Getting Ready for Collaborate’06
I mentioned a month or so ago that I was due to present at the Collaborate'06 event over in Nashville, Tennessee next month, and last week I finally got a confirmation through (of sorts) from the event organisers that my presentations had been accepted. I'm one of a number of customer and partner speakers that Oracle are sponsoring and the two presentations I'm doing are actually part of the Quest International Education Breakout sessions, so if you search for me on the IOUG site and you can't find my details, that's why.
The first presentation I'm doing is an updated version of the Oracle OLAP Best Practices session that I gave at the Desktop Virtual Conference 2006 and is scheduled for Wednesday, 26th April at 3.15pm in the Cheekwood C room; the second presentation is scheduled for the prestigious "last slot of the last day" slot at 11.30am on Thursday, 27th April in the Belle Mead AB room, and is a joint presentation with one of our customers on an Oracle Database 10g, Oracle OLAP, BI Beans and Oracle Portal-based application we've build with them called "QMortgage". Joking apart about the slot (thanks guys) this will actually be a very interesting presentation if you're either interested in the idea of packaged analytics applications, or how Oracle OLAP and BI Beans can be used to build a low-cost, powerful analytics platform. We'll be talking about the business background to the application, why Oracle's BI toolset was chosen for the application, and how we took all of the components, extended them as necessary, and turned out a packaged, "shrink-wrapped" Oracle BI application. I'll post more details as we get nearer to the date, but if you're interested in some of the subject matter in this blog, pop along and hopefully you'll find it relevant.
Incidentally, if you're a fellow speaker at the event, I'd be grateful if you could drop me a line and let me know what the requirements are regarding deadlines, requirements for accompanying papers and so on. As I've come in late and on an Oracle ticket, I seem to have missed out on all the standard information the organisers send to speakers, and despite sending lots of emails to [email protected] nobody's ever replied to me or told me what I have to do. I guess at the worst case I just turn up with slides and a demo but it'd be nice to know what the actual procedure is. If anyone knows any more (or if an organiser is reading this), can someone tell me what the speaker procedure is?
Also, if you're a fellow blogger or if I know you, and you're going to Collaborate'06, drop me a line as I'll try and organise a meet up. As it's all based around a hotel (The Gaylord Opryland Hotel, obviously doesn't mean quite the same thing over there...) it'll probably be drinks in the bar, but if you're going to be around drop me a line and we can meet up one evening.
Finally, I'm particularly looking forward to going to this event, which is the first joint conference that has been held between the IOUG, OAUG and Quest International, the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards user group. I'm a paid up member of the IOUG, ODTUG and of course the UKOUG and going to user group events is probably the part of my job I most enjoy. Whilst Apps isn't something I particularly get involved in, from looking at the conference grid schedule there's a whole bunch of speakers that you never get at UKOUG events including Don Burleson speaking on predictive modelling, Oracle Application Server tuning, and the future of Oracle in the 21st century, Mike Ault on common performance errors in Oracle databases, Craig Shallamar on essential performance forecasting, Arup Nanda on database security, Steven Feuerstein on unit testing and Cary Millsap on accountability for system performance. From looking at the IOUG line-up it's clear that this event is the equivalent of the UKOUG conference we have over in Birmingham each year, with pretty much a mutually exclusive set of speakers - from looking through the speaker list I can only see Wolfgang Breitling, Tim Gorman and Paul Dorsey who are regular speakers both sides of the pond. It'll also be good to catch up with Dan Vlamis and Chris Claterbos from Vlamis, who I guess are my equivalents over in the States, and Michael Armstrong-Smith, who I think is doing a full-day education session over the preceding weekend, and is a fellow Brit so at least someone over there will know where to get a decent cup of tea.