Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Today started off with the main ODTUG Keynote, this year by Marko Tilli on
the new world of SOA-based development and what it means for traditional Forms
and Reports developers. From what I can make out, ODTUG’s history is in Forms,
Developer and Designer and so the move towards more standards-based J2EE
development probably the number one interest and issue for most attendees here.
Fellow blogger
Clemens
Utschig came up and did a presentation that included

Oracle Business Rules, with another demo being shown afterwards that showed
JSF and Ajax working together to put together a pretty groovy end-user
interface.

Traditionally Oracle’s applications have looked fairly uninspiring and it was
interesting to see something put together that had the quality of a desktop
application. Unfortunately I had to leave ten minutes or so before the end, and
I therefore missed Keith Laker doing a demo of OWB 10gR2 and the Data Profiler,
apparently it went down well according to this post on Keith’s blog.

Straight after the keynotes was my first presentation, "XML Publisher -
What’s It All About", which was a walk through of the standalone XML Publisher
5.6.2 Enterprise together with a demo based on the examples in my recent OTN
article. I was pleasantly surprised that I ended up with a full room with people
standing at the back and with people apparently being turned away, although I
think this is more down to people’s interest in XML Publisher rather than me
being a particularly good speaker.

The presentation and demo went ok, I was a bit nervy at the start but settled
down about twenty minutes in, and there was lots of questions and feedback so
hopefully it went down well.
Toon Koppelaars was
the ODTUG Ambassador for the talk which was nice, he’s someone I’ve wanted to
meet after reading his
"A
Database-Centric Approach to J2EE Applicaton Development" a couple of years
ago. Anyway, if you want to take a look at the slides and paper you can download
them here:

• 
  "XML Publisher – What’s It All About" (paper)
• 
  "XML Publisher – What’s It All About" (powerpoint slides)

Talking of being a bit of a fan, I finally met up with Steven Feuernstein
earlier today, or at least we got to say hello in the lifts. I’ve mentioned
before that I’ve got a lot of time for Steven, both in terms of his work and the
things he stands up for, so it was nice to introduce myself and say hello. I
also got to meet a load of people who read the blog – the fact that I took part
in the BI keynote the other day means that a lot of people seem to recognise me,
and it’s really nice when someone says they found something useful on the site
or that it’s helped them solve a problem or understand some new product.

The rest of the day was taken up by being an ODTUG Ambassador at

Dan Vlamis’ talk on Real-World Business Intelligence,

Vincent Chaznoor’s talk on Advanced Dimensional Modelling, and Bert Scalzo’s
one on data modelling large data warehouses. After the presentations, I went
along to an ODTUG BI SIG get-together that Kent Graziano organized, where a few
of us got together and talked about the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition and the
new packaging and pricing for Oracle Warehouse Builder.

An interesting and useful hour or so, and a good chance to catch
up with Kent Graziano and Michael
Armstrong-Smith, as well as some new people I haven’t met before such as
Chad Churchwell from Akimeka (that’s not him on the right by the way)

More photos are on Flickr
here.

That’s it for today. I hit a bit of a brick wall after the last
session and ducked out of the various events going on tonight – I need to get my
head down and a proper night’s sleep. Tomorrow’s a bit easier in that I’m not
presenting, just "chairing", and the England game is on at 3.00pm which I should
be able to watch in the hotel bar. The final bit of prep then is for my talk on
Wednesday, I need to read through the paper and slides again and make sure the
demos all work, although I think I’ll leave that all until tomorrow as I could
just do with a bit of a break now.

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