Why this blog and why now?

I have been toying with this idea of creating a blog to record my day-to-day experience somewhere so that this can be referred back sometime not only by me but others who are struggling with something. If this blog can help someone technically or functionally, that would be what this was thought of in the first place. I will try to capture my experiences, tips and tricks not just technical but from functional point of view as well. There is a good history written by Mark in his blog on OBI. I have been working from 2005 on multiple versions of SIEBEL Analytics and now OBIEE.

My related experience in the OBI space so far -
1) SIEBEL Analytics 7.7, 7.8
2) Informatica 5.0, 6.4, 7.1
3) OBIEE Platform 10.1.1.2, 10.1.3.3
4) OBIEE Applicatons 7.9.4

I passed Introduction to Oracle 9i after I was out of my first project that was n Lotus Notes, DomDoc, Domino Workflow and etc.. I chose to join an Analytics implementation thinking that my SQL skills would be a decent value add to the project. In the very initial days, it did help to some extent. I was writing PL/SQLs and tuning Informatica mappings for almost 6 months. I was also formally trained in the mean time on Analytics by a colleague in 4 hours. While I was working on tuning of ETLs, I developed lot of interest in the way the query engine works and security works. I have been working on Analytics implementations for long enough to see myself as someone who can talk end-to-end of SIEBEL Analytics implementation.

I am particularly impressed with the way Oracle has been able to integrate SIEBEL Analytics into the Oracle Product family. It gained lot of momentum in last few months especially after the launch of OBIEE 10. I suddenly see many blogs and Google brings many more pages now for any queries on OBI. It is definitely capturing the market and Oracle has been able to convince its customers that this has potential to meet all their future BI needs. I will make sure to blog more frequently and see to it that this gets ranked by GOOGLE. Let us see how it goes!