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Training and Tutorials

As a project manager with a new OBIEE installation or as a developer with an interest in keeping your skills up to date you may be interested in material to develop an OBIEE training course for developers or in a set of tutorials to provide a basis for understanding OBIEE.

A very good starting point is Oracle’s set of OBE tutorials on OBIEE (you’ll find them here). I’ve used these tutorials as the basis for developing training courses, so I can offer up some pros and cons based on my own impressions, and on the feedback that I’ve received from course participants.

In Favour

Let’s start out on a positive note:

Volume of Training Material

Level of Detail

Volume of Training Material:

The first thing to note about Oracle’s OBE tutorials is the sheer volume of material, around 750 pages in total. Producing even a modest fraction of this material would take a great deal of time and effort. So, it makes good sense to make use of the material that Oracle has provided if at all possible.

Level of Detail:

The second thing to note about these OBE tutorials is the level of detail. For the most part the tutorials describe how to carry out each task on a “blow by blow” basis, with each step illustrated by a screen dump. For a developer trying to learn a new product this “fine-grained” approach greatly increases the speed of uptake.

Against

Now for some of the negatives. Oracle clearly has not taken any professional advice when it comes to developing this tutorial material (and this applies right across the range of its OBE tutorial offerings). There are failings in four key areas:

Conceptual Overview

Extraneous Tasks

Data Set Complexity

Quality Control

Conceptual Overview:

While the tutorials are very good at explaining the “how” of OBIEE, they are generally poor at explaining the “why”. In common with the OBIEE documentation in general, the focus is always on the “trees”, with little attention paid to the “wood” to which these trees belong. Developers who have completed a tutorial will say, “I’ve got that done, but I’m not quite sure what it was that I did”. There is a general lack of a conceptual overview as to the context in which a task is taking place. Developers are left to “intuit” an understanding of OBIEE from the ground-up which is a very inefficient means of imparting knowledge, and increases the learning curve unnecessarily.

Extraneous Tasks:

In demonstrating how to carry out one particular task a tutorial will often introduce extraneous tasks, or supporting subtasks that are over elaborate. This approach “muddies the conceptual waters” and leaves a developer unsure as to what components of the tutorial were essential to carry out the task at hand. The key to a good tutorial is to present the simplest possible instance of the task to be carried out, something that Oracle singularly fails to do.

Data Set Complexity:

A key feature of a good tutorial is that the data sets being used should be simple enough so that a developer can hand check the results of calculations, so that he can confirm that “what he has done” is the same as “what he thinks he was supposed to do”. These OBE tutorials use vast data sets which make cross checking impossible without running elaborate SQL queries independently in SQL*Plus.

One gets the impression that Oracle is treating these tutorials as though they were a sales presentation intended to “wow” a potential purchaser, “See all the wonderful things you can do with this realistic data set”. From the perspective of a sales pitch working with realistic, complex data sets is an excellent idea, but from the perspective of a tutorial we must assume that the sales pitch has already been successful, and that the objective should now be to generate understanding rather than to impress.

Quality Control:

By far the most serious “black mark” in Oracle’s “OBE copybook” is an abysmal lack of quality control. There are hundreds of discrepancies between the tutorial screen dumps and the screens that a developer will see while carrying out these tutorials. Very often screen dumps are taken out of context – they are taken when the tutorial has been developed to a later stage than the step in the tutorial that they are intended to illustrate. While many of these discrepancies are minor, others will cause developers to suspect that they have done something wrong. Often these discrepancies can be overcome by a little guesswork and by trial and error, but sometimes they become “showstoppers” that prevent further progress – short of digesting large volumes of the OBIEE documentation or spending hours trawling the Internet in the hope of finding a post from someone who has encountered the same problem and to which some OBIEE veteran has been kind enough to offer up a solution.

Recommendations

Despite the negatives, the OBE tutorial material is too valuable not to make use of it in some way. In the section “FAQ: OBE Tutorials” I’ve provided explanations and workarounds for some of the most common questions that I’ve been asked by developers working through these tutorials. Workarounds for other problems that are not specific to the tutorials can be found in the section “FAQ: General”. I hope this material will be of some use to prospective OBIEE developers in working around the bugs, so that they can complete the tutorials without wasting too much time.

In addition, however, the tutorials should still be supplemented by some supporting conceptual material to provide context. As the volume of this supporting material can be a great deal smaller than the tutorials, it’s a practical proposition for someone organizing a training course to produce this material and to present it to developers before they start on the tutorials.

A final comment on tutorial timings. The tutorials provide estimates of the times it should take to complete them. These estimates are absolutely risible. As someone new to OBIEE, you’d be hard put to “click” your way through a tutorial in a “zombie-like” manner in the time suggested. If you hope to take away any understanding of what you’ve done, then expect to multiply the supplied timings by a factor of 2-3. By far the best approach is to go through the tutorial quickly to ensure you can navigate your way through the tasks, and then to repeat it more slowly with the object of understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

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