Odds and Ends

A quick round up of a few odds and ends.

I've had a few responses back now about the Open World bloggers' dinner, and it looks now like it won't be just me turning up, or indeed held in a phone box. So far the following people have expressed an interest:

  • Tom Kyte
  • Steve Muench
  • Justin Kestelyn
  • Sergio Leunissen
  • Wilfred van der Deijl
  • Chris Schalk
  • Laurent Schneider
  • Jonas Jacobi

Justin has confirmed that Monday night is the OTN night, which would seem to make Tuesday night the preferred night for people (Wednesday is the "Appreciation Night") - sorry Wilfred. If anyone else is interested (Brian, are you around?) add a comment to this posting or drop me a line at mark@rittman.net.

Another new blog you might find interesting; Jeff Moss is an Independent Oracle BI&W consultant currently working up in the Midlands, who's recently started a blog on Oracle data warehousing and OWB. Jeff's posted a few interesting articles already, on setting the values for SGA_TARGET and PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET for a large data warehouse and fixing OWB after a repository corruption bug, and as he seems to be working with the same technologies and types of projects that I work on, I'm looking forward to reading more from him over time. Good stuff.

ODTUG have put the conference papers from ODTUG Now! 2005 up on their website, which you can download without having to be an ODTUG member (which is good of them). Some of the ones that look particularly interesting include:

I'm hoping to go along to ODTUG 2006! next year, hopefully see if I can get a paper accepted.

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Windows is now available for download from OTN. I've been playing around with the developer preview for the last week or so, and from an OLAP perspective, from what I've seen so far it's faster and doesn't require all the hassle of patching. I'll be looking the DW features in more depth over the next few months, if anyone's found any goodies so far be sure and let me know.

Finally, in case you didn't notice, Apple announced the new iPod this week. The iPod nano is the replacement for the Mini, but uses flash chips rather than a hard disk. And doesn't it look good. Of course, I just happened to buy a Shuffle the other week (nice move on my part) but of course I'm off to San Francisco next week, home of the Apple Store and a still favourable exchange rate - I think you can see what's coming now (and I wonder how much I'll get on eBay for a used Shuffle...?)