Category Archives: kscope15

Kscope15 Presentation Preview: ODI Workhorses

The other day I mentioned my goals for attendees for my upcoming ODTUG presentation on Drillbridge. Today I’m going to talk about my goals for my presentation on Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).

Over the last few years I have presented on ODI a handful of times. My main presentation on it has been highlighting a success story with it, where ODI was used to clean up and facilitate a lot of automation and ETL jobs for a health services company that [as you can imagine] has tons of data flying around everywhere. This previous presentation was more of a high-level affair, where I talked very generically about what the benefits of ODI were over the previous solution. Wanting to add a little more technical meat to the presentation, I appended what started off as a small section at the end where I take a look at just how ODI works under the covers.

While the “business” or high-level part of the presentation was all well and good, I found myself getting really excited to explain just how awesome the workings of the details of ODI ETL jobs were, and what started out as a 10-minute flight of fancy into the lower depths of something technical has now been promoted, as it were, to full on presentation.

In other words, I am going to spend an entire presentation literally tearing apart a single ODI interface, explaining why the steps are sequences the way they are, how to build idiomatic ODI interfaces, the affect of various options (journalization, query hints, delete all vs. truncate, etc.), update strategies, and more. I’m also going to marry up what is ostensibly an IT tool with various concepts from computer science, including the notion of idempotence (and why it’s a good thing).

With any luck, the attendee coming to this presentation will have a new or expanded understanding of how interfaces/mappings work, feel comfortable with modifying knowledge modules, and learn a trick or two when it comes to debugging ODI jobs. This will be a nuts and bolts, technical deep dive. While it’s ostensibly an advanced content presentation, I believe that people with even only a cursory familiarity should benefit from it as well. If you haven’t worked with ODI at all but are curious (and intrepid!) about what it can do, I think you’ll also benefit. So to all of my pure-Hyperion colleagues that haven’t dipped their toes in the ODI pool just yet, this is a great chance to hop on a different track and expand your horizons – I hope to see you there!

Kscope15 Presentation Preview: Drillbridge

I am very pleased to be able to say that I have two presentations at Kscope15. One of my presentations is on Drillbridge, the other presentation is a deep dive on how interfaces work in ODI. I’m going to really have a chance to geek out on both of these, especially the ODI presentation.

As for the Drillbridge presentation, I want to give a brief overview not just of what I am going to cover, but what I hope to accomplish for those in attendance.

This Drillbridge presentation will be an elaboration of my original webinar. I’m going to introduce the attendee to what Drillbridge is and how it works (of course). Then, as with the webinar, I will download and deploy Drillbridge in real-time, showing off just how easy it is to get drill-through up and running. The original webinar had a stated goal of deploying drill-through in 10 minutes or less. Not only was drill-through deployed to a cube in less time (five minutes!), I used the spare time to redeploy drill-through on the same cube but with drill-to-bottom enabled in the Time dimension (and still had some time left over). Yeah, it’s that good.

Since I’ll have more time than the webinar, I’ll also be able to show off the handful of awesome features that have been added in the last year: custom mappings, support for Linux, custom plugins, server-side result paging, smart formatting, drill-from-drill, custom stylesheets, and more.

After the presentation, attendees should have a firm grasp of how Drillbridge works, how it can be used, and how implement drill-through in simple situations. More importantly, they should be heading back to their respective companies excited about how they can now deliver a solid win to their users without breaking the bank or having to re-architect their systems.

There are a lot of great presentations this year, but I hope if you’re interested in drill-through or Drillbridge you will be able to attend!

Kscope15 – Two Presentations

Just wanted to mentioned that I’ll be at Kscope15 (you have registered, haven’t you?) with two brand new presentations. I will be presenting on Drillbridge, the innovative, awesome, easy to implement, super cool, fun, free, and fast drill-through solution, as well as a really interesting twist on an ODI feature.

For the ODI presentation I will be doing a super detailed, incredibly deep dive on one of the main features of ODI – mappings and interfaces – and how they work under the hood, how to make/customize Knowledge Modules, and more. I’m really excited for this presentation because it’s a total nerd look at how and why things are setup the way they are, filtered through the lens of a computer scientist (with a nice helping of cube geekery). I don’t seem to get to write about ODI as much as I write about Hyperion-related things, but truth be told if I had to rate my Oracle-specific skills in order of strength, it would go Java, ODI, and then Hyperion. Go figure.

Anyway, get to registering for Kscope as soon as you can; I have a feeling this year’s is going to be the most awesome yet, and when you do, be sure to swing by my presentations and geek out with me and introduce yourself.