Open World, BIWA, UKOUG and Oracle Mag

Mark Rittman

Aug 15, 2007 • 4 min read

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog recently, as Jon and I have taken a bit of leave and I've been working on a couple of articles for Oracle. As well as the articles, Jon and I are also due to present at a number of events between now and the end of the year, so whilst it's quiet now there'll be a fair bit of activity over the next few months.

First up, I'm doing a talk on Oracle BI EE and Service-Orientated Architecture, together with a keynote entitled "Oracle BI: Where We Are Now, Where We Are Going" at the Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics Summit in Reston, Virginina in October; Jon is also doing a couple of talks, one of which is a co-presentation with Jean-Pierre Djicks on OWB Tips and Tricks, one of which is on OWB Development Techniques, at the same event. I've actually got to fly back a day early to deliver the same keynote at the OUG Scotland Conference in Glasgow, but Jon is going to say for the extra day and see what goes on.

I've also just got through the acceptance for the same talk on BI & SOA at Oracle Open World, where I'll also be chairing the ODTUG BI&DW SIG Meeting on the Sunday. This trip over to Open World is my first as an Oracle ACE Director, so I'm interested to see what's planned in terms of meetings and briefings, and I'll also be organizing the Annual OOW Bloggers' Get-Together which will be at the Thirsty Bear, just along from the Moscone, probably for the Monday night - more details on this soon. Also, if you're coming over to Open World and you want a central place to stay, I'm proposing we fetch up again at the King George Hotel in Mason Street - ~~I'll be booking my place there soon, if anyone else does that knows me, let me know~~. UPDATE: Actually, I'm staying at the Hilton just around the corner now - the Oracle ACE Director program has kindly agreed to cover our travel & accom. expenses this year but we're all being put up at the same hotel, a block or two down from the George. So I won't be there, but all the other bloggers will be, so still book it if you can (and it's no doubt where we'll all meet up before going out).

Just after Open World is the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition in Birmingham, where I'll be donning my UKOUG BIRT SIG hat and doing a couple of presentations - one on OBIEE and Oracle Fusion Middleware (the OBIEE and SOA one with a bit less detail and some extra content on IdM), an extended masterclass on the last day on Advanced Development Techniques using OBIEE, and a joint presentation with Mike Durran on Discoverer and OBIEE Integration where I'll be going through the Discoverer/BI Publisher integration that should be in production then. Jon's also doing a talk on Oracle Warehouse Builder which I'll get him to talk about soon.

Apart from arranging these presentations, the major thing I've been working on over the past few weeks has been two articles for Oracle; one for Oracle Magazine on OBIEE and Identity Management, another for OTN on OBIEE and Service-Orientated Architecture. The Oracle Mag article should be out in an issue or two and starts with an overview of Oracle Identity Management, then goes on to OBIEE and how it leverages, in particular, Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Single-Sign On. The OTN article looks at some code Oracle are about to put up on OTN that considerably simplifies the process of calling BI Presentation Services via Web Service calls, and goes through a step-by-step process of integrating OBIEE analytics into the Order Bookings SOA Suite demo. Both of the articles are being written as a joint effort by myself and Joel Crisp, who works down in Oracle's development offices in Bristol and who was responsible for both bits of integration, so they should be fairly good and authoritative when they come out.

Beyond that, my main aims over the next few weeks are to apply a few modifications to the BI Seminar material before the next events in the Netherlands and Switzerland, then get to grips with the new OLAP functionality in Oracle 11g and in Essbase. I'm kind of hoping that this is something I'll finally get done when I start flying all around Europe and Australia later in the year, there's nothing better than a new product to get to grips with, a laptop with a couple of spare batteries and a long flight to while away a few hours (except, of course, when you realize you need to download yet another version of the JVM to get things working, and of course you've not got an internet connection anymore) - at least it'll force me to read the installation instructions before I take off.

Until then, here's a few blog postings from the OWB product team, Vlamis Software and Venkatakrishnan J that caught my eye:

Back in a couple of days.

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