ODTUG Day 1 : BI CAB, BI Summit and a Brass Kaleidoscope

Yesterday was the first day proper of ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2006 for myself, with the BI CAB just after lunch and the BI summit straight afterwards. The day started off with a 4.30am start (ouch) as I'd been in bed since 7.00pm the previous night, it actually wasn't too bad as my "internal clock" is just four hours ahead of everyone else at the moment. During breakfast I bumped into Wilfred van der Deijl (from OraTransplant) followed shortly by Ronan Miles from the UKOUG. Registration was fairly painless with a particularly impressive set of swag, including a speaker gift of a brass kaleidoscope (obviously...)

Mogens is over at the conference as well, and I bumped into him shortly afterwards - he's representing the Oaktable and pointed out that, if you take the kaleidoscope off of it's (oak) plinth and turn the latter upside down, you've got a miniature Oaktable - so there you go.  A bit of guerrilla marketing. Oh and notice the Tetley teabag in the picture - they've got proper teabags (not the usual American "fruit infusion"-style chai teabags) in the refreshment area - which coupled with the fact that everyone seems to be into the (World Cup) football over here at the moment, well it's like a "home from home"...

The rest of the day was a good chance to put faces to names. Some of the people I met up with included Scott Spendolini (thanks for the D.C. tips, Scott), Lucas Jellema, Matt Topper (or at least nodded to across the room), Nicholas Donatone and quite a few other really nice people that keep up with the blog. Concerning the blog, one thing I found amusing was that it appeared to be my Macbook that people were looking forward to seeing, not myself, with people in particular looking to see how I'd got the Oracle software up and running on Parallels. Well ironically, even though I bought the Macbook partly because it's more compact than my old Dell laptop, I've had to bring both over as I haven't fully migrated my demos over yet. When it comes to Open World though, and the UKOUG conference, I should be fully migrated over and just use the Dell as a mobile Linux server.

For me, yesterday was probably the most stressful that the week was going to get, as I was co-presenting with George Lumpkin for the Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 launch at the end of the BI Summit. I had fifteen minutes to talk through our experiences on the beta program, including two mini-case studies and demos. The demos were fairly straightforward - one was of the data profiler and automatic corrections, the other was on creating an SCD2-type dimension - but as the event was so important, I had to make sure they'd both go off without any problems. Right up until about an hour or so before the presentation, little bits kept going wrong such as I'd forgot to "un-deploy" a table before dropping the module, or I'd do a profile live and it'd take about 5 minutes to complete (a long time if you're standing up at the podium) but in the end, it went off fine and I think it went down well with the audience. People always seem to appreciate you doing a demo rather than just reading from slides, I think the trick is to rehearse properly and not get too ambitious.

Other than that, the rest of the day was the BI CAB in the afternoon (again met some really nice people) and the reception in the evening. By this point I was getting pretty bushed and so I called it a day around 9ish, a pretty long day but well worth it. Now - it's 6.30 (again up at 5.00, ouch), time to get some breakfast and then start practicing my XML Publisher talk and demo for my slot at 11.00. XML Publisher always seems to be a product with a lot of interest so hopefully there should be a good audience.

UPDATE: Lucas from Amis has just posted a good summary of the yesterday's BI Keynote. He picks up on a couple of good points raised by the session - the new pricing for OWB and the "embarrassment of riches" that Oracle now have with their various BI suites. A great posting and one you should read.