First Seminar in Melbourne
Well that's the first one done then, and I'm pleased to say I think it went fairly well. The event was held at a training centre just a couple of blocks away from my hotel, just over the river, and I bumped into one of the delegates down by the lifts who recognized me and said hello. In the end, there were thirty five attendees, not a bad turnout, with most of the people living and working in and around Melbourne, which is the financial services, telecoms and automotive centre for Australia.
I know I'm always made to feel welcome at these events, but the audience today I though were particularly nice, particularly friendly and very interested in what's new and up-and-coming in the Oracle BI & DW world. Unlike the events I've run in the UK, not many people over here seem to have made a start with the BIEE tools, but there was a lot of interest and if I've encouraged even just few people to download BIEE, start doing some data modeling and turn out a couple of dashboards, I'd say it's been a worthwhile exercise.
In terms of the demos and sessions, I could probably have gone on for twice the amount of time available, but my feeling was that the architecture, data modeling and dashboard designs went down best, with a good level of interest in the SOA integration stuff and the introduction to Oracle Data Integrator. Most of the demos went off ok, with just a couple of issues - I picked up the wrong WSDL file when putting the SOA demo together, and whilst the BPEL process compiled and deployed OK, it couldn't then talk to the BIEE Web Service. In addition, I got caught out by what must be a new feature in BI Administrator 10.1.3.3 where a second, identically-named logical table source, added to a logical table, when added to the table now replaces the original table source, rather than gets added with a number suffix (something you need to do when demonstrating fragmentation), which confused me at the time, but is easily worked around (when you try it again later, in the hotel room) by renaming the original table source before you add the new one.
Other than that though, things went well although I'm going to try and re-jig the memory allocation for my Parallels virtual machine, running it with 1.5GB of RAM causes too many problems when running multiple copies of Oracle Application Server at the same time - I've now got a beta of the next Parallels release that allows you to bump the memory allocation up to 2GB, I'll have to see if that improves things.
Other than that, I'm off to Sydney tomorrow, flying out around 11am, should arrive around 12.30, and then its off for drinks in the evening with Andy Todd, a fellow Brit and blogger who's now based over here.