And … Finished

October 24th, 2008 by Mark Rittman

Well, I’ve just realized that for the first time in what must be six months, I’ve not got any course material, presentations, articles or blog posts to write. Today was the last day of our inaugural BI Training Days event, and now that the event has finished and the material has all been delivered, I’m now in the strange position of having a bit of free time in the evening and over the coming weekend.

Around six months ago, I started off by putting an Oracle BI Enterprise Edition course together, followed by an Oracle BI Applications course containing slides, hands-on labs and delegate notes. These typically take several weeks to put together, not least because of the need to create all of the labs and demos. Around this time I also had my presentations for ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Collaborate’08 to put together, followed by sessions for Open World and a two-day data warehousing seminar for Oracle University in Denmark. Just when that died down, I started work on an OBIEE Performance Tuning session for the Training Days event, and with all of these presentations I usually develop and fine-tune the material first by running them as articles on the blog. So now I’m in the funny situation of, having worked flat out on all of this for the past few months, actually having completed it all including the sessions that I’ll be running at the UKOUG Conference in December.

So what am I going to do now? Well, we’ve got the beta for OWB11gR2, and I want to take a closer look at the integration between OWB and ODI, and OWB and OBIEE, though I can’t blog about this as it’s under non-disclosure. Same goes for the forthcoming OBIEE 11g beta, which we should have around the turn of the year and I’ll be using as the initial development area for the forthcoming Oracle Press OBIEE 11g book. I’m also looking to revise the section in my Oracle University Data Warehousing Masterclass around bitmap indexes and bitmap join indexes, and I’m also tempted to try out one of the new column-store databases such as Vertica to see how it’s ETL and query performance compares to the Oracle database.

Most importantly though, I’ll now get a chance to spend some time with the kids, as what with all the recent traveling and presentation writing I’ve hardly spent any quality time with them at all. For now though, it’s time I think for a few cans and a chance to catch up with the football over the weekend. So how have Spurs been doing…?

Comments

  1. Kimmo Says:

    Thanks for the very useful training session! Pity that I was so busy with other matters.

    Anyway, enjoy the freetime. I expect to be in the same situation after next six months – hopefully.

    BR,
    Kimmo

  2. Mike Green Says:

    Thanks again to Mark and all his team for a great 3 days of learning!

    Have a good rest!

  3. Peter Scott Says:

    Well, some of us are finished :-( – I still have a few demos to put together for a customer OBIEE course and that paper for BIWA… and it needs to be in by Friday!!

    It was really good to be at the course last week and from the comments here and those made to me in person I think the delegates enjoyed it too!

    Now I suppose you want me to start thinking about the next one!

  4. Doug Clark Says:

    Mark – many thanks to you for your fantastic & deep incite in the Oracle BI world – it’s rare to find someone who really truly understands how & why things work as they do – rather than just acceping things at their face value. Thanks also to all the great people at Rittman Mead for the excellent & informative sessions over the past few days.

    John – if you fancy organising a BI night at the Faltering Fallback sometime soon, let me know!

  5. Gilles Says:

    Hi Mark,

    You write about owb11gR2 in beta. What are the criteria to enter the beta program?

  6. Mark Rittman Says:

    Hi Kimmo, Mike, Doug

    Thanks for the kind words about the Training Days event, it was very nice to meet you all and provide the training at the event. I’m glad you got a lot of value out of the three days and I hope we can stay in contact going on from here.

    All the best

    Mark

  7. Mark Rittman Says:

    Hi Gilles,

    A the moment the beta is restricted to a few key partners. I think Oracle plan to open it up around December though, so it’d be worth speaking to your local Oracle rep around that time.

    best regards, Mark

  8. Todor Botev Says:

    You see – you started watching them and the Spurs got better by orders of magnitude. :)))

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