Go Self Service or Go Home

Who understands your company Data best?

Is it the OBIEE RPD Developer?
Is it the DBA?
Is it the Warehouse Designer?
How about the source System Architect?
Or the department analyst?

Lets ask the question another way, Who knows what to do with the company Data in your system?

The Data Scientist?
The report distributer?
RPD Developer?
Dashboard Developer?
Dashboard User?
Board Member?

OK, one more question,

Who knows how to transform data into meaning?

Database Developer?
ETL Developer?
RPD Developer?
Excel Guru in the xxx Department?
Board Members?

So, you answered the above, and you probably biased your answer depending upon where you are in the company. You’re in the IT department? Then you think IT is the answer. You work for the finance director producing reports, then you think end users rock!

Despite whatever your opinion is, the truth is demonstrated by what is successful in the front line.

Be honest, how many times does a print out of a dashboard, written by the IT department, get presented in board meetings. The answer is NEVER (and I mean Never). The reality is that Powerpoint and Excel Rule when it comes to end users. Why? because they can manipulate the presentation and the data in the way they need to – They have the skills and therefore love the tools. Lets not forget that MS Access won the battle of the databases. Oracle may well be the best database platform, with SQL Server a close second, but users have MS Access in their desktop, so Access wins. Essbase is another example, where departments get what they want, bypassing the IT department.

Why is this relevant to OBIEE? Well, look whats happening in the technology space – PowerBI from Microsoft, R Studio, Data Visualisation Desktop, BICS, APEX 5.0, Spotfire and dozens of other end user targeted systems. All of which can be bought with departmental budgets, and can be implemented without IT.

So what can you do?

Build your platform well, and let the users free reign to building the content. Give users access to Answers and Dashboards. Ge them to build the Agents and the BI Publisher reports. They understand the data far better than you do. And they have the IT skills.

This is the age of the end user. get over it.

Blogs of the week

1. Oracle Users in Action (A Collaborate16 Conference Review)

Ian Abramson talked of his experience of the 4 day event. He says, “The 4 day event had many themes and introduced ideas but my thoughts was focused on the messages in the following areas:

The upcoming release of Oracle Database 13c. An updated version with expanded features. Still under NDA so we have little to discuss at the moment.
The Cloud
Business Intelligence (Discussion around the concept of bimodal BI)
Security
Big Data and Internet of Things

…A big topic of conversation was Cloud. This permeated across all technology and applications. Oracle is focused on becoming the biggest Cloud provider of databases, applications and other components provided through their SaaS and PaaS strategy. ”

2. Getting ready for Collaborate 2016

Elke Phelps provides an overview of their planned activities at the conference. These include ‘Meet the Experts’ sessions, special interest groups, sessions, panels and demos.

3. My first Collaborate

Heli sums up her experiences at Collaborate16

4. Collaborate 2016 Oaktable World Sessions

Another Collaborate16 blog to peruse!

5. How to Install Oracle 11gR2 XE on Ubuntu

Gokhan Atil writes, “I wanted to import a datapump dumpfile to my laptop, and I wondered if I can install Oracle XE to ubuntu guest. I thought it would be easy because I installed Oracle 10g XE to ubuntu for several times, but I saw that Oracle doesn’t provide debian packages for Oracle 11g XE. So I needed to convert the RPM to debian package (and fix incompatibility problems). Therefor, I installed “alien” package and other required tools using apt-get.”

6. Installing OBIEE on Windows

Sarah Craynon Zumbrum says, “Earlier this week I started on the task of installing OBIEE on my Windows machine for the first time ever. And by myself. The software download took around 2 hours (really bad home internet…took <30 minutes in the office for all files) and the install took 4 hours, with most of the time coming from frustrating pauses in the installation process. But, I figured all the nuances out and want to list them here for you so you won’t have the same halts as I had…or they will help you get past where you are currently stuck.”

7. Monitoring ADF 12c Client Request Time with Click History

Andrejus Baranovski writes, “You must be excited to read this post, I will describe one very useful feature, available in ADF 12c. This feature – Click History. You can follow steps described by Duncan Mills, to enable and read click history data in server log. There is one more option available – we can read click history data from ADF request (captured by filter class) and log it in custom way (for later analysis). Click history gives such information as client request start/end time (you can calculate client request duration), component client ID, component type, action event type, etc. All this is useful to understand application performance perceived by the client.”

8. ODI 12c LOOKUP Components

Pete Scott writes, “In the depths of time before ODI 12c, ODI Studio had a fairly simple canvas to design our interfaces. We dropped on our datastores (tables) and then dragged columns between tables to create joins, and columns to the canvas to make filters. If we needed to use expressions we just typed them on the target table and selected where to execute the expression, be it source, stage or target.”

9. Can Oracle SQL Developer do that?

Jeff Smith gives a quick run-down of FAQ’s he gets when doing presentations or demos including How to Extend a Tablespace and How to Debug a stored procedure?

10. OBIEE 12c Required Information: Services, Repository Deployments

A blog that gives some useful information about OBIEE 12C.

Includes:

Restart services
Main Directories
Catalog Upgrade Pre-Requisite

11. Agile Amped Interview

Kent Graziano talks of his experience at Agile Alliance Tech conference (#AATC2016) and shares his interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxUs34pxRMo

12. Active and Inactive Sessions

Connor McDonald writes, “Most people are aware of the STATUS column in V$SESSION. If it’s ‘ACTIVE’ then that connection is in the process of consuming database resources (running a SQL statement etc). However, a lesser known column which is probably even more useful is the LAST_CALL_ET column.”

13. Kscope16: New Oracle Professional Track

Sarah Craynon Zumbrum shares this opportunity to attend KScope16. She says, “With this New Oracle Professional track, you can take 1-2 year’s worth of learning and condense it into 3 days. I’d say in terms of ROI, it’s kind of like winning the lottery. No waiting 2 years for salary expenses to pay for the knowledge; rather, 50% off the registration price of Kscope16 is the cost.”

14 . Why PLSQL?

Connor McDonald shares: