Last week I flew to San Francisco to attend an Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) training class.

Going into it, I had only a minimal and very high-level understanding as to what the programs capabilities were. After the series of lectures and lab examples that we have run through, I can easily see why companies would want to / need to implement this.

OBIEE has some amazing capabilities for compiling all sorts of data and dump it out into highly configurable reports. In just a short amount of time, I had connected it to an Oracle database, and built out the business layers and presentation layers of the OBIEE product. A little bit of explanation was needed, mainly on the admin tool functionality, but after that, it was pretty straight forward.

We focused a lot of our time learning all the individual pieces of the product and what all the features are in the suite. The level of customization that you can do from a simple point-and-click interface is impressive. The user interface is also a level above most Oracle products that I have to use.

Everyone in the class, except for myself and my business partner, didn’t show up for the last day because they already finished through the labs and figured that’s all there was to it. We spent the last day with a one-on-one with the instructor and grilled him about all the little nuances of the product that are undocumented “features” (read…quirks that will drive you nuts when you encounter them). I think that was probably the most beneficial part of the instruction. We now have an upper-hand on the product than a lot of other people, even some of those that already have a couple installation under their belt. Even more important, I now have a new friend and direct line to a lead Oracle OBIEE developer / implementor. That is priceless when going through an installation on a client’s site. I don’t mind opening tickets for support. But nothing shows a client that you’re the best guy for the job when a problem arises during implementation, and you call a lead developer for the product on his cell phone and get an answer directly. That’s what I call true expert support.

I really wish we had gone through an installation workshop rather than a configuration workshop. I have yet to run through an install of this product, but after speaking with the instructors, I have a feeling it’s not going to be terribly easy. There is some documentation around the setup procedures, but like most of Oracle’s documentation, it’s more of a guideline than an instruction manual.

For almost every Oracle product I have ever installed, I wind up spending a couple days (normally a full weekend) just trying to get it installed and running successfully. During this long and arduous process, I build out step-by-step runbooks that I will then use for subsequent installations, either for my own Virtual Machines or on client sites. Of course these runbooks get more defined as I do more installations and learn new tricks.

Looks like I’m going to have to build out a new one for OBIEE =)

Anyway, it’s an excellent reporting tool and is ridiculously flexible and would be a CXO’s dream come true for instant snap-shots on their company’s health. It’s allows for delegated administration and multiple levels / types of dashboard reporting so that each department of a corporation or institution can create, manage, and run their own customized reports.

If you are a chief-level individual in your corporation or institution and you can get an *instant* report on everything your company is doing with a push of a button (I’m not exaggerating on this either), you need this. Just have someone come in and demo it for you. When you see it hook up to a couple of your data sources and churn out a couple reports that tell you exactly what your profit margin is, and drill down to the exact products or services that are your loss-leaders / etc, you’ll understand where I’m coming on this.

I’m also kind of curious to see what I can do when I combine OBIEE and OIM with attestation. Since Oracle Identity Manager runs all off an Oracle Database backend, I’m going to connect OBIEE directly to it (with a read-only account of course), and generate some SOX reports or user provisioning status reports. I’m excited to see how bad ass I can make Oracle Identity Manager reporting using Oracle Business Intelligence as the reporting display tool. Once I figure out all the tables and fields to tack onto, I will totally scrap OIM’s reporting completely.

Next week, I will be going down to Redwood City (Oracle HQ) for training on Oracle Entitlements Server. I’m interested to see how I can implement this with conjunction with the rest of the Oracle IDM Suite.

.: Adam