A Good Day, and News on the UK BI Seminar

Thanks to all the people who had kind words to say yesterday when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps; it was my son's first day at school yesterday but instead I was working onsite with a client on a new data mart project. I'm usually a pretty positive person and it doesn't usually take me much time to get wrapped up in a project, after a chat with Scott and a good night's sleep it's all much less of an issue.

Today was a pretty productive day - it's an interesting project and a good customer to work for. Today we were working on pulling a scope and development plan together for a data mart, the value in terms of replacing manual work with an ETL tool, and delivering a new set of customer MI reports that'll set them apart from their customers is pretty compelling.

I was also amused to get an advert for my BI Seminar in my email from Oracle University - I knew the UK event was coming up soon but I wasn't expecting a picture with my shifty look and set of eyebrows on it - I've already had a humourous email through from Miss Dobson and I'm sure there'll be more to come. 

Apart from that I'm finally making some progress with my aggregation testing - I've spent the last two days trying to get the imported tables into the separate tablespaces I've created for each test schema, the key in the end was revoking the RESOURCE priviledge, setting quota to 0 for each new user on the EXAMPLE tablespace and making sure the new tablespaces are set as the user's default tablespace - thanks Galen Boyer - and I've just finished off the final version of my Oracle Business Intelligence Suite book which has now gone off to a potential publisher.

One thing I did miss out on today was the Scottish OUG event in Glasgow. Jonathan, Mogens, Doug, Anjo, Jason Pepper and Peter Robson were all on the agenda, arch ligger Jeff Moss was up there as well, plus my colleague Sonia was doing a presentation on BI Suite Enterprise Edition - pretty impressive as she had about one week to learn the product, get the demo up and running and put a presentation together. I really must get myself up to Scotland for the next event if only to get Doug Burns to buy me a pint, I sort-of promised to do a presentation on OWB "Paris" a while ago and I'll try and follow through on that soon.

Finally, as a treat I took myself along to one of Newbury's finest curry houses tonight and treated myself to a slap-up butterfly prawn, nan bread, lamb pathia and pilau rice, now I'm back I'm going to have a rest for once and get on with the rest of the aggregation testing tomorrow. A couple of people - David Aldridge, Jack Raitto and Peter Scott - have made some good suggestions on putting the materialized views together, I'll couple these up with what I planned anyway and see how things get on. Back in a couple of days.