ODTUG Day 1 : BI CAB, BI Summit and a Brass Kaleidoscope
June 19th, 2006 by Mark Rittman
Yesterday was the first day proper of ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 for myself,
with the BI CAB just after lunch and the BI summit straight afterwards. The day
started off with a 4.30am start (ouch) as I’d been in bed since 7.00pm the
previous night, it actually wasn’t too bad as my "internal clock" is just four
hours ahead of everyone else at the moment. During breakfast I bumped into
Wilfred van der Deijl (from
OraTransplant) followed shortly by Ronan Miles from the UKOUG. Registration was
fairly painless with a particularly impressive set of swag, including a speaker
gift of a brass kaleidoscope (obviously…)
Mogens is over at
the conference as well, and I bumped into him shortly afterwards – he’s
representing the Oaktable and
pointed out that, if you take the kaleidoscope off of it’s (oak) plinth and turn
the latter upside down, you’ve got a miniature Oaktable – so there you go.
A bit of guerrilla marketing. Oh and notice the Tetley teabag in the picture -
they’ve got proper teabags (not the usual American "fruit infusion"-style chai
teabags) in the refreshment area – which coupled with the fact that everyone
seems to be into the (World Cup) football over here at the moment, well it’s
like a "home from home"…
The rest of the day was a good chance to put faces to names.
Some of the people I met up with included
Scott Spendolini (thanks for the
D.C. tips, Scott), Lucas Jellema, Matt Topper (or at least nodded to across the room), Nicholas
Donatone and quite a few other really nice people that keep up with the blog.
Concerning the blog, one thing I found amusing was that it appeared to be
my Macbook that people were looking forward to seeing, not myself, with
people in particular looking to see how I’d got the Oracle software up and
running on Parallels. Well ironically, even though I bought the Macbook partly
because it’s more compact than my old Dell laptop, I’ve had to bring both over
as I haven’t fully migrated my demos over yet. When it comes to Open World
though, and the UKOUG conference, I should be fully migrated over and just use
the Dell as a mobile Linux server.
For me, yesterday was probably the most stressful that the week
was going to get, as I was co-presenting with George Lumpkin for the Oracle
Warehouse Builder 10gR2 launch at the end of the BI Summit. I had fifteen
minutes to talk through our experiences on the beta program, including two
mini-case studies and demos. The demos were fairly straightforward – one was of
the data profiler and automatic corrections, the other was on creating an
SCD2-type dimension – but as the event was so important, I had to make sure
they’d both go off without any problems. Right up until about an hour or so
before the presentation, little bits kept going wrong such as I’d forgot to
"un-deploy" a table before dropping the module, or I’d do a profile live and
it’d take about 5 minutes to complete (a long time if you’re standing up at the
podium) but in the end, it went off fine and I think it went down well with the
audience. People always seem to appreciate you doing a demo rather than just
reading from slides, I think the trick is to rehearse properly and not get too
ambitious.
Other than that, the rest of the day was the BI CAB in the
afternoon (again met some really nice people) and the reception in the evening.
By this point I was getting pretty bushed and so I called it a day around 9ish,
a pretty long day but well worth it. Now – it’s 6.30 (again up at 5.00, ouch),
time to get some breakfast and then start practicing my XML Publisher talk and
demo for my slot at 11.00. XML Publisher always seems to be a product with a lot
of interest so hopefully there should be a good audience.
UPDATE: Lucas from Amis has just posted a good summary of the yesterday’s BI Keynote. He picks up on a couple of good points raised by the session – the new pricing for OWB and the “embarrassment of riches” that Oracle now have with their various BI suites. A great posting and one you should read.
