ODTUG Day 2 : Keynotes, BI Presentations and the BI SIG

Today started off with the main ODTUG Keynote, this year by Marko Tilli on the new world of SOA-based development and what it means for traditional Forms and Reports developers. From what I can make out, ODTUG's history is in Forms, Developer and Designer and so the move towards more standards-based J2EE development probably the number one interest and issue for most attendees here. Fellow blogger Clemens Utschig came up and did a presentation that included Oracle Business Rules, with another demo being shown afterwards that showed JSF and Ajax working together to put together a pretty groovy end-user interface.

Traditionally Oracle's applications have looked fairly uninspiring and it was interesting to see something put together that had the quality of a desktop application. Unfortunately I had to leave ten minutes or so before the end, and I therefore missed Keith Laker doing a demo of OWB 10gR2 and the Data Profiler, apparently it went down well according to this post on Keith's blog.

Straight after the keynotes was my first presentation, "XML Publisher - What's It All About", which was a walk through of the standalone XML Publisher 5.6.2 Enterprise together with a demo based on the examples in my recent OTN article. I was pleasantly surprised that I ended up with a full room with people standing at the back and with people apparently being turned away, although I think this is more down to people's interest in XML Publisher rather than me being a particularly good speaker.

The presentation and demo went ok, I was a bit nervy at the start but settled down about twenty minutes in, and there was lots of questions and feedback so hopefully it went down well. Toon Koppelaars was the ODTUG Ambassador for the talk which was nice, he's someone I've wanted to meet after reading his "A Database-Centric Approach to J2EE Applicaton Development" a couple of years ago. Anyway, if you want to take a look at the slides and paper you can download them here:

Talking of being a bit of a fan, I finally met up with Steven Feuernstein earlier today, or at least we got to say hello in the lifts. I've mentioned before that I've got a lot of time for Steven, both in terms of his work and the things he stands up for, so it was nice to introduce myself and say hello. I also got to meet a load of people who read the blog - the fact that I took part in the BI keynote the other day means that a lot of people seem to recognise me, and it's really nice when someone says they found something useful on the site or that it's helped them solve a problem or understand some new product.

The rest of the day was taken up by being an ODTUG Ambassador at Dan Vlamis' talk on Real-World Business Intelligence, Vincent Chaznoor's talk on Advanced Dimensional Modelling, and Bert Scalzo's one on data modelling large data warehouses. After the presentations, I went along to an ODTUG BI SIG get-together that Kent Graziano organized, where a few of us got together and talked about the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition and the new packaging and pricing for Oracle Warehouse Builder.

An interesting and useful hour or so, and a good chance to catch up with Kent Graziano and Michael Armstrong-Smith, as well as some new people I haven't met before such as Chad Churchwell from Akimeka (that's not him on the right by the way)

More photos are on Flickr here.

That's it for today. I hit a bit of a brick wall after the last session and ducked out of the various events going on tonight - I need to get my head down and a proper night's sleep. Tomorrow's a bit easier in that I'm not presenting, just "chairing", and the England game is on at 3.00pm which I should be able to watch in the hotel bar. The final bit of prep then is for my talk on Wednesday, I need to read through the paper and slides again and make sure the demos all work, although I think I'll leave that all until tomorrow as I could just do with a bit of a break now.