Looking Forward to the UKOUG Conference

It seems so soon after Open World, but in a week or so's time the UKOUG annual Conference & Exhibition is running at the ICC, Birmingham. There's going to be quite a big Rittman Mead contingency at the event, with Jon and I joined by Borkur and Peter who've been working with us on projects, and for the first time ever I'll not be on stand duty, and actually able to attend talks and generally take part in the event.

Monday is a particularly busy day for me, as I'll be introducing Nick Whitehead and Frank Buytendijk for the BI keynote, then dashing down to Jonathan Lewis' talk on Playing Russian Roulette with Silver Bullets. After that, I'm taking part in four consecutive sessions:

After that, it'll be a quick shower and then across the ICC bridge to the Pitcher and Piano, where we'll be holding the blogger meetup at 8pm. Should make it an interesting day.

Tuesday is a bit quieter, with no BI sessions that day but some excellent talks by Tom Kyte, Jonathan Lewis and Lilian Hobbs, followed later on by the Community Focus Pubs, basically a free bar based around the various SIGs and this year, with our new BIRT SIG deputy, Mick Bull, handing out the free drinks tickets.

Wednesday is back to the BI track, with presentations by Pete Singleton on Essbase, Borkur on Implementing Access Control with OBIEE, a BI Roundtable in Hall 1 Foyer L5 facilitated by myself, and then a presentation by Lisa Dearnley-Davidson on Best Practices for Implementing OBIEE.

Thursday wraps up the conference, with some good OBIEE presentations by Martin Hammer and Hamish Donaldson, a talk on Enterprise Performance Management by John O'Rourke, and then my final session, an extended finale on some of the whizzy new features in OBIEE including Essbase integration, data modeling, identity management, aggregate persistence, MS Office integration, time-series functions and SOA integration:

If you haven't signed up there's still some places left, and short of going to Open World it's about the best, most informative and best networking Oracle event you can go to, and like all user group events it's big on real-world advice and short on marketing. Hopefully see you all there.