UKOUG Conference 2005 : Day 2

Today was the day for Tom Kyte's keynote and from reading his blog just before the presentation, I had an inkling that a few of us last night were in for a bit of a ribbing. Little did I know ...

See also here, here, here and here. It turns out that Tom's keynote was due to be about the new Express edition of Oracle Database 10g, but what with the leak to news.com and the subsequent reporting in the blogosphere, "the cat was out of the bag" and instead of Tom getting to do his first ever product launch, he "tongue in cheek" went through a list of the blogs - starting with Eddie Awad's - that had picked up on the story since Monday. My blog was quoted because of the reference to the Express edition / Oracle Express name mix-up, Howard's was mentioned regarding the licensing issue, Pete's was quoted over his security concerns, and then a load of photos (from my posting last night) were brought up, ending up with the one of mine above. Now of course given that Tom's dug that one out, I wonder if he's forgotten that I took this one from the previous night ....

Apart from Tom's talk (very well done actually, very funny to see us all up there on the screen) there was my talk earlier in the day on Oracle OLAP ...

... Nick Goodman on End-to-End Metadata using OWB "Paris" ...

... Pete Smith on Query Rewrite (who had Jonathan Lewis as the chair, no pressure there...) ...

... and the Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools panel, with Martin Cooper, Nick Goodman, myself, Ian Hayman and Lilian Hobbs.

More photos as before on Flickr. It's been a pretty good week so far, lots of names put to faces and a great get together of the "community"; about the only person who's not here who I guess we'd all like to see would be Howard - maybe he'll be over at some conference in the future.

Tomorrow's the last day; I'm on again at 9.55 with a talk and demo of Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, then I'm chairing Ian Hayman's talk on EPB, then it's back on the stand until the end of the event. It's been great meeting everyone, my best UKOUG ever, hopefully (Doug) next time I'm along I'll not have so much planned and I'll be able to have a late night...