Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Like Doug
and Alex,
I got my acceptance email through from the UKOUG yesterday saying that
my two papers had been accepted for the conference in November.
I know most of you probably thought I picked the papers in the BI track
anyway, but this year I couldn’t make it to the paper selection day so
I genuinely didn’t know until a day or so ago that I’d been accepted.

Anyway, the two papers I’m doing are:

• “Analytic Workspaces –  A Performance Improvement
  over Materialized Views”

• “Inside Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Suite Enterprise
  Edition”

The first one will be an investigation as to whether analytic
workspaces, together with OLAP_TABLE based views over them, can create
more effective summaries that regular materialized views – I don’t know
what the answer is yet, I’ll be doing lots of testing between now and
then – and this will be in the DBA server tech track, so I should get a
fairly knowledgable and testing audience.

The second on is an overview of the new Siebel
Analytics-derived BI application server that powers the new BI Suite
Enterprise Edition. It’ll be a development on what I presented at the
recent Reporting
Tools event in London, with some extra content around
performance tuning, bringing in non-Oracle data and so on.

I also got the confirmation through from Open World 2006
yesterday, saying that the second presentation on BI Server has also
been accepted for the User Group Day on the Sunday. This is an 1.5 hour
session so I’ll be able to do lots of demos, take questions and so on.

Next up, the dates for the BI Masterclass seminar series
around Europe are starting to come in. The first four on the list are
definately confirmed, the ones from Estonia on are still to be
confirmed by the local Oracle office. Anyway, here are the dates and
locations so far:

• Netherlands – August 29th, 30th
• Denmark – October 3rd, 4th
• Norway – October 10th, 11th
• UK – October 31st, Nov 1st
• Estonia – September 26th, 27th
• Latvia – September 28th, 29th
• Lithuania – September 21st, 22nd
• Slovakia – October 17th, 18th
• Czech Republic – November 7th, 8th

More details on what’s in the seminars can be found in this
posting. Hopefully I’ll be staying locally between the
Lithuanian and Estonian seminars, it’ll be a chance to do a bit of
sightseeing and take a look around. I’ve always wanted to visit the
Baltic states, should be very interesting.

Finally, like some other people I’ve been mucking around with
Linux distros at home recently, but for me the one I’ve been looking to
get up and running is Ubuntu
Dapper Drake. Although I use Centos at work, for the Red Hat
compatibility, at home I wanted something where I could install
software easily, quickly get support and get some “strength in numbers”.
With Ubuntu, it’s so ubiquitious now as a home linux distro that you
can always find something on the net to help if you’re having a
problem, most software is packaged up for it now, and the Debian
underpinnings means that installing software is as easy as “sudo
apt-get install foo”.
It’s also got a nice, well polished interface and a “less is more”
approach to the initial install.

So far I’ve got it up and running, got my Netgear Wifi card
working ok (courtesy of ndiswrapper), I’m using AmaroK and Rhythmbox
for my music (AmaroK is more iTunes-like, but Rhythmbox interfaces
better with my iPod and the Serpentine CD burner). Of course, I’ve also
got the (now free) VMWare
Server up and running, and brought across my Oracle VMs, and
I’m using Nvu as
my “frontpage-replacement” for putting blogs together. Another nice
touch was using EasyUbuntu,
a set of scripts that installs all the usual codecs, fonts, browser
plug-ins and so on that you end up hunting around for when you first
install a distro.

So now I’m solely living in a Unix-derived world … OS X
Tiger on the laptop, Unbuntu on the PC. I’ve tried it in the past but
it’s always fallen down over hardware support and rough edges in the
software, but so far (a week later with the PC) things are going ok. I
think that this time, it’ll work out just fine.

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