Over at the BIWA Summit, Washington
I'm currently sitting in the departures lounge at Washington Dulles, waiting for my flight back to London. Yesterday was the first day of the BIWA Summit, and whilst it's also going on today I've got to go back to the UK, to do a presentation at the OUG Scotland Conference up in Glasgow. Jon's staying on though, and doing his OWB and Agile talk, plus a hands-on workshop on OWB tips and tricks with Jean-Pierre Djicks.
The BIWA SIG is an IOUG special interest group that's been running for around a year, and was started up by a number of customers, partners and Oracle employees who were keen to get together to discuss, primarily the use of the Oracle database for business intelligence and data warehousing, although it also covers the BI tools such as Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Discoverer and so on. The BIWA SIG is a sort of counterpart, complementary to the ODTUG BI&DW that I co-chair with Kent Graziano, and I expect we'll work increasingly together over the next few years. The BIWA board of directors were kind enough to ask me over to do one of the keynote talks, which I put together as a kind of potted history of Oracle's BI tools, where we are now and five key trends I saw coming together over the next twelve to eighteen months. Hopefully the talk went down well.
After the keynote it was time for the breakout sessions, one of which was another one of mine, this time on using Oracle BI Suite EE with Oracle SOA Suite. I ended up having to do a bit of a last-minute rethink of the talk as non-Oracle employees weren't allowed to plug their laptops in to the AV equipment (the event was at an Oracle premises, the Oracle Conference Center in Reston, VA) which meant I couldn't do the demo I'd had planned - luckily I had screenshots and I was able to talk the attendees through most of the process of building a BPEL project, plugging in the BIEE Easy BI web service and building an analytic business process. A bit of a shame about the demo but the talk still went down fairly well, I think.
Here's the two presentations, if you're interested:
Other than that, the event was a good chance to catch up with some of the Stateside Oracle PMs, other consultants and friends that I've made over the past few user conferences, hear the latest on Oracle's BI & data warehousing strategy, and also, wait for it .... to see Tom Kyte's new beard (a blog world exclusive, I believe...)
Apart from the event itself I was able to pop out for drinks and something to eat with some old friends (Matt Topper, Andrew Faulkener, Matt Wertheim) and meet up with a couple of people I've corresponded with but not actually met in real-life - chief amongst them being David Aldridge, a fellow Brit working over in Washington and author of some pretty impressive articles on materialized views and data warehousing. Nice to catch up with you, David.
Other than that, it's back on the plane in an hour or so, then off to Heathrow and then Glasgow for the OUG Scotland conference. I'm delivering the same keynote for the conference BI track, hopefully I'll get a chance to catch up with Doug Burns, Mogens and Thomas Presslie, then it's finally back home in the evening and then up to London on Friday for a day of real work, up at a client site in London.