Three Days in the Netherlands

Well that's the first of the BI Seminars over and done with now, and I was pleasantly surprised that, firstly we had around thirty attendees, and secondly, it more or less went off without a hitch.

I must admit I was expecting about a maximum of ten attendees, so thirty was pretty good and about the maximum you could do and still keep it fairly interactive. The audience was a mixture of Oracle employees, partners and customers, with the bias being towards Oracle and partners - no pressure there then - and overall, with a pretty good level of existing experience with Oracle's BI tools. The timing went pretty well - I took my cue from an email conversation I had with Jonathan Lewis who suggested four, one-and-a-half hour sessions each day, and because I was there for two days you could afford to take a bit longer with one and shorten another.

My trusty laptop held out ok; because it's a fairly important session I took a backup USB hard disk with a copy of my Oracle virtual machine, in fact the only problem I had was with my Apple remote and Keynote - twice it completely locked out and I had to hard reset and switch to Powerpoint, which was pretty ironic on a Mac. I think next time around I'll try and get a small laptop bluetooth mouse and use that as a remote, having said that I can't seem to find one anywhere except Apple's Mighty Mouse which is fifty quid and a bit too big - I'll have to have a hunt around the 'net.

Having done the first seminar, things I'd change next time around are to add a bit more content around BI Suite Enterprise Edition, maybe even make it all of the second day - this is definately the area most people were interested in. I'd probably add some more on new features in OWB 10gR2, again this was one of the most popular topics although it might just reflect the particularl make-up of the Dutch audience. Also, given the experience level of the attendees, I'll probably drop the introductory stuff, or at least have it in reserve should I get a more beginner audience. Overall though, I was very pleased with how it went, an excellent audience and hopefully we all got a bit of value out of it.