SunGard Summit 2008

I am delighted to be able to let you know that Armstrong-Smith Consulting will be attending the SunGard Summit 2008 (link) conference in Anaheim, April 13 to 16. At the conference we will once again have a 10 x 10 booth and will be able to discuss our Oracle Discoverer training and consultancy offerings with attendees.

Last year, we had over 500 people attend our booth. During the conference we also gave away an iPod and 4 copies of our Oracle Discoverer 10g Handbook (link).

For those of you who don't know, SunGard Higher Education (link) provides software, systems implementation and integration, strategic consulting, and technology management services to colleges and universities. Here at Armstrong-Smith Consulting we are delighted to have partnered with SunGard and to be a part of the SunGard Higher Education Collaborative.

Our partnership allows us to provide report building, training and other consultancy services for Oracle Discoverer on the SunGard ODS and EDW products. We can even help institutions comply with federal and state regulations to ensure that their private data is secured.

• Are you a SunGard Higher Education customer?
• Do you have the SunGard ODS or EDW?
• Do you have Oracle Discoverer?

If you answered yes to the above three questions you need to speak with either your SunGard Higher Education support representative or email us at info@learndiscoverer.com and find out how we can help you make the most of your investment.

Would you like to see your BI articles on the web?

Have you written any interesting articles on Discoverer, Oracle Warehouse Builder and / or just business intelligence in general but have no means of getting this information out into the BI community? If so you will be among hundreds of like-minded people who would love to see their articles in print. This is where I would like to come to your aid. I am offering to make available your articles and papers from my web site and via my blog totally free of charge.

To have documents posted you would need to send them to me, along with any commentary that you would like to see displayed. If you have enough material I could even create a special page just for you. I do however reserve the right to look through any documents you send me before publishing as I would not want anything that is offensive or a copy of someone elses work on my site. If I see anything that is of concern I would raise it with you and I will of course give you full credit for anything you send me that is published.

The first documents have already been submitted (link) and I would like to say thank you to Jayashree Satapathy and Krishna Mohan from Hyderabad, India for sending me two Discoverer Power Point presentations. The two papers that have been submitted are:

• Discoverer 10g Administration - 84 slides that focus on administering Discoverer in an E-Business Suite environment. You don't see many papers on this topic and you may well find something you didn't already know
  
• Discoverer 10g Desktop - 80 slides that focus on the Discoverer Desktop, a tool that does not get a lot of press these days. Towards the end of this paper you will find some very interesting slides that walk you through running a Discoverer worksheet from within E-Business Suite

Do you have a BI paper that you would like to see published? It doesn't have to be on Discoverer, you can pick any BI subject you like. This is a great opportunity to spread the wealth of information that is available about Discoverer, Warehouse Builder or just BI in general. Think it over and if you would like to get going feel free to send me (link) a document or two.

New white paper on Discoverer sizing

Following years of research at dozens of clients I came to the conclusion that the sizing matrix published by Oracle is somewhat inaccurate, particularly in the amount of memory required to run Discoverer Plus in a real-world environment. For the past couple of years I have been recommending my clients not to follow the Oracle published matrix and have been advising them independently. Recent follow-ups have confirmed that those clients who have followed my advice see very little issues with their Discoverer servers needing additional RAM or CPU.

I have therefore decided to publish my findings as recommendations in a white paper. That white paper is now available for download (link) from my main web site.

If you have any experience with sizing of Discoverer that you would be willing to share please let me know. We can all better help the community at large if we share information.