Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Well that’s the end of my brief trip to the Baltic States,
with my seminar in Estonia finished today and one in Lithuania
completed earlier this week. The seminar in Estonia was held at
Oracle’s offices in Tallinn, with ten people attending this time and
thirteen in Vilnius. As with Utrecht, most of the delegates were from
Oracle partners, looking to evaluate Oracle’s new tools and see how
they could be used with their customers.

One thing I noticed from speaking to delegates from both
events, is that it’s much more common in these countries for customers
to build their own solutions, manually using scripts and PL/SQL
packages, than to buy tools such as Warehouse Builder or even
Discoverer. In relative terms, tools such as Warehouse Builder are
quite expensive compared to employing staff, and as there are a lot of
university educated, technically aware people over here, it’s usual
practice to code a solution from scratch than to use a tool. One
example I was given was an Estonian bank who wrote their own banking
system themselves, rather than buy in a packaged solution – using tools
or packaged applications is the exception rather than the rule,
although I guess as labour costs rise, and the tools become more
productive, this will change over time. 

It was a good couple of days though, with a couple of people
in the audience who had used Oracle OLAP or were keen to see the new BI
Suite Enterprise Edition, and with everyone wanting to see the new
toolset; also, now that this was the third time I’d run the seminar,
all the demos went more or less OK (except the Excel integration into
BI Suite EE one, that’s always tricky) – to the point where I actually
need to add some more material to fill in the time. By far the most
popular subjects are Discoverer and OWB – I might end up adding some
more in on Discoverer integration into OWB (perhaps the derivation of
business areas from OWB modules), or perhaps something on Process Flows
and deployment, this seems to be the area everyone wants to know about.

After the seminar finished, I had a chance to look around
Tallinn Old Town. Even more picturesque than Vilnius, not quite as nice
weather but a geniune walled town with lots of old churches, towers,
spires and windy old roads. I don’t think anyone could fail to be
impressed with this sight:

More photos on flickr.
I’m on the 7.45am flight from Tallinn to Gatwick tomorrow, so I should
get back fairly early and have a chance to spend the day with Scott and
Isabella, and my long-suffering wife Janet. Being away for the week
puts quite a burden on her (our kids are 4 and 1.5 years old), so it’s
good that my next few seminars will only take me away for a couple of
days each week. I’m trying to avoid doing too much travelling other
than the overseas visits, to be honest it’s all getting a bit too much
at the moment and I need to scale things back a little.  I’ve
actually thrown the towel in on the aggregation techniques paper for
the UKOUG conference, looking at my diary for the next month, there’s
no way I can get it completed properly and have some sort of semblance
of a family life; I’ve also decided to not put a paper in for the IOUG
event next year, restricting myself instead to OOW and ODTUG.

Other than that, I’m still mulling over what to do with the
website – as I mentioned the other day, a couple of scripts on my site
were using up to 80% of the server resources, which means that I’ve had
to turn comments off for the time being. The problem with the site is
that the sheer size of it – over 1000 postings at the moment, 250k+
page views per month, plus the rather shortsightedly set-up template
that makes it impossible to add new pages, means that it’s due for a
rather radical overhaul soon. My preference is to archive off the old
pages, or at least the best of them, put them together as an
“anthology” PDF and make them available for download, then start
something new, probably using Wordpress. I’d like to keep the old
material – it’s an interesting history of Oracle BI&W over the
last four years – but I’ve got that urge at the moment to do something
new. The other interesting factor is that I’m just about to sign a
contract with a publisher to do a book on Oracle BI Suite, which could
well have some influence on what sort of web presence I have going into
2007. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few weeks.

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