Monday at Collaborate’06

First of all, just to repeat : If you were looking to come along to my Best Practices for the OLAP Option to Oracle Database 10g talk on Wednesday, it's been moved now to Tuesday, 4.45pm in Cheekwood C. It should be in the agenda changes leaflet in the morning, but if not, now you know.

Anyway, I went along to a few more presentations today as this was the first day proper of talks and seminars. For the second day running I was up at 5.00am, I had a call through from a customer who obviously assumed I was over in the UK, that'll teach me to put my phone on silent when I go to bed although of course I am still officially "on duty" whilst over here. In the end it was one of my nicer customers though, I got up anyway as I had to some work to do for the office. Just afterwards, I got an email through from Debra Lilley who was also over here, so we called each other and went down for breakfast a bit later. I'm feeling pretty tired now (it's 8.00pm), so I've ducked out of dinner tonight and have been in my room instead doing prep for my talks. (stop press - I'm just going to the bar now, so that's that plan finished)

Going back a minute to breakfast - I think I've mentioned this before, but it's always breakfast where you notice the strange sort of food you get when abroad (this of course is from the country that has kippers and black pudding). Over here there's something called "biscuits and gravy sausage" which sounds like the sort of thing you get in pedigree chum, but it's actually a sort of creamy sauce with bits in it. Oh, and there's grits as well. So, out of morbid curiosity, at least one morning this week I'm going to have grits, biscuits and gravy sausage for my breakfast, although hopefully not a morning when I've got a hangover.

On to the talks. The first one I went to was a bit strange, a talk on performance tuning using Oracle Enterprise Manager. What was strange about it was that we didn't see one screenshot of OEM in action or a demo, it was more a talk on how ADDM, AWM and so on worked in the 10g database. The speaker started off by saying "a lot of people present on OEM by showing lots of screenshots, but I won't do that" and then proceed to go through about 20 or so slides that were packed with text and - admittedly good - observations about 10g tuning. Nothing on OEM though. What I think has happened here, is that the speaker has written an excellent paper on tuning using 10g and OEM, and especially where OEM stops and you have to script it yourself, but the presentation is pretty much a summary of the findings of the paper. There were lots of references to "there's more details in the paper" but without the paper to hand, it all sort of missed the point. I've done this myself actually - the OLAP tuning presentation I gave at the Desktop Conference was pretty much a highlights package for the accompanying paper, but without the paper to hand, you just end up skimming over things that people aren't all that familiar with, just keep referring to thing that you then don't properly explain and demonstrate. What I learnt from that, and I think this would have been good advice for the speaker, would be to cut right down the amount of things you cover, but then for the things that are left, demonstrate it, explain it, don't just refer people to the paper. I kept thinking during the talk - "show me, don't just tell me" and I think in the end, the guy probably had an excellent paper, but you've got to do it a bit different for the talk, it's a different type of communication.

I was planning to go to Steven Feuernstein's talk on unit testing, and Matt Topper's talk on Mapviewer, but Debra mentioned to me that the BI&DW SIG were running their meeting at 1pm and so I went to that instead. The SIG meeting consisted of a couple of talks, the first on using Noetix Views for Data Warehousing, the second on EPB. The Noetix one was interesting in that they use the views, over the E-Business Suite tables, to get data out and into a star schema, which was then used to populate an analytic workspace. Very interesting to see other vendors leveraging this technology.

The EPB talk started off promising, in that I thought it might go into a bit of detail about what's coming with EPBv3 but in the end it was mostly about the features in the current version. There was a short bit at the end though that talked about where EPB is going with Fusion - according to the slide, a future version of EPB will have a link through from PeopleSoft's GL, and will have the ability to write-back to Oracle GL. It does seem as if, contrary to rumours, EPB is going to soldier on for at least the time being, although Oracle are never going to discuss the long term plans (integration with, or replacement by, new CPM apps built on the Siebel Analytics platform?) in a public forum. Still, the very fact that they're still standing up and promoting EPB must mean it's got a future in the short to medium term.

Anyway, that's it for now. My first talk is at 4.45pm tomorrow, but to be honest, the fact that it's on the Quest agenda (as opposed to IOUG), coupled with the fact that the date and time has changed AND it's at the end of the day, I don't think I'll get many attendees. Still, if you're here and reading this, and you're interested in making Oracle OLAP work more efficiently, come along and say hello.