Wrapping Up In The Baltic States

Well that's the end of my brief trip to the Baltic States, with my seminar in Estonia finished today and one in Lithuania completed earlier this week. The seminar in Estonia was held at Oracle's offices in Tallinn, with ten people attending this time and thirteen in Vilnius. As with Utrecht, most of the delegates were from Oracle partners, looking to evaluate Oracle's new tools and see how they could be used with their customers.

One thing I noticed from speaking to delegates from both events, is that it's much more common in these countries for customers to build their own solutions, manually using scripts and PL/SQL packages, than to buy tools such as Warehouse Builder or even Discoverer. In relative terms, tools such as Warehouse Builder are quite expensive compared to employing staff, and as there are a lot of university educated, technically aware people over here, it's usual practice to code a solution from scratch than to use a tool. One example I was given was an Estonian bank who wrote their own banking system themselves, rather than buy in a packaged solution - using tools or packaged applications is the exception rather than the rule, although I guess as labour costs rise, and the tools become more productive, this will change over time. 

It was a good couple of days though, with a couple of people in the audience who had used Oracle OLAP or were keen to see the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and with everyone wanting to see the new toolset; also, now that this was the third time I'd run the seminar, all the demos went more or less OK (except the Excel integration into BI Suite EE one, that's always tricky) - to the point where I actually need to add some more material to fill in the time. By far the most popular subjects are Discoverer and OWB - I might end up adding some more in on Discoverer integration into OWB (perhaps the derivation of business areas from OWB modules), or perhaps something on Process Flows and deployment, this seems to be the area everyone wants to know about.

After the seminar finished, I had a chance to look around Tallinn Old Town. Even more picturesque than Vilnius, not quite as nice weather but a geniune walled town with lots of old churches, towers, spires and windy old roads. I don't think anyone could fail to be impressed with this sight:

More photos on flickr. I'm on the 7.45am flight from Tallinn to Gatwick tomorrow, so I should get back fairly early and have a chance to spend the day with Scott and Isabella, and my long-suffering wife Janet. Being away for the week puts quite a burden on her (our kids are 4 and 1.5 years old), so it's good that my next few seminars will only take me away for a couple of days each week. I'm trying to avoid doing too much travelling other than the overseas visits, to be honest it's all getting a bit too much at the moment and I need to scale things back a little.  I've actually thrown the towel in on the aggregation techniques paper for the UKOUG conference, looking at my diary for the next month, there's no way I can get it completed properly and have some sort of semblance of a family life; I've also decided to not put a paper in for the IOUG event next year, restricting myself instead to OOW and ODTUG.

Other than that, I'm still mulling over what to do with the website - as I mentioned the other day, a couple of scripts on my site were using up to 80% of the server resources, which means that I've had to turn comments off for the time being. The problem with the site is that the sheer size of it - over 1000 postings at the moment, 250k+ page views per month, plus the rather shortsightedly set-up template that makes it impossible to add new pages, means that it's due for a rather radical overhaul soon. My preference is to archive off the old pages, or at least the best of them, put them together as an "anthology" PDF and make them available for download, then start something new, probably using Wordpress. I'd like to keep the old material - it's an interesting history of Oracle BI&W over the last four years - but I've got that urge at the moment to do something new. The other interesting factor is that I'm just about to sign a contract with a publisher to do a book on Oracle BI Suite, which could well have some influence on what sort of web presence I have going into 2007. We'll have to see what happens over the next few weeks.