Sunday at Collaborate’06
Yesterday was the first day proper for Collaborate'06 with some all-day education sessions going on over at the main conference venue. I was hoping to pop into Don Burleson's Predictive Modelling session but I couldn't get in in the end, so I took the opportunity to spend the rest of the day finishing off my second ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 paper. I had about a day's work to do on it so the timing was pretty handy, with the kids and so on you can't really set aside a day at home to work on a conference paper.
The papers I'm doing (one on XML Publisher, one on OWB10g Release 2) are due in on May 5th and I'll be glad when they're done, as I've stopped myself looking at any of the Siebel Analytics stuff until they're both finished. Now they're in the can, I can start doing the install for the various Siebel tools and see how they all fit together. Coming up in June is a presentation I'm doing at the OUG in Scotland on the Siebel Analytic Server, and I've said I'll do an article for OTN on the BI Suite Enterprise Edition when it comes out, so expect a few postings on here over the next few weeks on how all this new technology fits together.
One thing I did do yesterday was drop in to Michael Armstrong-Smith's all day Discoverer 10g session, to take part in the Q&A at the end.
What's quite interesting with these sorts of sessions, is hearing what versions of Discoverer most people are on. In the line of work I'm in (consulting and presales), I'm generally working with the very latest versions of the tools - in Discoverer's case, 10.1.2.0.2 - but for most people who come to these sorts of sessions, they're usually on versions two or three steps back from the latest one. The majority of people coming to the course seemed to be on version 4i as that's the one bundled with the most commonly used version of e-Business Suite, with a few on version 3, a few on 9i and very few on 10g. It makes you think actually that if you're trying to "help out" in the Discoverer community, you should be trying to help people get the most out of old versions, not talk about what's coming in version 10.3 or 11g, certainly made me think about doing a presentation along the lines of "making the most out of Discoverer 4i" as one of my future talks.
Michael and Darlene had a complementary copy of the new Discoverer 10g book for me as well. It was good seeing my chapter finally up in print, although seeing the size of the book (1000 pages) it certainly put my effort into perspective - I spend about four solid weeks of evenings and weekends doing my chapter, Michael and Darlene must have done twenty times that amount. In terms of dedication to the cause and the amount of work they've put in, they deserve a lot of thanks from the Discoverer community for doing what they've done. If you're a Discoverer user and you haven't got the book yet, I'd thoroughly recommend it.
Today's the first proper conference day and I'm hoping to pop into the following sessions:
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Performance Tuning using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g - Mike Messenger
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Six Steps to Unit Testing Happiness - Steven Feuernstein
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Spatially Enabling Your BI Applications - Matt Topper
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Controlled Flights Into Terrain : Learning from Catastrophic Database Design Failures - Kevin Loney
I also need to do a bit of prep for my talks later in the week, and when I get a moment, go over to the Oracle demogrounds and take a look at the BI Suite Enterprise Edition demo which they're apparently running (hidden camera at the ready...)
That's it for now, back tomorrow.