Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Yesterday was the first day proper for Collaborate’06 with some all-day
education sessions going on over at the main conference venue. I was hoping to
pop into Don Burleson’s Predictive Modelling session but I couldn’t get in in
the end, so I took the opportunity to spend the rest of the day finishing off my
second ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 paper. I had about a day’s work to do on it so
the timing was pretty handy, with the kids and so on you can’t really set aside
a day at home to work on a conference paper.

The papers I’m doing (one on XML Publisher, one on OWB10g Release 2) are due
in on May 5th and I’ll be glad when they’re done, as I’ve stopped myself looking
at any of the Siebel Analytics stuff until they’re both finished. Now they’re in
the can, I can start doing the install for the various Siebel tools and see how
they all fit together. Coming up in June is a presentation I’m doing at the
OUG in Scotland
on the Siebel Analytic Server, and I’ve said I’ll do an article for OTN on the
BI Suite Enterprise Edition when it comes out, so expect a few postings on here
over the next few weeks on how all this new technology fits together.

One thing I did do yesterday was drop in to Michael Armstrong-Smith’s all day
Discoverer 10g session, to take part in the Q&A at the end.

What’s quite interesting with these sorts of sessions, is
hearing what versions of Discoverer most people are on. In the line of work I’m
in (consulting and presales), I’m generally working with the very latest
versions of the tools - in Discoverer’s case, 10.1.2.0.2 - but for most people
who come to these sorts of sessions, they’re usually on versions two or three
steps back from the latest one. The majority of people coming to the course
seemed to be on version 4i as that’s the one bundled with the most commonly used
version of e-Business Suite, with a few on version 3, a few on 9i and very few
on 10g. It makes you think actually that if you’re trying to "help out" in the
Discoverer community, you should be trying to help people get the most out of
old versions, not talk about what’s coming in version 10.3 or 11g, certainly
made me think about doing a presentation along the lines of "making the most out
of Discoverer 4i" as one of my future talks.

Michael and Darlene had a complementary copy of the new

Discoverer 10g book for me as well. It was good seeing my chapter finally up
in print, although seeing the size of the book (1000 pages) it certainly put my
effort into perspective - I spend about four solid weeks of evenings and
weekends doing my chapter, Michael and Darlene must have done twenty times that
amount. In terms of dedication to the cause and the amount of work they’ve put
in, they deserve a lot of thanks from the Discoverer community for doing what
they’ve done. If you’re a Discoverer user and you haven’t got the book yet, I’d
thoroughly recommend it.

Today’s the first proper conference day and I’m hoping to pop
into the following sessions:

• Performance Tuning using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g -
  Mike Messenger

• Six Steps to Unit Testing Happiness - Steven Feuernstein

• Spatially Enabling Your BI Applications - Matt Topper

• Controlled Flights Into Terrain : Learning from Catastrophic
  Database Design Failures - Kevin Loney

I also need to do a bit of prep for my talks later in the week,
and when I get a moment, go over to the Oracle demogrounds and take a look at
the BI Suite Enterprise Edition demo which they’re apparently running (hidden
camera at the ready…)

That’s it for now, back tomorrow.

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