Check out Oracle Data Miner at OOW 11

If you are at Oracle Open World (OOW11) and you have an interest in Oracle Data Miner, check out the following presentation sessions:

In addition to these sessions there are also the following Hands-On Labs, where you can get your hand dirty with the tool.

Do let me know if I have missed a session so that I can update the list.
I’m not attending OOW11 so let me know what the sessions are like.

And tell Charlie that I sent you

What to do with your OOW free stuff

For those lucky people who are heading off to Oracle Open World, there is something I would like you to consider doing for me.

At OOW you will be collecting lots of free stuff. I'm hearing rumours that OTN will have lots of t-shirts, etc and for the Oracle ACE's some new vests. Or perhaps you are an exhibitor who will be trying to give away some of your merchandised stuff.

Well instead of giving these items as presents, or carefully filled away somewhere in your office or at home, why not donate it to school children in Tanzania.

I’ve recently started a charity called Tech Gear for the Third World. This allows companies and individuals to donate their merchandised items to a good cause. It also helps companies to donate their surplus or old branded goods.

More details and a shipping address can be could here.

Oak Table Event in Dec 2011

This year the Annual UKOUG event will be in Birmingham (again) from the 5th to 7th December.

This year there is a slight difference to the usual schedule. On Sunday 4th December there is an Oak Table event, with two parallel tracks. It has all the well known experts presenting at this event.

If I had the time turner from Harry Potter, I would be able to go to all the sessions.

Presenters include Morgens Norgaard, Johnathan Lewis, Frits Hoogland, Martin Widlake, Christian Antognini, Connor McDonald, James Morle and Wolfgang Breitling.

This is an impressive line up and hopefully the UKOUG will run a similar event in 2012.

Check out of the full agenda at

http://2011.ukoug.org/personalisedagenda

This is one event that I would love to go to but unfortunately I wont be able to make it.  I’ll be attending the Annual UKOUG conference alright, and I have already booked my airline tickets. But there are no flights from Dublin that will get me to Birmingham on time. I would need to fly to Birmingham on the Saturday, involving another hotel night and another night away from the family.

The best I’m hoping for is to get to the ICC in time for the Panel Session on Performance and High Availability. 

Depending on weather and travel delays I might even miss this last session.  If I do, I can always meet up with everyone in the pub on the Sunday evening for a chat.

Maybe next year.

OBIEE VirtualBox VM Available

I have a few Updates since I posted the blog on 14th Sept
1. The OBIEE VMS are now available on the Virtural Box Pre-Built VM webpage, as of 15th Sept. Thanks to @oraclenerd for requesting this
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vms-192663.html
2. Thanks to @rnm1978 for pointing out that the OBIEE VM is very resource intensive. The min. spec. given is not really enough. You really need more than 4GB for this VM to run.
3. The SampleApp that the OBIEE VM contains also has some examples of how Oracle Data Miner can be used in an application

I’ve recently come across an VM of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, which has the sample application already build and ready for you to use.

The VM files are available at the following link for download.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/obiee-samples-167534.html

There are 2 files that you need to download to create the VM in VirtualBox. These are the VB Image key File (.ovf) and the VB Image Disk Files (.vmdk). The second file is ~25G, so it a while to download!

There is also a VB Image-Deployment Guide.

If you already have OBIEE installed and you don’t want to setup the VM, the setup files and data files are also available.

Next Generation Analytics–Oracle BIWA TechCast

The Oracle BIWA SIG, which is part of the IOUG, will be having a tech cast on Wednesday 14th September 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CDT  (between 6pm and 7pm in Ireland)

It is titled 'Building Next-Generation Predictive Analytics Applications using Oracle Data Mining'.

You can register for this by visiting http://ow.ly/6s35C

This presentation will cover how the Oracle Database has become a predictive analytics (PA) platform for next-generation applications and will include several examples including:

• Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) Predictive Workforce,
• Oracle Adaptive Access Manager for fraud detection, 
  Oracle Communications Industry Model,
• Oracle Complex Event Processing and others and will be interspersed with
• Oracle Data Mining demos and PA examples where possible.

“Predictive analytics help you make better decisions by uncovering patterns and relationships hidden in the data. This new information generates competitive advantage. Oracle has invested heavily to "move the algorithms to the data" rather than current approaches. Oracle Data Mining provides 12 in-database algorithms that mine star schemas, structured, unstructured, transactional, and spatial data. Exadata, delivering 10x-100x faster performance, combined with OBIEE for dashboards and drill-down deliver an unbeatable in-database analytical platform that undergirds next-generation “predictive” analytics applications. This webcast will show you how to get started.”

My Oracle Magazine Collection

Over the past couple of days I have been doing a bit of a reorganisation of my book case in my home office. On one of the shelves I keep my Oracle Magazine.  My collection dates back to 1992. I began my working career as a graduate consultant with Oracle in Ireland. At that stage Oracle Magazine seemed to be published every 4 to 6 months, but around 1995 it moved to being published every 2 months.
I though that I had a full collection of Oracle Magazine from 1993 onwards, but the table below shows that I have a number of missing editions. Perhaps these gaps are due to my good nature of lending them to other people, or maybe I just lost them somewhere.
What I’m looking to do is to complete my collection. If you have one of the missing editions, can you let me know. Assuming that you don’t mind parting with it, we can arrange postal.

Looking back over the previous editions, it is interesting to see some of the topics that were discussed. Typically they were a couple years before they became commonly used.
An idea for Oracle Magazine is to have a new column that looks back at an article on a particular technique/technology/tool and reflects on how things have changed (or not) since the article was written.