OSX Parallels, ODTUG and Forthcoming Seminars

Mark Rittman -

I've had the Mac now for about a week and I'm starting to get the hang of it. Thanks to all those people who replied to my earlier posting; I've worked out how right-clicking works now (why don't they just include a second button on the trackpad? It's thousands of times easier than ctrl-clicking or doing the two-fingers-on-the-trackpad routine. I think someone's being a bit dogmatic here...) and how to get the dock working better, but best of all, I've got all my Oracle software up and running using a virtual machine.

I've been using something called Parallels, which is functionally very similar to VMWare in that you create a virtual machine, install your OS and then some "tools", and you can then run a copy of Windows, or Linux, or BSD or whatever from within OS X. So far the performance is excellent, much better than on my old single core 2Ghz Dell laptop, which is probably down to the extra processor but of course could be down to any number of things - Parallels could be faster than VMWare, OS X could be a faster host OS than Windows, or whatever. Anyway, I've got 2GB of memory on the Macbook now, it's a Core Duo 2Ghz CPU and it's running pretty well actually. I've installed Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition (including Actuate), XML Publisher 5.6.2 and BI Tools 10g, and the performance is pretty good, about as fast as my old laptop running native. Once BI Suite Enterprise Edition is ported to Linux, I'll move it all over to Centos, but until then, it's Windows I'm afraid.

I'm off on holiday on Wednesday, so I've been sorting things out for my trip to ODTUG later this month. I've signed up as an ODTUG ambassador, and put my name down for the talks I planned to attend anyway. Here's my agenda for the week, and if all turns out as planned I should be introducing each of these presentations (the ones in bold are the talks I'm doing)

  • Mon 11.00 - 12.00 Oracle XML Publisher —What's It All About? (Mark Rittman)
  • Tue 1.30 - 2.30 Oracle Business Intelligence in the Real World: Case Studies from the Trenches (Dan Vlamis)
  • Mon 2.45 - 3.45 Successful Dimensional Modeling of Very Large Data Warehouses (Bert Scalzo)
  • Mon 4.00 - 5.00 Advanced Dimensional Modeling (Vincent Chazhoor)
     
  • Tue 8.30 - 9.30 Why Should You Consider Warehouse Builder for Data Modeling? (Jean-Pierre Dijcks)
  • Tue 9.45 - 10.45 Siebel Business Analytics Platform Overview (Matt Bedin)
  • Tue 11.00 - 12.00 Reporting Against the Warehouse Builder Repository (Keith Laker)
  • Tue 1.30 - 2.30 Business Intelligence / DW Panel (I'm not chairing this BTW)
  • Tue 4.00 - 5.00 Climb to the OLAP Summit with Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 (Keith Laker)
     
  • Wed 9.45 - 10.45 Inside the Oracle 10g Cost-Based SQL Optimizer (Donald Burleson)
  • Wed 11.00 - 12.00 The Oracle 10g Release 2 Rules Manager and Expression Filter—Events for Business Rules (Andre Beland)
  • Wed 1.00 - 2.00 Building an Effective Data Warehousing Architecture Using OWB 10gR2 (Mark Rittman)
  • Wed 2.15 - 3.15 Data Warehouse ETL For Developers (Michael Ault)

The Tuesday 4.00pm session with Keith Laker is a bit of a dilemma - England are playing at 3.00pm local time, although I'm starting to think that I'm not going to find anywhere to watch it anyway. Given that Keith's a fellow Brit, I'll have to bring my laptop and tune in to Radio 5 Live and keep us both informed of the score during the talk...

Finally - and this should be interesting. I'm sorting out a seminar series at the moment with a large training organisation, where I'll be going around Europe, Middle East and Africa doing a two day business intelligence "masterclass" on the new BI tools - OWB "Paris", BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition, and XML Publisher. Once things are signed up I'll post more details, but it sounds very interesting and apparently the first one's going to be in Holland in August. More news when it's available...