Summer Holiday Reading for OBIEE Fans.

This week we have a great collection of updates – Including a great blog from Stephen Few, and some free stuff from Oracle.

We also see some more tips from the prolific Red Stack team – keep them coming guys!

I hope this week finds you on a beach, refreshing yourselves, and learning new stuff – I have just bought the latest books from Brendan Tierney, so look forward to getting sunburnt while loading more knowledge 🙂

Anyway, enjoy, wherever you are…

Blogs of the week

Hunters Eat Better Than Gatherers

Phil Goerdt discusses how we can better implement analytic solutions by challenging the convention of requirements gathering.

He says: Don’t “Gather Requirements”. Hunt for Questions.

“My take aways for consumers: Think about what data you need, the data you don’t have and what questions you can’t answer. From there, brainstorm how you can help the data suppliers understand these pain points. An export or data dump is a failing answer in my classroom!

My advice for suppliers: Try to read between the lines and understand what the consumers are really gunning for. Once you understand that, try to find ways to deliver it! “

2. Trial Subscription to Oracle Process Cloud Service

Antonis says, “Oracle has simplified the previously long and complicated process of subscribing to its Cloud Services, making it much simpler and quicker to get access to any of its Cloud Services.”

Go here and click on the Free Trial button.

3. Basta, Big Data: It’s Time to Say Arrivederci

Stephen Few blogs about why he’s had enough of Big Data.

He concludes by saying, “Let’s say “goodbye” to the term Big Data. It doesn’t mean anything in particular and all of the many things that people have used it to mean merely refer to data. Do we really need a new term to promote the importance of evidence-based decision making?”

4. Oracle REST Data Services and Docker

Kris Rice goes through:

TL;DR
GitHub Project
The Build Structure
Optional Software
Running The Image
The build

5. Unpivot

Jonathan Lewis blogs about an interesting observation that appeared recently as a side-channel on a question on the OTN database forum – how does Oracle execute an unpivot()operation. He gives an example of such a query in this blog.

6. BI Publisher 12C: Running reports via the REST API

Paul Cannon writes, “BI Publisher 12c comes with a suite of REST APIs allowing you to manage and run reports via URL calls, primarily to allow you to make automated calls from custom applications. The APIs provide a wide range of functionality from creating reports & templates, updating definitions & xliff translation files to viewing the report definition & sample data, plus of course actually running the report.

In this blog I’ll go through the basics of viewing the report definition and running a report – providing parameters and downloading the report.”

7. What is Oracle Analytics Cloud and why should you care?

Christian Screen asks us to imagine that you don’t have to worry about hosting the necessary infrastructure in terms of servers, software, and storage space, and can concentrate on using the functionality and getting results in an environment that is:

Scalable
Flexible
Comprehensive
Secure

The Oracle Analytics Cloud is all the above and much more.

He also links to these white papers

8. nl.OUG Tech Experience 15 June 2017

Daan Bakboord wrote of his experience at nl-OUG Tech Experience which took place in ‘De Rijtuigenloods’.

9 How to Update the ORDS_PUBLIC_USER Password

Jeff Smith writes, “ORDS_PUBLIC_USER is the database user that’s used to create your ORDS connection pool(s). Each database configured with ORDS gets one.

When you publish a RESTful Service under HR on database X, ORDS resolves the call to the proper jdbc connection pool, then proxy connects from ORDS_PUBLIC_USER to user HR, and runs the SQL or PL/SQL.

So, now imagine what happens when you let the ORDS_PUBLIC_USER password expire?” Read on for more…

10. Online Index Rebuild Problem in 12C

Neil Chandler blogs, “When building an index in Oracle Enterprise edition using the keyword “ONLINE”, if the index build fails for whatever reason a messy set of extents can get left behind.”

This week on Twitter