ODC Appreciation Day: ‘Blank Canvas’ Syndrome

It’s that time of the year again. After 2016 and 2017 the ODC Appreciation Day of 2018 is there. As Tim Hall mentioned in his Summary-post in oktober 2016, ODC Appreciation Day is; “to mobilise the Oracle community to say #ThanksODC for everything the Oracle Developer Community (ODC) has done for the Oracle community over the years.”

Machine Learning Alleviates ‘Blank Canvas’ Syndrome

For my contribution, I would like to refer to a blogpost by Oracle’s Barry Mosterd. Oracle has integrated Machine Learning into their Data Visualization product that explains attributes in context of the other attributes and metrics in the dataset. This way; “Machine Learning is now in the hands of business users, empowering them to filter noise, quickly see the signals and share their findings.”

Thanks again to Tim for organising this event. Looking forward to all the different contributions. Curious what other people have to share on ODC Appreciation Day, check here.

Cheers.

The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Fabric, Q2 2018

I have written about analyst reports in the past. Last week I read about the The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Fabric, Q2 2018. A few months ago I wrote a 5 part series about Big Data Platforms. Apparently platforms like Cloudera an Hortonworks do not run the show according to this analysis report.

“Talend, Denodo Technologies, Oracle, IBM, And Paxata Lead The Pack”

According to Forrester, a Big Data Fabric is an emerging platform which accelerates business insights; “by automating ingestion, curation, discovery, preparation and integration from data silos”. It can support many types of use cases. The top big data fabric use cases Forrester has seen are:

A 360-degree view of the customer
Internet-of-things (IoT) analytics
Real-time & Advanced analytics

Forrester has included the following companies (Cambridge Semantics, Cloudera, Denodo Technologies, Hitachi Vantara, Hortonworks, IBM, Informatica, Oracle, Paxata, Podium Data, SAP, Syncsort, Talend, TIBCO Software, and Trifacta) into the report, based on a few inclusion criteria. The most important ones are the functionality of the offering and (of course) Cloud. The offering must be able to offer the following functionality:

data access
data discovery
data transformation
data integration
data preparation
data security
data governance
data orchestration of data sources

Of course the solution;

“must be able to ingest, process, and curate large amounts of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data stored in Big Data Platforms
“should be able to store metadata/catalogs for data modeling and data access purposes to support a globally distributed data fabric.
“must be able to run on cloud or on-premises platforms.”

“Oracle continues to broaden its big data fabric solution”

Oracle’s key strengths lie in its security & governance capabilities, highly scalable data movement, and transformations that can be done in real-time streaming environments. Forrester says, Oracle’s customers use the Big Data Fabric to support the various use cases, like real-time analytics, customer intelligence, IoT applications, and other Big Data applications and insights.

In a presentation I did at the UKOUG and the nlOUG last year, I uncovered some parts of the Oracle Big Data (Cloud) offering.

The following Oracle products are included in the report:

On Premise

Cloud

Find out what some of the other vendors have to say about the report:

Of course this report is only a view from one analyst. You should check what the Gartners of this world have to say to get a completer picture.

Originally published on LinkedIn.

Creating Plug-in Visualizations for Oracle Data Visualization

Last week I had the privilege to present at the nlOUG Tech Experience 2018. I decided to discuss the Challenges and Pitfalls of Data Visualization.

In one of the slides I showed how we apply some of Stephen Few’s rules to our dashboards. Because we were not completely able to achieve this with out-of-the-box functionality, we decided to use jQuery. In the Oracle (OBIEE) Virtual Box Sample App, we found the inspiration.

One of the attendees asked whether it is a lot of work to add these kind of customizations. After the usual; “It depends”, we discussed a possibility to add custom visualizations to Oracle Data Visualization. If you check the ‘The Oracle Analytics Library’, you see a library of different customised data visualization examples. Besides Oracle, several companies like Peak Indicators and Vlamis.

I have not tried it myself, but here are a few links to get you started.

Challenges and Pitfalls of Data Visualization

The last two days I was present at the 2018 nlOUG Tech Experience at the Rijtuigenloods in Amersfoort. The Dutch Oracle User Group organizes this event with 69 speakers from 19 countries, who give more than 70 sessions on ground-breaking topics in the field of Oracle (related) Technology.

‘The Cloud is Next’ Tech Experience!

The nlOUG has been able to get both Regis Louis (Vice President of Product Management & Strategy, Oracle Cloud Platform, EMEA/APAC) as well as Penny Avril (Vice President of Product Management Oracle Database) on stage. They have brought us up to speed with Oracle’s Cloud Platform strategy and Autonomous Data Management.

In addition, Oracle was present and offered various hands-on labs where visitors have been able to try out the latest Cloud products from Oracle themselves.

There where a lot of inspiring and challenging sessions on applying Oracle technology in practice. These sessions include, Continuous Delivery, Blockchain, Data Guard, Oracle Data Modeler, JSF and ADF, hybrid API strategies, Low-Code, Bots, API Integration Testing, Cloud-based Agile Team Development and many more.

The Analytics track was filled with sessions about Data Visualisation, Kafka, Graph Database, Hybrid Cloud solutions, Chat bots and much more.

The Psychology of Data Visualization

Yours truly had the privilege to take the stand in one of the old train wagons. “A picture says more than a thousand words”. This sounds like a true statement. While it’s true that it is easier to tell a story with visuals than with words, it makes a huge difference which visual you are using for which story. What is the real story behind a visual. Using the wrong visual to tell a certain story can reduce the benefit of a visual to zero. In this presentation we will go through the Challenges & Pitfalls of Data Visualization.

I uploaded my slides on SlideShare.

Of course a big thanks to our sponsors!

I had a great time. As always these conferences ar great place to exchange knowledge and meet with like minded people. I have met some ‘old’ and some new friends. Hopefully I will see you (again) next year at the third anniversary of the nlOUG Tech Experience.

Originally published on LinkedIn.