Reading time - Oracle 11g

There you are - I've mentioned it. But I have not downloaded it yet.

One of the things I do with any new release is to read some (no, not all) of the documentation. The new features documentation, of course, is a given and enough of the of the other stuff to have a good idea of what people are talking about. But one volume I always try to keep up on is the Data Warehousing Guide. This time around we get two guides for data warehousing - a revised version of the old guide and a new 2 day + essentials guide to data warehousing. Add in the new guide to Partitioning and VLDBs and the multi-volume document sets on OWB, data mining, and OLAP and there is lot of stuff to read on a wet holiday.

Others have written that they will be presenting at UK OUG in December; I probably will not be. As I suspected when I helped review submissions for BI / DW there was a lot of very good material (or least abstracts) around this year and in my case I could see that my proposal was very similar to at least two other proposed sessions and of course there could not (and should not) be room for all three of us. So, sorry to the Dutchman that offered to chair my session, it won't happen, Piet. But if I do get along to the conference (and that is not a forgone conclusion for reasons I may go into later on this year) I know I will be in for some very interesting talks.