UKOUG, Oaktable and Blogging Confidentiality

Now that I'm back from Open World it's time to start doing all the work to prepare for the UKOUG Conference at the end of October. I'm doing a presentation on Oracle 10gR2 OLAP and Discoverer, plus there's all the company presentations and demos to put together, so there's quite a lot of demo building and paper writing to do over the next few weeks. I'll also be organising a blogger dinner on the Monday night for after the UKOUG Focus Pubs for which I'll post up details shortly.

I've signed up for the Oaktable day on the Sunday before the conference (no Doug, I had to pay for it ;-)) and with a bit of luck I'll be able to go along for the social event afterwards, although I'll need to fit it all in with the SIG Chairs' meeting and the UKOUG drinks as well. Should be an interesting and busy few days.

I made a conscious decision for Open World to stick to the BI&W presentations, as technically speaking that's what my job is about and Open World is where you get to hear new product announcements (often verbal, not necessarily included on the slides) and meet the product managers; the UKOUG Conference is much more about the users, third-party consultancies and independents and (in my opinion at least) is more concerned with technical content than marketing. Certainly I'll be going along to more of the server tech. presentations than I went to at OOW, hopefully get to catch up with a few people and pick up a few tips and techniques. Looking at the agenda, a few that I'm particularly looking forward to are Gary Goodman's "The Performance Dangers of Database Independent Applications", "All About Binding" by Tom Kyte, "Hints and How To Use Them" by Jonathan Lewis, "Performance Data Mining using ADDM & AWR" by Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha and Mogens N rgaard's "Performance from a Different Perspective"

Talking about the Sunday before the conference, Oracle are running an in-depth tutorial for XML Publisher that day as well; I saw the product (and the level of interest) whilst over at Open World and I'd recommend that anyone who's thinking of deploying this product goes up a day early and takes part in the session. Details of the event are here and it's open to all full conference delegates.

Finally, and changing the subject a little bit, one thing I noticed whilst over at Open World was that whilst a lot of people now knew me through the blog, often half-way through the conversation they'd say something like "You're not going to blog this, are you?" sometimes jokingly, but often seriously. It sort of shows that writing a blog can be a double-edged sword; people know of you, but it would be a shame if all they thought you could do was write a blog (i.e. you're not a technical person yourself). More seriously though, I guess people worry that something they might tell you in confidence will end up getting splashed on your homepage tomorrow as a bit of exclusive news.

All I can say to this - and I would imagine this would be the position of all the Oracle bloggers - is that there's a clear distinction between what's said to you in confidence and what goes into the blog; basically, if you know what's being said to you is not for public consumption, you keep it to yourself, in the same way that if you're told something which is obviously confidential you don't then go and tell everyone else that you know. Of course in the end you end up in a situation where you restrict those things that you say in the blog, but that's the same as in life in general and if in the end people don't feel they can trust you, you'll soon find that you're out of the loop anyway - this much obviously be doubly true for those of us who work for Oracle. What it does mean though, even if you end up keeping most things to yourself, is that at least when you pass comment on things or come up with predictions, at least you're doing it based on a better understanding of the true situation, both as Oracle would want you to see it and how others see it as well. I know that even from my trip over to SF last week I've got a much better understanding of where Oracle are going with Fusion and in particular BI&W, and whilst I probably can't comment on it directly, I'm pretty sure of what's going on now and what's likely (and not) to work, and I can make sure I channel my efforts accordingly.

Any comments from other bloggers?