Holidays, Seminar News and Forum Spam
I'm on holiday at the moment at the Mark Warner Paleros Village Beach Resort, which is pretty relaxing and is a bit of a cross between a watersports activity centre, a nursery and an all-inclusive holiday resort; in fact everything would be perfect except that the Greek Islands seem to be the only place that's not experiencing a heat-wave - in the UK it's been boiling, over here it's been on-and-off cloudy, sunny, raining and even hailing, although as the kids are kept occupied even the bad weather isn't too much of a problem.
One conscious decision I took was not to bring the laptop (alright - I was told under no uncertain terms I wasn't taking the laptop) and so I've been blissfully unaware of the spammers taking over my forum (again) and posting links to all sorts of viagra and porn sites. Thanks to David Aldridge and Doug Burns for pointing it out (although this of course pales into insignificance compared to having the site itself hi-jacked, as Doug recently experienced). I've had to take the step of re-enabling "Administrator Authentication", which should mean that all new accounts have to be authorised by me, but infact means that new posters have to infact drop me an email to enable their accounts, as the automatic ones don't seem to come through. Oh well, it's better than disabling the board altogether, which is what I thought I'd have to do, but it's still a hassle.
One bit of interesting news that had come through whilst I've been away, is that the seminar series that I'd mentioned previously now looks like it'll be up and running in the late summer. It's going to be through Oracle Education, it'll take place throughout EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) in Oracle's current financial year (June - May), and will be a two day "Oracle Business Intelligence Masterclass" seminar written and presented by myself. All of the marketing and organisation will be done by the local Oracle operation in each country, and as far as I'm aware so far I'll be doing it in Holland, Norway, Denmark and the UK, with others to follow soon. I'm working on the material now, but my plan is to cover:
- Oracle Business Intelligence architecture
- Core ETL using OWB10gR2
- Enterprise ETL and Data Quality using OWB10gR2
- BI Publishing using XML Publisher 5.6.2
- OLAP cube building using 10gR2 and AWM
- OLAP analysis using Discoverer Plus OLAP and XL Addin
- BI Suite Enterprise Edition Enterprise Semantic Layer and Administration
- BI Suite analysis using Answers, Dashboard and Delivers
The format will be presentations by myself, demonstrations, questions and lots of course notes. It's most definately *not* a marketing seminar, there'll be lots of real-life examples, technical information and tips to take home. Anyway, no doubt Oracle Education in each country will send out some information in due course, if you can come along I'd be keen to see you there.
That's it now, off to the beach for the last day of the holiday. Two days back in Brighton, then it's off to ODTUG in Washington.