The final day of the formal RittmanMead forums wraps up today.  The pace was kept strong with Mark Rittman providing a depp dive into Oracle Exalytics and Oracle TimesTen by some real world examples and a demo agains their newly purchases Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Engineered System. Jean-Pierre from the Oracle Big Data team gave an eye-opening deep dive presentation on Oracle’s approach at “Big Data” and how the go forward implementations can be structured. He gave great use cases around the principle of using Big Data to be proactive instead of reactive, similar to using radar in the front of a vehicle to judge and alert the proximity of the vehicle from another in order to avoid a crash instead of only having an air bag deploy after the crash in order to protect you. In my opinion the best presentation of the day came from Jordan Meyer from RM with a very artistic investigation at designing dashboards for purpose, perspective, and artistry. He sited well known dashboard enthusiasts such as Stephen Few and introduced the group to integrating open source visualization JavaScript libraries into Oracle BI 11g using Protovis and D3.

Jordan Meyer giving Oracle Viz talk

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The RittmanMead BI forum is happening again this year in the states in Atlanta, GA, and the caliber of Oracle BI experts is just as one would expect from this annual event for aficionados.  I missed the MasterClass given by Kevin McGinley on Tuesday but it got rave revues from the attendees I’ve asked, although it did get a “Low Sentiment” score from the Endeca model created by Adam Ferarri which he designed to demo how Endeca can yank unstructured data, in this case Twitter posts using the #biforum hash tag from the attendees.

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You may have already heard that there has been a book on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g in the works for some time now.  We’ve been working hard on this book over the last year or so and we are in the final stretch of conducting chapter rewrites and pushing towards our 2nd Quarter publish date.

If you didn’t know that the Oracle BI 11g book was on its way, well now you do and hopefully my lack of blog posts over the last few months hasn’t dissappointed you too much.  It’s all been for a good cause I assure you. I’ll be picking up the pace here in about a month or so.  There is so much to explore with the new software versions of Oracle BI 11g, Endeca, Exalytics, Fusion Middleware and the list goes on.  I can’t wait to get back to focusing on the blog.

But let me continue talking about the book that we believe will be a great read and reference for any current or soon to be user of Oracle Business Intelligence.  The book covers all of the major features of Oracle BI 11g from a learn-by-doing perspective.  This book is more than just a reference book to Oracle’s flagship BI software suite.  We, the other authors being Adrian Ward and Haroun Khan, take you as the reader from introduction of the new architecture of Oracle BI 11g, through properly installing the software on a server, to a step-by-step development of an RPD and Web Catalog based on an ATP tennis tournament database. The reader will engage in a real-world end-to-end architecture scenario, learn best practices, tip n’ tricks, and feel confident about using Oracle BI 11g when they’ve finished this book.  We believe this book will be  invaluable to any organization whether they are bringing on new people to their Oracle BI team, upgrading from a previous version of Oracle BI, or already have advanced users on the team.

I believe you can already pre-order the book from Amazon or Packt Publishing.

We’ve put a lot of effort into this book and we are excited about the release.  There might even be a launch party. I’ll be sure to let you know about it.  In the meantime, the official website for the Oracle BI 11g book is going to be http://www.obi11gbook.com/.   The book website has a user forum http://www.obi11gbook.com/forums/ available for users to ask questions regarding the book, or general Oracle BI 11g questions, as well as to download code and data files found within the book.  I recommend that you sign-up for the Oracle BI 11g book newsletter on the homepage of http://www.obi11gbook.com/ so you’ll be one of the first to know when we send out more information closer to the time of the book release.

Stay tuned.