Reflecting on the BI Seminars So Far…

I'm sitting in the front row of my Austrian Airlines flight back from Vienna, lording it in business class following my seminar over in Zagreb. I don't normally get to fly business class, but I must say it is nice to have a bit of legroom and a decent meal an a non-plastic knife and fork. Now although I'd still consider myself a socialist, I am a bit partial to business class and posh hotels - which, I must say, in a proper socialist world everyone would be entitled to - but it's partial compensation, I suppose, for the fact I won't get home tonight until after 1am, and I'm off to London again in the morning for a meeting with a client.

The seminar in Zagreb rounds off my travels now until the New Year, with things starting off again towards the middle of January with trips planned to Austria, Slovenia, Denmark and Norway. Looking back, it's certainly been an interesting few months, with visits to The Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, two in the UK, Slovakia and now Croatia, and with trips to San Francisco for Open World and Birmingham for the UKOUG event during the middle. Although it's all been organized through Oracle University, the experiences have all been a little bit different; class sizes have ranged between ten and fifty, some events have been in hotels and some at Oracle's training centres, some events have had mostly beginner attendees whilst at some we've had an audience of very experienced BI&W developers. I've been interviewed by local journalists (and photos taken, if I'd known I'd have trimmed the eyebrows), climbed up mountains to find a castle, several times been almost run over by tram and even got to visit the Miracle headquarters and seen Mogens Norgaard's budgies, but where-ever I've gone the reception from the Oracle teams and the attendees has always been fantastic and welcoming, and it's been great to show off all the new Oracle BI products to a bunch of really interested people. I've taken quite a few photos over the three months and you can see them in a flickr set here.

The seminar itself has evolved quite a bit over the three months. Starting off in Utrecht, I had a list of about fifteen demos, all the steps written down on sheets of paper, and a failure rate of about one in three, with me forgetting steps, going "off-piste", and just not being familiar with the environment I was working with, even though I built all of the demos. Now, with Zagreb being about the tenth time I've run the event, all the demos this time - for the first time - went perfectly, I must admit I've pretty much worked all the quirks out with OWB, XMLP, OLAP and BI EE, and I've added in a bunch of new material that either makes the seminar flow better, or adds in new interesting things that I've worked out since taking the seminar on the road. It's certainly a change to take the same material and work out all the quirks over a number of months, refine it following feedback and really feel comfortable with the material, quite a change from my usual presentations where it's the one and only time I'll deliver the material.

Once of the best things about doing the seminars is picking up some of the stories and tips from the people who've come along. For example, at the first seminar in Utrecht I met up with Bas Roelands from Oracle Netherlands, who showed me a bunch of new BI EE techniques that I then incorporated into all of the remaining seminars; in Denmark one of the guy from Miracle showed me how to persist OWB connection passwords from session to session, in Tallinn and Reading I met some people who work closely with Oracle OLAP and shared some examples of how they use the product in real-life, elsewhere I've discussed techniques around Warehouse Builder, the BI Server and Discoverer for OLAP. Over the months, I've added in content on SQL access to Analytic Workspaces, guided analytics for BI dashboards, BI, SOA and BPEL, I've got the Excel Add-in for XML Publisher to work (the trick is to disable the OLAP Spreadsheet Add-in...), and due probably in part to the publicity around the seminars, secured myself a book deal with Oracle Press.

On the downside, well I think I've just about blown it with the wife and kids in terms of doing so much traveling (Janet's been very understanding, but looking after two young kids is a lot harder than ordering room service in a hotel), and going into 2007 I'm probably going to try and rein it in a bit and do a bit more work locally in London and the South-East. I've got to knuckle-down now and get the book written, and I want to try and do some consulting work next year around BI Suite Enterprise Edition to try and build on the theoretical stuff so far. Although the traveling has been fun, I've had some dodgy meals (the closer you get to Russia, the worse the food in restaurants), a couple of rubbish hotels (never go in an Ibis, or any other budget French hotel if you get a choice), and more than a few nights spent traveling and getting only a few hours sleep, but I've equally stayed in some fantastic hotels (Oslo, Tallinn, Vilnius) and probably put on a few pounds. Overall though, I wouldn't change it for the world, and it's certainly been a privilege getting to visit all these countries and to meet up with so many switched-on and enthusiastic people.