This year, I had the opportunity to present three sessions at the DOAG conference in Nuremberg – one on each conference day. Here a short summary of the sessions and links to the downloads.
Like every year, the DOAG conference in Nuremberg, organized by the German Oracle User Group (DOAG), was an exciting and well organized event. I had the pleasure to listen to many interesting presentations, meet colleagues, friends, customers and other interesting people, and have a lot of interesting chats and discussions. Of course, I could write a few words about each session I attended, but the risk that I forgot somebody to mention would be too high. So, I focus on my own sessions in this blog post.
Analytic Views: Einsatzgebiete im Data Warehouse
(Analytic Views: Use Cases in Data Warehouse)
In this presentation, I explained the concepts of the three new metadata objects Attribute Dimension, Hierarchy and Analytic View in Oracle 12c Release 2 and showed some demos of how they can be used in SQL queries. In data warehouses, they will typically be used in BI tools, in ad-hoc queries or as source for specific ETL jobs. From my point of view, the success (or failure) of this very powerful and flexible database feature depends on the integration with BI tools. As soon as there are easy-to-use import functions available in tools like OBIEE, there is a good chance that Analytic Views will be used in many data warehouse environments. The live demos in the presentation were based on the Oracle Live SQL tutorial Creating an Analytic View for the Sales History (SH) Sample Schema.
Downloads: Presentation (English), Presentation (German), Article (German)
Photo: Twitter (@Buckenhofer)
Data Vault Forum
Since a couple of years, a forum session for the Data Vault community is organized as part of the DOAG conference. Its purpose is to share knowledge and practical experience from different Data Vault projects. Because the community of this data modeling technique is still small in German speaking countries, most of the attendees of this session were the same as last year. But nevertheless we had interesting discussions about the choice of suitable business keys, bi-temporal historization, validities of Links and the performance of data extraction from Data Vault. Actually, it was planned that my Trivadis colleague Peter Welker will chair this forum session, but because he had another appointment at the same time, he asked me to lead the discussion. So, it was not one of “my” sessions, to be honest.
Photo: Twitter (@dani_schnider)
Partitionierungsstrategien im Data Warehouse
(Data Vault Partitioning Strategies)
Loading data into a Data Vault schema is easy, but how to extract information from there in an efficient way? This is a typical challenge in many Data Vault projects, when the number and the size of tables increases during the lifecycle of the data warehouse system. Partitioning tables in Data Vault can help to solve this problem, but what is the best way to do that? In this session, I introduced three different partitioning strategies that can help to solve performance issues in Data Vault. Although I had the idea for this session in a customer project at the beginning of this year, I used an imaginary “project” for my presentation: a craft beer brewery. In addition to the presentation, I published a Trivadis white paper “Data Vault Partitioning Strategies” just before the DOAG conference. It contains the same strategies and examples as the presentation, but explains more details for each partitioning approach.
Downloads: Presentation (English), Presentation (German), Article (German)
Photo: Twitter (@dani_schnider)
Data Warehousing with Oracle 