This week’s blog is dedicated to Jeff McQuigg, Senior Architect at KPI Partners
A little bit about Jeff:
- He developed many of Siebel’s early Analytics v7.0 best practices & wrote part of the certification exam.
- He has personally been involved with over 35+ OBI projects in every capacity (BI Architect, Data Modeling, RPD Metadata, Business Analyst, Report Developer, ETL Architect/Developer, Project Manager, Pre-Sales).
- He is a BI & OBI Thought Leader:
- Jeff frequently is an Oracle Open World Speaker.
- He has developed OBI Deployment Methodology, deliverable templates and all Training programs with Metricsphere.
Some of his best blogs:
1. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About the OBI RPD
This blog from September 2013 states that Dimensional Hierarchies in OBIEE are used for a variety of important features. This post explores the fundamental reason for their existence and some specialized features that require their existence. But mostly he discusses the single most important thing to know about the RPD!
2. Making Dims & Facts Work Together
Jeff says in this blog from June that this is a very common RPD modeling question on IT Toolbox. The problem is stated something like this:
“I have 2 fact tables and 3 dimension tables. One of the dimension tables doesn’t work with Fact #2 while the other 2 dimension tables work with both facts. When I make a report with all 3 dimensions and both facts, Fact #2 is incorrect or missing.”
He then restates the problem using ‘good BI language.’ The blog post also features slides from a recent presentation of his.
3. Bad BI Form
This blog from October 2013 was featured as one of our ‘Blogs of the Weeks‘. In this blog post, Jeff demonstrates visually how circles can not be compared easily but in a vertical bar, comparison is visually better. He says to keep this in mind when dealing with comparisons using area based visuals.
4. Hanging In The OPN Lounge With Norm Dy & Jeff McQuigg
This blog from November 2013 features the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KfHhkZmteg&feature=player_embedded
In this September 2013 blog, Jeff announces that the project he bled and sweated over for nearly a whole year won KPI Partners the coveted Oracle Excellence Award for North American Specialized Partner of the Year in BI & EPM (formerly know as the Titan Award). He has also written a presentation that goes into further detail about the project.
He goes through the following areas of the project:
- Enterprise BI
- Prototype-to-Production
- Technical Solution for making multiple hierarchies end user friendly, all folded in with advanced data security
- Performance
This blog from December 2012 was another to be referred to in one of our weekly blog posts.
Jeff says, “I’ve been spending a lot of time recently working on performance tuning projects. Sometimes the BI apps are slow, sometimes it’s custom, sometimes it’s a mix. I’ve gotten the chance to see what works in both Oracle and SQL Server. My conclusion about both of these databases is that they are like a cat or dog that gets fooled when you play hide the ball; they aren’t very smart sometimes. The only way you can really truly ensure database engines, even modern advanced ones, do things the right way to is to make it as simple and easy for them to understand as possible.”
He covers this in the following way:
- Star Schema not Snowflake
- Map straight to fields
- Use Good Date Joins
- Outer Joins Should Be Outta Here
Papers and Presentations
Planning for High Performance OBI
This presentation from September 2010 has the following agenda:
- Introduction
- Logical Data Architecture
- Physical Data Model
- Physical Database
- Oracle Focused
- Physical Database
- Oracle Focused
- OBI Server
- User Interface
- Introduction
- Business Need & Solution
- Technical Solution
- Project Implementation
- Agenda
- Status & Future Plans
- Challenges, Lessons Learned & Best Practices
- Wrap-Up
- Introduction
- Physical Data Model
- Physical Database –Oracle Focused
- OBI Server
- User Interface
- Combo Tables
- Make Dims & Facts Reach
- Non-Conformed Dimensions
- Canonical Time
- Selecting a Logical Table Source
- Controlling Join Paths
- Business Need & Solution
- Project Implementation
- Status & Future Plans
- The Solution & Key Aspects
- Data Model and ETL Efforts
- Challenges, Best Practices & Keys to Success
Build a Performance Layer for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 11g
This is described as:
“All the best work on your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition–based system will be wasted if users are frustrated with long response times for dashboards and reports. Learn from an Oracle ACE with more than 10 years of implementation experience what contributes to poor performance and what the best solutions are to improve the end user experience and user adoption. This session discusses the creation of a performance layer to make dashboards and reports run at high speed. Samples scripts and the necessary mapping into the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Repository are also reviewed, plus architect and project manager considerations. The context is Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 11g, but the concepts are equally valid for custom-built solutions.”
Download the pdf from the above link.
Videos
Webinar: A Mix of Art & Science: How to Achieve High Performance Business Intelligence
Performance Tuning Oracle’s BI Applications
Contact details:
Contact Jeff via his LinkedIn profile or his blog
