Day 1 at Collaborate 08

Up early, as I always am and met Mark for a 6:30AM breakfast. Was criticised for eating "Fruit Loops" as that's not the sort of thing that the sane consultant eats...

Then back to the hotel room to get a little work out of the way before crossing the street to the Conference Center to get to the first session. Mark and I tend to go to different talks as there are so many to take in and by splitting up we miss less; that said we both attended one talk which seemed highly relevant to our work and of course I listened to Mark's talk as I wanted to see how a "British" presentation worked with the local audience. In fact Mark's presentation went well (unlike the photos I took of him speaking) with many good questions from the audience

First up for me this morning was Stephen Rokes and his presentation on building a multi-terabyte claims data warehouse. I love this type of presentation;  I always come away from them with a nugget of information that I might well put to use in one of our DW projects. In this case about adding more steps into an ETL process to minimise the number of joins per step and in Stephen's example this gave some significant improvement in his batch run time. Another thing I enjoy is to hear about database performance on other platforms, and a two-node RAC with 18TB of storage is quite an exotic beast for me.

Met Mark to sit in on Vincent Chazhoor's Oracle 11g data warehousing talk. I guess that Mark may write this one up, but is was a real shame that Vincent was so pressed for time.

Readers of my older posts will know that I am not always fully Oracle focused - coming from an IT services company background I was used to customers working with a whole host of technologies - that included both old established names and the newer ideas such as data warehouse appliances. So the two presentations either side of the very filling box lunch fitted well together. Before lunch Chandu Patel presented "When a data warehouse appliance will not work for you" which turned out to be more of a SWOT analysis of the technology compared against the traditional approach and after lunch Oracle's Hermann Baer spoke about Oracle Optimized Warehouses (and the 11g features that help make data warehouses scalable)

I finished my day with a session on Oracle OLAP presented by Chris Claterbos; I have been making a point of getting to as many OLAP presentations as possible at recent events - my talk this coming Thursday is on Cube-Organized Materialized Views - and to see that my findings are similar to those found in other work is very reassuring.

I really enjoyed today, let's see what tomorrow brings!