OWB, RMOUG and ODTUG in Denver
I'm writing this on the evening following the Rocky Mountains Oracle User Group Training Days Conference in Denver, Colorado, where Stewart Bryson and I delivered our session on OWB11gR2 New Features for DBAs and Developers. We were both pleased with the turnout, managed to deliver five demos across the new code template functionality, and took some good questions from the audience at the end. Thanks to Peggy King and all the others at RMOUG for inviting us over, and here's Stewart, up on stage and ready to go, just before starting our session:
This was our first time at RMOUG, probably the biggest and best regional user group conference in the States and very similar to our UK Oracle User Group conference in terms of speakers, technical coverage and friendliness of the speakers. This year RMOUG took the opportunity to broaden their coverage into areas such as Hyperion, SOA and business intelligence, so it was also good to see people such as Edward Roske here delivering a number of Essbase and Hyperion sessions. We took our usual "OWB11gR2 New Features" presentation and gave it a DBA and database developer angle, and whilst most of the audience were new to OWB hopefully the new ODI-derived functionality still made a bit of sense. If you're interested, the paper and presentation can be downloaded from our articles page.
Now whilst Stewart has now gone back to Atlanta, I've stayed on as I'm taking part in my first ever ODTUG Board Meeting. I got elected to the board late last year and whilst I know most of the board members already (having been the BI&DW SIG co-chair for the last few years), it'll be very interesting to take part and contribute to some of the user group decisions, and to see how we can improve and build on the BI content going forward. Certainly, the BI stream agenda for this year's Kaleidoscope, due to be held in Washington D.C. in June, is about the best BI agenda I've seen for a long time (including lots of sessions by the Oracle PMs responsible for the 11g release), and I'm looking forward to working with the board to increase this coverage in the future. So for me, it's another three days work going into the weekend, then I fly back to the UK on Sunday ready to deliver a course on Tuesday. Busy times, but all good fun.