Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I mentioned a month or so ago that I was due to present at the
Collaborate’06 event over in
Nashville, Tennessee next
month, and last week I finally got a confirmation through (of sorts) from the
event organisers that my presentations had been accepted. I’m one of a number of
customer and partner speakers that Oracle are sponsoring and the two
presentations I’m doing are actually part of the

Quest International Education Breakout sessions, so if you search for me on
the IOUG site and you can’t find my details, that’s why.

The first presentation I’m doing is an updated version of the Oracle OLAP
Best Practices session that I gave at the Desktop Virtual Conference 2006 and is
scheduled for Wednesday, 26th April at 3.15pm in the Cheekwood C room; the
second presentation is scheduled for the prestigious "last slot of the last day"
slot at 11.30am on Thursday, 27th April in the Belle Mead AB room, and is a
joint presentation with one of our customers on an Oracle Database 10g, Oracle
OLAP, BI Beans and Oracle Portal-based application we’ve build with them called
"QMortgage". Joking apart about the slot (thanks guys) this will actually be a
very interesting presentation if you’re either interested in the idea of
packaged analytics applications, or how Oracle OLAP and BI Beans can be used to
build a low-cost, powerful analytics platform. We’ll be talking about the
business background to the application, why Oracle’s BI toolset was chosen for
the application, and how we took all of the components, extended them as
necessary, and turned out a packaged, "shrink-wrapped" Oracle BI application.
I’ll post more details as we get nearer to the date, but if you’re interested in
some of the subject matter in this blog, pop along and hopefully you’ll find it
relevant.

Incidentally, if you’re a fellow speaker at the event, I’d be grateful if you
could drop me a line and let me know what the requirements are regarding
deadlines, requirements for accompanying papers and so on. As I’ve come in late
and on an Oracle ticket, I seem to have missed out on all the standard
information the organisers send to speakers, and despite sending lots of emails
to queststaff@queststaff.org
nobody’s ever replied to me or told me what I have to do. I guess at the worst
case I just turn up with slides and a demo but it’d be nice to know what the
actual procedure is. If anyone knows any more (or if an organiser is reading
this), can someone tell me what the speaker procedure is?

Also, if you’re a fellow blogger or if I know you, and you’re going to
Collaborate’06, drop me a line as I’ll try and organise a meet up. As it’s all
based around a hotel (The
Gaylord Opryland Hotel,
obviously doesn’t mean quite the same thing over there…) it’ll probably be
drinks in the bar, but if you’re going to be around drop me a line and we can
meet up one evening.

Finally, I’m particularly looking forward to going to this event, which is
the first joint conference that has been held between the IOUG, OAUG and Quest
International, the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards user group. I’m a paid up member of
the IOUG,
ODTUG and of course the UKOUG and going
to user group events is probably the part of my job I most enjoy. Whilst Apps
isn’t something I particularly get involved in, from looking at the

conference grid schedule there’s a whole bunch of speakers that you never
get at UKOUG events including Don Burleson speaking on predictive modelling,
Oracle Application Server tuning, and the future of Oracle in the 21st century,
Mike Ault on common performance errors in Oracle databases,  Craig
Shallamar on essential performance forecasting, Arup Nanda on database security,
Steven Feuerstein on unit testing and Cary Millsap on accountability for system
performance. From looking at the IOUG line-up it’s clear that this event is the
equivalent of the UKOUG conference we have over in Birmingham each year, with
pretty much a mutually exclusive set of speakers – from looking through the
speaker list I can only see Wolfgang Breitling, Tim Gorman and Paul Dorsey who
are regular speakers both sides of the pond. It’ll also be good to catch up with
Dan Vlamis and Chris Claterbos from Vlamis, who I guess are my equivalents over
in the States, and Michael Armstrong-Smith, who I think is doing a full-day
education session over the preceding weekend, and is a fellow Brit so at least
someone over there will know where to get a decent cup of tea.

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