What’s Coming Up

I've finally got a few days back in the country after my recent travels, and I though it'd be worthwhile to jot down a few notes on what I've been up to and where I'm going to be later on this year.

I've done a fair bit of traveling over the past few weeks, culminating in a three day consulting visit to Doha in Qatar to help out on a data warehousing project. I was staying and working in the new West Bay development (picture below, I was in the Moevenpick Hotel in the centre) which I can only describe as a kind of "factory" turning out skyscrapers.

From my hotel room and the office just around the corner, I could count at least 10 or so skyscrapers being constructed, with a similar scene all around the bay. The rate of growth over there is astonishing, it's certainly an up and coming region and together with Dubai you can imagine this part of the world becoming more and more important over the next ten or twenty years. And the heat - admittedly this was right in the middle of their summer, but it was 100 degrees farenheit at 9am in the morning and by lunchtime you could even feel the heat coming through the double-glazed office windows. A very interesting and eye-opening experience and I'm looking forward to going back there later on in the year.

Looking forward now, I'm going to be working mostly up by Canary Wharf over the next few months, working at an investment bank redeveloping their reporting database and taking advantage of some of the data warehousing features (bitmap indexes, query rewrite, star transformations and so on) in Oracle 10g. Apart from work, I've been asked to provide a keynote at a couple of upcoming conferences; the BIWA Summit in Reston Virginia (along with Tom Kyte and Rich Niemic) and the Scottish OUG Conference in Edinburgh.

These are actually my first keynotes and it's got me thinking about how best to approach this. The best keynotes I've seen recently (Tom's at the UKOUG and Jonathan's at the Miracle event spring to mind) take a slight step back from all the detailed technical stuff and instead consider the wider trends in the industry we work in. They usually feature a bit of humour (that's me out then, or perhaps I'll just put this up on the screen) and set the scene for the rest of the event, and so for these events I'm going to do a quick recap on where we are with Oracle BI & data warehousing, and where I see us going over the next few years.

This is going to be an interesting one. On the one hand, we've got all the new technology that's come out of the Siebel acquisition; Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Real-Time Decisions and so on. Then we've got the Hyperion-derived tools, Essbase, Brio, the financial planning tools, plus interesting products such as Visual Explorer and the Metadata Management tools.

Then of course we've got what's going on in Fusion Middleware, tools such as Web Center, the new Identity Management tools and so on. Finally, and by no means least, we've got the analytics and analysis features in the Oracle Database, including the new super-exciting OLAP Option, which'll let us query and analyze Analytic Workspaces just like Materialized Views. It'll be interesting putting this part of the talk forward, I'll probably put a few "straw men" up on the site and see what people's opinion is.

In between all this, I've got two new articles to finish off; one is on Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Service-Orientated Architecture, where I'll be using a set of "coarse-grained Web Services" to invoke BI EE reports and evaluate conditions; the second is on Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Identity Management, with both articles in fact being collaborations between myself and Joel Crisp, who works in BI EE product development down in Bristol. Oh, and there's the book...

Finally, we've got the next UKOUG BIRT SIG on September 24th in London, and we're particularly looking for someone with knowledge of Essbase (or even better, Essbase and Oracle OLAP) to do a talk to introduce the product to us. If you're interested, or know someone suitable, drop me a line and we'll extend an invite.