Examining the ongoing challenges of delivering high-quality, value-added ERP services in Higher Education.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Where have you been my whole life,
Oracle VM VirtualBox and the
OBIEE 11.1.1.5 image?
Lurking in plain sight, probably advertised on Oracle corporate and
partner Twitter posts just outside the latest 50 each time I pulled out
my iPhone between meetings, in elevators, or waiting on line at SBUX. We
went through so much trouble configuring a demo machine (with Windows
Server 64-bit… ouch) when all we needed to do was hook up to a fat pipe,
download you, and turn the key to start.
I learned about the VirtualBox Image last week at
#OOW11
in San Francisco, in a throw-away comment from the product manager for
OBI Scorecards and Strategy. Flew home and checked the specs – 4 GB RAM?
I’ve got that on my home laptop. Fat pipe, not so much. It took nearly
12 hours to download the install packages from ftp.oracle.com but only
another hour to get OBIEE up and running.
Other than 4 GB of RAM, what does one need for this install? 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) and an FTP client (FileZilla -
http://filezilla-project.org/). And Oracle VirtualBox, which you can download from here:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html
The real heavy lifting (for you network, anyhow) comes with the
SampleApp V107 Image. As you can see at
this link the download is roughly 25GB. This took forever over my slow Wifi on my slow at-home Comcast connection. The
installation guide
steps through all the (rather straight-forward) installation steps from
that point forward; it also contains all the passwords one needs to get
the party started.
Once connected, the
“General Index”
provides a learning map – literally hundreds of dashboard pages devoted
to individual concepts and terminology in OBIEE. For example, dig into
Section 0.2 to learn about the security set-up in the Sample App as well
as key features in OBIEE such as the “Act As” proxy option. Or navigate
to 3.20 to see various options for formatting your Answers reports. Or
visit 8.7 to see how OBIEE allows fidelity of interactivity between both
relational and flat-file data sources. After traipsing through each
dashboard and drilling down to “Edit” with the objective of sorting out
the underlying configuration, the power and flexibility of the
technology become obvious—and far more tangible than literature,
conference presentations, or canned demos.
More later this week after my hands are a little dirtier…
Labels: #OOW11, OBIEE, Oracle
Monday, October 3, 2011
Sunday is for SIGs – Special Interest Groups oriented around geographic regions, products, or business processes. These groups, associated with the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG), typically meet twice each year – at OAUG Collaborate and Open World. In between, most of the SIGs have e-mail discussion boards, educational webinars, etc. For more info start here:
OAUG SIGs
SIGs are a great way to meet people and hear from Oracle. Unfortunately, they’re also held on Sunday before the conference has officially kicked off, so they can be a little sparse. Yesterday, I missed the Upgrade (R12) SIG and E-Business Suite SIG but made it to the Moscone Center in time for the Hyperion SIG. In that session, I learned that Oracle would be announcing later that evening the release of “Exalytics” – an optimized “parallel-everything” pre-built server for analytics, with Essbase at the core. I knew that a major focus for this conference was going to be the Exadata (purpose-built appliance for Oracle Database) and Exalogic (purpose-built appliance for Oracle Middleware) but this was interesting news indeed. Unfortunately, I would have rather found out the release date for the next major Hyperion EPM version, but was told merely “2012” which is not particularly helpful.
The Higher Education User Group (HEUG) is an unusual SIG in that rather than focusing on geography or technology, the HEUG focuses on an industry. We have long been involved in the HEUG, with two current members (Ryan and Tom) of Product Advisory Groups (PAGs) that interface directly with Oracle development to lobby for higher education interests. There was a strong turn-out (at least 50) for this session and they held a reception immediately afterwards at a nearby restaurant to allow for more networking time. Since we use a small piece of pretty much every Oracle product except JDE, we have a little something in common with everyone there. The most interesting dialogue I had was with Lone Star College, which implemented 44 modules (!) of PeopleSoft Enterprise and Campus Solutions in 18 months, with a total of 40 (!!!) customizations platform-wide. Ouch. Makes me feel just a little better about our current slate of upgrade projects…
After rubbing elbows and trading business cards for an hour, we returned to the Moscone Center for the main event – Larry Ellison’s keynote speech. It was a strange one. The San Francisco Giants gave Mr. Ellison a world series ring for his years of support. Partner and CIO of-the-year awards were presented. And then Mr. Ellison began his presentation. For one hour, he talked about hardware. Data compression. Infiniband. DRAM. Parallel everything. Lots of math. Some talk of customer case studies, with the final punchline each time the performance gains. 60x, 18x, 23x, 40x. All very impressive, but a little boring for those of us with application software on the mind. Exalytics was announced with ten minutes to go, and Ellison showed some ugly stats that looked eerily like our own Hyperion Planning performance, and then what would happen if we had Exalyctics. Very exciting, though all talk of pricing was omitted from the slides…
I hope to learn enough this week about Exa- this and Exa- that to put a more layman’s definition together, but my head is spinning far too fast. Off to see Exalytics in action at the 8am keynote; will report back tomorrow!
Labels: #OOW11, Conferences, OAUG
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Less than a week until the first sessions of Oracle Open World. As I mentioned in a
blog last week, it has been six years since I attended this massive and overwhelming convention. How many companies has Oracle acquired since then? Twenty? A hundred? Yet some things never change: the sessions I’m most excited about pertain to this mysterious thing known as “Fusion” (cue ominous music).
I have never had the chance to play the “tourist” in San Francisco, and by the looks of the packed agenda for Open World, there won’t be occasion for it this year. My Thursday-morning presentation will hang over my head all week, as will the worry that I will choose poorly among the hundreds of concurrent sessions. I aim to strike a balance between learning tangible things that will help my team immediately with seeking serendipity—stumbling across something novel and innovative that could make a real difference for the institution 2-3 years hence. My example of the latter from six years ago was a session on XML Publisher / BI Publisher which was still shiny and new… (I’m a big fan, and still trying to gain traction with this tool at my institution, but that’s another story for another day…)
San Francisco has a special place in my heart—I spent the first six weeks of my post-college career there, with a cubicle on a mid-teens floor in the
Transamerica Pyramid. We were sixty fresh-faced college grads, with aspirations to fly high in corporate finance, psyched about the fancy Motorola SkyTel pagers that for those few weeks served to coordinate bar-hopping rather than signal a crisis. My favorite memory was kayaking in Sausalito, where we basked in sunlight and watched the fog darken the streets of the city.
Thanks to Virgin America—far and away the cheapest direct flight option out of Logan—I actually have a full afternoon on Saturday to relax and enjoy San Francisco beyond the Moscone Center and environs. What shall I do? (Other than put finishing touches on my presentation!) I had been considering Alcatraz, until I saw that the
de Young Museum has a Picasso exhibit that was just extended to October 10th. Perfect. (Even better since my wife doesn’t particularly care for Picasso, which means I don’t have to feel lousy that she’s missing it!)
I wonder which will prove more serendipitous, the Picasso exhibit or the random eye-opening Oracle technology or applications session I plop in the 2pm slot on Wednesday afternoon?
Labels: #OOW11, Conferences, OOW11, Oracle, Travel