Speaking Dates, and Moving to Ubuntu

Like Doug and Alex, I got my acceptance email through from the UKOUG yesterday saying that my two papers had been accepted for the conference in November. I know most of you probably thought I picked the papers in the BI track anyway, but this year I couldn't make it to the paper selection day so I genuinely didn't know until a day or so ago that I'd been accepted.

Anyway, the two papers I'm doing are:

"Analytic Workspaces - A Performance Improvement over Materialized Views"

"Inside Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition"

The first one will be an investigation as to whether analytic workspaces, together with OLAP_TABLE based views over them, can create more effective summaries that regular materialized views - I don't know what the answer is yet, I'll be doing lots of testing between now and then - and this will be in the DBA server tech track, so I should get a fairly knowledgable and testing audience.

The second on is an overview of the new Siebel Analytics-derived BI application server that powers the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition. It'll be a development on what I presented at the recent Reporting Tools event in London, with some extra content around performance tuning, bringing in non-Oracle data and so on.

I also got the confirmation through from Open World 2006 yesterday, saying that the second presentation on BI Server has also been accepted for the User Group Day on the Sunday. This is an 1.5 hour session so I'll be able to do lots of demos, take questions and so on.

Next up, the dates for the BI Masterclass seminar series around Europe are starting to come in. The first four on the list are definately confirmed, the ones from Estonia on are still to be confirmed by the local Oracle office. Anyway, here are the dates and locations so far:

Netherlands - August 29th, 30th
Denmark - October 3rd, 4th
Norway - October 10th, 11th
UK - October 31st, Nov 1st
Estonia - September 26th, 27th
Latvia - September 28th, 29th
Lithuania - September 21st, 22nd
Slovakia - October 17th, 18th
Czech Republic - November 7th, 8th

More details on what's in the seminars can be found in this posting. Hopefully I'll be staying locally between the Lithuanian and Estonian seminars, it'll be a chance to do a bit of sightseeing and take a look around. I've always wanted to visit the Baltic states, should be very interesting.

Finally, like some other people I've been mucking around with Linux distros at home recently, but for me the one I've been looking to get up and running is Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Although I use Centos at work, for the Red Hat compatibility, at home I wanted something where I could install software easily, quickly get support and get some "strength in numbers". With Ubuntu, it's so ubiquitious now as a home linux distro that you can always find something on the net to help if you're having a problem, most software is packaged up for it now, and the Debian underpinnings means that installing software is as easy as "sudo apt-get install foo". It's also got a nice, well polished interface and a "less is more" approach to the initial install.

So far I've got it up and running, got my Netgear Wifi card working ok (courtesy of ndiswrapper), I'm using AmaroK and Rhythmbox for my music (AmaroK is more iTunes-like, but Rhythmbox interfaces better with my iPod and the Serpentine CD burner). Of course, I've also got the (now free) VMWare Server up and running, and brought across my Oracle VMs, and I'm using Nvu as my "frontpage-replacement" for putting blogs together. Another nice touch was using EasyUbuntu, a set of scripts that installs all the usual codecs, fonts, browser plug-ins and so on that you end up hunting around for when you first install a distro.

So now I'm solely living in a Unix-derived world ... OS X Tiger on the laptop, Unbuntu on the PC. I've tried it in the past but it's always fallen down over hardware support and rough edges in the software, but so far (a week later with the PC) things are going ok. I think that this time, it'll work out just fine.