo’s (yeah, the nicknames get less and less loving from left to right) take on what user groups are like in other countries. At the end of the day, we all speak Oracle, and the really awesome and cool (ahem) amongst us speak Oracle EPM, so I am looking forward to seeing how things differ from the US of A.

Day 1, NZOUG 2013, 18 March 2013

The kickoff, 9:30 am NZDST

Would you believe that New Zealand is a long way from the East coast of the States? Well, it is, but I’m here, somehow, and I am writing this in the kick off session of NZOUG (btw, last night I was lectured, and then tested, quite closely, on my ability to say “N-Zed-O-U-G” – I am happy to report that a lifetime of watching Trevor Howard and John Mills movies about Splendid English Chaps and Beastly Everyone Else well prepared me for this linguistic challenge) 2013.

This morning I’ve listened to man-without-a-country NZOUG president Francisco Munoz kick off the conference, Peter Idoine the NZ Oracle MD welcome everyone to New Zealand’s once-every-18-months conference, and now Stuart Speers the Platinum Sponsor talk about the cloud. As all seven or eight of you that follow this blog know, I am a huge fan of the cloud and use it all the time for EPM. No need to sell me on the cloud Stuart, I am 100% on board with the message. :) Okay, he’s not speaking to me, but I am a huge proponent of cloud functionality. It is The Way of The Future.

The keynote

The leadup

So this is a bit embarrassing as someone who makes his living off from Oracle products. I have never listened to Tom Kyte speak – I suspect that fellow Essbase Hackers (again, all seven or eight including my Mum) of you are also likely similarly ignorant of probably the biggest name in the Oracle database world. This is a function of Oracle-is-bigger-than-the-sun and the siloing of many of the products, or maybe the siloing of my technical knowledge. No matter, I haven’t seen him speak and I am really looking forward to it.

The Tom Kyte update, 10:15 NZDST, 18 March 2013

OMG, this guy I like – “I dream in SQL”. Yup, that is my kind of guy. He loves SQL as much as I love Essbase – maybe more, which is saying something.
Perspective is a funny thing – for an EPM guy, I like to flatter myself that I have a decent basic understanding of SQL and have used that SQL hacking (sort of like my Essbase hacking) for fun and profit. I am not 100% deluded as I have always realized that I’m just scratching the surface with my knowledge level. Having said that, OMG yet again – nothing like a reminder of how basic basic really is when one bumps up against a master at a technology. No surprise to the rest of the world, Tom really knows what he’s talking about.

There is a lot of buzz around 12c and to quote Tom, it is “coming out soon”.

The break, 10:50 am to 11:10 am

Just like Kscope, between sessions there’s the ability to walk the vendor booths. And of course the really important stuff is just below:
Flat blacks (Americanos, sort of), flat whites (café au laits, sort of), espresso, mmmmm. What was I here for again? Oh, right, NZOUG. And here’s the user group booth.

Babar Jan-Haleem, BI Futures, 11:10 am to 12:00 pm, NZDST

I begged, harangued, and bothered Bambi Price, and Erica Harris, and Kay Galbraith, and Babar Jan-Haleem himself to come to NZOUG and talk BI futures. Perhaps they all realized I wasn’t going to go away until he said “Yes”. And I quite happy to say that he is here, and is talking about BI futures. But what is this talk about Exalytics being anything more than the biggest and baddest Essbase box in the world? There’s more to life than Essbase? Apparently so.

Charles Pinda, Financial Results with EPM 11.1.2.2, 12:10 pm to 1:00 pm, NZDST

Ah, Oracle presales, but I like him. :) I kid, I kid. These guys are great – I have *tried* to do it and good grief is that hard to do (I might add that I ran away from it as fast as my little legs would take me). Implementation geeks like me cannot exist (or at least cannot earn a living) without guys like Charles and the sales reps he supports. And to be fair to them, they tend to have a much broader view of the tools, needs, the market, etc. than Essbase/Planning/ODI/whatever hackers tend to have. They have to speak to multiple products, multiple industries, and multiple customers, all at the same time.

So what’s this session all about? Smart View, for sure. And from an Essbase geek’s perspective, the fact that 11.1.2.2 has reached parity with the add-in, well…that’s it for me from a tool perspective now that I can seamlessly use Planning with Excel.

Project Financial Planning – the prebuilt colossus known as PFP (there is some really cool BSO and ASO integration behind the scense). Personally, from a Capex and even Workforce perspective, this has to be the future (no, that is not official Oracle-speak, just what appears to be obvious to me and of course I could be wrong). It’s focus is long term projects and yes, I have tried to do this in “normal” Planning and it is sort of a pain to do. Given its name, it isn’t super surprising that PFP is a better fit for this kind of Planning. Btw, this may either make you sad or jump for joy (I tend to be in the latter camp) – no EPMA.

Charles just talked about Decision Management – this is really cool – it’s a summary of budget requests with narrative justification and supporting detail. This is a new feature of Public Sector Planning and Budgeting aka PSPB as of 11.1.2.2. I don’t do PSPB but this is something that really ought to be in “normal” Planning IMHO.

Richard Philipson, Exploring Oracle BI Apps: How does it work and what do I get ?, 2:30 pm to 3:20 pm, NZDST

I know Richard from multiple Kscopes – now I’m sitting in on his BI Applications suite session. There are multiple apps around Sales, Financials, HR, Marketing, Procurement & Spend, Supply Chain – who knew? Not me. And that is why I come to conferences like this – the world I need to learn is large, the amount of information I actually know is really pretty small, something has to bridge the gap, ergo user conferences like NZOUG 2013.

And what makes up BI Apps? An ETL tool, a central console to manage anything, built in ETL adaptors, a unified data model, and reports – ta da, BI Apps.

Richard’s presentation is showing Informatica (I think that this is actually as the BI Apps packages are sold from Oracle which is a bit confusing although I could have it wrong) as the ETL tool, but ODI can be part of this as well, and that’s how the BI Apps hook into the transactional system. A data warehouse is at the center (hmm, should that be centre or is that just too twee for words?). Just like ODI, OBIEE has physical and logical layers hung off the DW to come up with reporting.

(Hmm, there’s a Q&A going on right now about the Informatica vs. ODI issue – it sounds like Informatica is the historical solution but the future is likely to be ODI.)

Yr. Obdnt. Srvnt., The spreadsheet management system known as Dodeca, 3:40 pm to 4:30 pm, NZDST

Hmm, tough to say if this was a success or not. Most of the presentations here tend not to be super technical, at least in the BI/EPM track. This presentation was pretty technical, and I’m not 100% sure I hit the mark with this one. OTOH, I did see people furiously scribbling down notes (although I have to wonder if they were writing down what needs to be related to the NZ Ministry of Health as I could be a hazard to the public when I am at full chat) as I ranted and raved (in a positive way) about Dodeca so maybe it wasn’t so bad. You decide – I’ve stuck the full presentation right here. This presentation is pretty big (34 megabytes) because of the embedded movies – You Have Been Warned.

Dan O’Brien, Oracle Business Intelligence: Model First, Build Later, 4:40 pm to 5:30 pm NZDST

High concept – Agile development with OBIEE.

Everything else concept – multiple techniques to quickly model business processes to OBIEE applications without going through a complex bottom-up build process.

This is pretty interesting stuff as Dan is talking about a bunch of different strategies about how to get round the formal, inflexible, “normal” way of developing OBI applications. Really the issues he’s talking about apply equally to EPM.

NB – One really funny comment in his presentation – “spreadmarts”. This is totally in line with my Dodeca presentation – you know your system/implementation/company is in trouble when really big spreadsheets become data marts. Spread + mart = spreadmart.

The end of today

Well, not really the end, but the end of what I’m going to blog for now. There’s a NZOUG event tonight at 7 pm and I hope to get a good sleep tonight. I have really totally given up trying to figure out what time it is, or what time my body thinks it is, and just think about strategies for blissful rest.

And that’s where I’m going to end this post.

Be seeing you.

Australians, So where the bloody hell are you?

Wow, that is a pretty awful tourism slogan, isn’t it?  I figured if you lot inflicted it on the rest of the world turnabout is fair play.  With luck, I will be met with chants of “Yankee go home!”  In the interest of good international relations and not getting pelted with eggs when I mount the podium at the just-about-here-why-haven’t-you-registered-yet ODTUG SP Australia conference, Melbourne 21 to 22 March, let me note that we too have real clunkers like – “Erie, Pennsylvania…Feel the Lake Effect”.  (I’ve been in Erie, PA during the winter and trust me, you don’t want to experience Lake Effect.)  Happily the world shares equally in bad marketing slogans so we can all engage in a little schadenfreude as we read these bon mots.  There, international enough for you?

But there is a point to that now discarded Australian tourism slogan – why oh why oh why have you Australian EPM and BI practitioners not signed up for ODTUG’s totally awesome Seriously Practical conference, Melbourne, 21 to 22 March which is just the end of next week?  Huh?  Why?  Why?  C’mon, give me a good reason.  You can’t, can you?

Don’t believe me?  Check out the agenda

I will note that this Seriously Practical conference has some seriously awesome content.  Again, don’t believe me?  Take a look at the below content.  What are you waiting for?  Me begging on my knees?  You have it, metaphorically.  A fantastic agenda?  Cast your eyes downwards and learn more.

Day 1

Welcome and Opening Remarks, Bambi Price, ODTUG8:45 - 9:00 AM

Keynote: What’s Coming in Oracle BI and EPM, Babar Jan Haleem, Oracle Corporation
9:00 - 9:30 AM
A glimpse into the future of Oracle BI and EPM, delivered by the Director of EPM BI Architecture & Technology for APAC.

SESSION 1
9:30 - 10:30 AM
Fusion Applications and Your BI/EPM Investment,  Debra Lilley, Fujitsu
Oracle Fusion Applications are here today providing the next generation of applications. They are about having everything the user needs in one place, and that includes information. Fusion Applications is a window on Oracle’s Fusion Middleware stack and a very big part of that is BI/EPM and analytics. This presentation will include a small demo of how Fusion looks and is designed to give you an appreciation of how BI/EPM is embedded in Fusion. For anyone thinking of Fusion in the future it will underline that your B/EPMI investment today is an investment in that future and protected.

SESSION 2
10:45 - 11:45 AM
Highlights and Capabilities of the Latest Release of EPM, Charles Pinda, Oracle Corporation
Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is comprised of four streams to assist the Office of the CFO to deliver predictable financial results. These streams are Strategy Management, Planning and Forecasting, Profitability Management, and Financial Close. In addition, the reporting delivery layer of EPM is supported by Oracle BI to provide further analytical insights into this information. Now the latest release of EPM, version 11.1.2.2, has new functionality to enhance the business process of delivering predictable results. This session will highlight some of these enhancements and demonstrate the new capability.

LUNCH
11:45 AM - 12:45 PM

SESSION 3
12:45 - 1:45 PM
Endeca Information Discovery, Stephen Weingartner, Oracle Corporation
Endeca Information Discovery (EID) provides unique and powerful analytical capabilities that enable organisations to discover insights in information that would otherwise be unusable. EID’s strengths in unstructured data, agile business intelligence, and information discovery will be demonstrated and discussed. Several EID use-cases will be covered to illustrate the wide variety of solutions which have been implemented at several large organisations. During this presentation, a solution will be created in EID, demonstrating how it works in an end-to-end manner. Attendees will learn how EID differs from other business intelligence and big-data technologies and how it has created its own new niche which companies can fill.

SESSION 4
2:00 - 3:00 PM
Exploring Oracle BI Apps: How Does it Work and What Do I Get, Richard Philipson, James & Monroe
This presentation provides an overview of the BI Apps architecture for novice users, with clear concise information presented in an easy-to-understand format. The presentation steps through the aspects of an implementation from conception to execution and concluding with example content for one of the many areas of content Financial Analytics.

SESSION 5
3:15 - 4:15 PM  
Thoughts from the Frontline – Issues and Opportunities Faced When Implementing or Upgrading HFM Applications,
Christine Aird, M-Power Solutions
This session will walk you through the project lifecycle of an HFM implementation/upgrade and cover key areas where problems/opportunities regularly occur. Using real life case studies, interspersed with best practice processes and approaches, the session will give you an insight into how you could avoid the challenges and take advantage of possible opportunities during your project. The session will touch on how we see HFM being used, will cover some of the misconceptions that follow HFM, and will drill into the potential issues this can cause and what is considered best practice for an HFM implementation.
This session will give you great insight into what you should use HFM for and how to deliver a successful project or upgrade.

SESSION 6
4:30 - 5:30 PM
The Spreadsheet Management System Known as Dodeca, Cameron Lackpour, CL Solve
Business users love Essbase for its unparalleled analytic power. Business users also love Excel because spreadsheets are where data is expressed, analyzed, and manipulated. Essbase + spreadsheets = analytic bliss.
But as soon as you move beyond ad-hoc Essbase functionality, a series of questions arise:
1) How do you handle complex functionality?
2) Code yes, but where, and how?
3) What about non-Essbase data?
4) Workbooks on the web?
What’s needed is a system that:
1) Is spreadsheet-centric
2) Ties easily to SQL
3) Automatically distributes and updates workbooks
Dodeca does all of the above, and more; it is the key to managing complex workbooks so you and your company can focus on the real task at hand—analyzing, understanding, and managing the numbers, not the spreadsheets. This presentation introduces the issues around spreadsheets, Dodeca’s philosophy around managing multiple complex workbooks, and then demonstrations of what Dodeca can do.

Day 2

SESSION 7
9:00 - 10:00 AM
Taking OBIEE to the Next Level, Maneesh Disawal, James & Monroe
Move over pivot tables and charts and incorporate Exalytics with KPIs, scorecards, maps, and advanced analytic functions into your regular reporting. Use the latest infrastructure and visualization techniques to create dazzling dashboards to quickly and directly communicate relevant information. Incorporate data in office communications and deliver reports on mobile devices.

SESSION 8
10:15 - 11:15 AM
Essbase ASO – A Brave New World in Australia but not for the Rest of the World, Steve Hitchman, m-power Solutions
Many of you will be familiar with the concept of Essbase ASO / Aggregate Storage. You’ve probably read about the differences from Essbase BSO, seen a case study or used it on a project but even though ASO has been available for over 5 years adoption in Australia continues to be very limited.  In this session, we will cover the basics of what ASO is before exploring what’s so great about it and how it is being used to help companies in Australia.  For lovers of the more traditional BSO model, we’ll explain the differences highlighting what you can and can’t do in ASO models. This initially seems like a lot but we’ll pass on the tips and tricks that we’ve learned that allow this gap to be bridged including how ASO and BSO can work together.
We’ll highlight the real world stuff that goes beyond the textbook and Oracle marketing to expose how ASO technology is revolutionising what Essbase can deliver.

SESSION 9
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Oracle BI and Oracle Essbase: Today and Tomorrow, Stephane Roman, Oracle Corporation
Essbase and OBIEE have come a long way together since they met years ago. Being both strategic solutions, Oracle have continuously improved their specific technologies while making the integration more and more seamless at the same time.
In this session, we will first of all give an overview of the OBIEE & Essbase architectures and explain their typical usages within the enterprise. We will then open the bonnet and look at how the two solutions work together. How is the Essbase multi-dimensional structure (outline) understood by the OBIEE semantic layer (Repository)? How can I federate relational and multi-dimensional data sources through the OBIEE RPD’s logical layer? What are the different ways to import and model an Essbase cube OBIEE? How to work with unbalanced hierarchies? Are all Essbase features available through OBIEE (UDAs, Variables, Levels vs Generations…)?
Finally, we will look at how upcoming releases of OBIEE & Essbase will make the two solutions even tightly integrated, as well as a glance on how both are used with new Oracle Applications.

LUNCH
12:30 - 1:30 PM  

SESSION 10
1:30 - 2:30 PM
Slay the Evil of Bad Data in Essbase with ODI, Cameron Lackpour, CL Solve
Everyone knows that bad data kills Essbase applications. But did you know that bad data can also kill careers, consulting engagements, and company-wide labor agreements? Why is the rule of high-quality data in Essbase honored more in the breach than the observance? This session explains the real-world consequences of bad data, categories of data quality, and tools and strategies for ensuring that your Essbase database has the right data. A complete solution in ODI will show one path to salvation in the never-ending quest for quality data.

SESSION 11
2:45 - 3:45 PM 
Growing with Business Analytics - Keeping Updated and Informed, Paul Anderson, Oracle Corporation
What's the fastest way to find out about product certification and compatibility? Which social media channels are available for EPM and BI products? These and many more questions are often asked in the busy and growing business world; incorporating the Internet highway into our lives.
There have been recent changes in both significant improvements and new implementation of ways in which customers can communicate with Business Analytics support.
This presentation will run through changes made by the Oracle Business Analytics Proactive Team to areas including MOS Communities, knowledge management, and social media.
This session will show the way you can ask questions and find answers about Product Lifecycle, how to interact with Business Analytics support in a simple and efficient way, how to keep updated with news on areas such as patches and documentation, and will provide a demo of the new translations being introduced into My Oracle Support.

SESSION 12
Closing Panel
3:45 - 4:30 PM
Do you have a question about BI or EPM? Your BI and EPM speakers are here to give answers. This session is moderated but is expected to be freewheeling and open. Try to stump us!

Whew, is that enough?

What oh what oh what are you waiting for?  Read what’s on offer – that is great stuff, packaged for, and (mostly) delivered by Australians (hey, I have incredibly distant relatives somewhere in Victoria so do I get a partial pass on the Yankee Go Home protests?).  That means the content is targeted to your needs and your market.  What more could you possibly want?  Sign up today.

Be seeing you in Melbourne.