Rene Kuipers, VX Company : "Groups, Roles and Issues"

"Last year I found that in certain circumstances the naming of Users, Groups and Application Roles cause strange front-end behaviour. Disappearing and reappearing dashboard pages.

It took us quite some time to figure out what happened.

We ended up with the conclusion that 'It's All in the Name .

That's something I would like to share with the user community.."

Antony Heljula, Peak Indicators: "Disabling your session logs will make no difference!"

"When customers have poor performance with Oracle BI, one of the most typical recommendations given by support teams is to disable session logging as this will reduce overhead on the system.   The same goes for Usage Tracking.

But why???   If your reports are taking 60 seconds then surely no improvement is going to be made simply by disabling logging!   59.999 seconds is just as bad as 60 seconds.

This "ignite" talk will rapidly discuss an Oracle BI performance test that was designed specifically to prove/disprove the recommendation - to see whether disabling logging can actually provide any real benefit."

Ayse OZTOP, GTech : "You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure"

"I would like to present about the Balanced Scorecard and OBIEE Scorecarding and Strategy Management. I want to emphasize the importance and necessity of performance measurement. I want to give some general information about Balanced Scorecard, Robert Kaplan, David Norton. I also want to talk about the 4 perspectives Balanced Scorecard uses to measure performance. Then I want to talk about OBIEE Scorecarding method, terminology used in there, symbols of the scorecarding objects, the visual power of OBIEE scorecard. I want to show some examples of scorecards, strategy trees, strategy maps. My estimate would be 5 minutes for the scorecarding and performance measurement concept in general and 5 minutes for the OBIEE scorecarding.."

Mike Vickers, Rittman Mead : "Making Breakfast Decisions, Better:  A Case Study"

"“Making better decisions” is frequently sited by organisations as one of the desired outcomes of their investments in Business Intelligence.  Meanwhile, marketing collateral continues to use the old “Making Better Decisions, Faster” cliche to sell the benefits case for BI.  Whilst these phrases sound impressive and indicate commendable aspirations, do we ever stop to think about what they actually mean?  And do we also think about what this means for our BI solutions?  

Decisions are complex things - even more so if we include the processes that lead up to them.  Does everyone make decisions in the same way?  Are decisions made as a collective always better than those made in isolation?  Do we understand relationships and inter-dependencies between decisions?  Do we know when we have made a good decision?  More importantly, do we know what made it a good decision?  Can we learn from previous decisions and, when we do it right, can it be repeated again and again?  Is the process portable, allowing for ‘good decision making’ to be replicated across departments or geographies?  To understand how your organisation tackles decisions goes a long way to understanding its culture.  And to understand its culture takes you a step closer to being able to deliver transformational BI.

This talk is an alternative and light-hearted take on my Conference Presentation (Making Better Decisions, Better).  Using an obscure but relevant case study, I will examine my own decision making process, which led me to my choice of breakfast on the day of the presentation.

In doing so, we will address some of the hidden complexities of what should be a simple decision.  We will then consider how these same complexities exist in the business world, where the decisions are infinitely more important and complex.  We will finally think about the ways in which BI technologies can be architected in order to alleviate some of this complexity and to enhance the decision making environment.."

Tony Selden, Playtech (Virtue Fusion): "Whistlestop tour of a greenfield DW/BI Development (subtitle - when you really don't need an ETL tool)"

"It would be 20 slides on the Virtue Fusion (world's largest provider of online bingo and other gaming sofware) project development, roughly as follows:

1: Introduction of self

2: Introduction of talk topic

3: Project overview

4: Project challenges

5: Source system characteristics

6 - 13: ETL tool considerations, including options considered, reasons for rejection of OWB/ODI. To spice things up, I'll make the contraversial assertion that in some circumstances such tools can be a case of the "Emperor's Clothes Syndrome" and that the only tools one needs are Word, Toad and Oracle RDBMS!  Later slides of this block will show what was actually done using a few meta-data tables, DBMS_SCHEDULER Chains and PL/SQL to create a hgihly instrumented, convenient to use and efficient ETL.

14 - 15: CDC vs Batch approach

16 - 17: Oracle 11g features/optimiser exploited (Join elimination) plus frustrations (Bloom filter pruning not so great)

18 - 19: OBIEE issues encountered and solutions.20: Conclusion."

Michal Zima, Teura s.r.o. : "OBIEE11g real experiences - what works/issues found"

"Topic:

Presentation goal is to share the experience with OBIEE11g implementation from the "field".

This includes : 

a) "succes stories"  - different topics, where we succesfully utilized new funcionality (like security integration with AD and Kerberos SSO, usage of scripting for automating different admin tasks... )

b) on the other site also issues we have hit during OBIEE11g implementation

(including OPMN memory leak, custom grups not working correctly, connectivity to BI server from Excel  etc...)."

Salih Oztop, ING Bank : "BI Certification - To do or not to do"

"In my presentation I want to talk about standardization of qualifications for BI team members through certifications such as CBIP (Certified Business Intelligence Professional), CDMP (Certified Data Management Professional) and Oracle Certified BI Specialist. I will illustrate what candidates will gain through certification and why it matters. Additionally, I will explain the differences between these certificates and give guidance to candidates about how to prepare for the exam, how to take the exam and finally discuss renewal of the certificates. I will also interpret Data Management Association (DAMA) and Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBOK).."