Easter Catch-Up

I've realized that I haven't posted to the blog much recently, so as I've got an evening in I thought I'd write a catch-up posting.

First of all, like a few people I was disappointed to see the EOUC event over in Amsterdam cancelled late last week. I had three presentations to give and I was particularly looking forward to writing the one on Discoverer migration to Oracle BI EE. The cancellation itself got covered on a few news sites and it looks like it was down to low registrations. Although I've lost out on the cost of flights, luckily I'd only prepared one of the presentations, and hadn't yet booked the hotels, so it's not the end of the world, and as a SIG volunteer myself, I know these things sometimes just happen. A shame, although the cancellation has prompted my colleague Jon to sign up for the Miracle Scotland Database Forum instead, so something positive has come out of it.

Apart from the EOUC event, there's already a whole bunch of other conferences and events that I'm going to over the next few months. Apart from the Miracle Event, I'm off to Collaborate'07 at the end of next week, which this year is being held at the Mandalay Beach Hotel in Las Vegas. Due to leaving the flight booking too late, I'm having to go on Virgin Atlantic (shudder) and change in Los Angeles, which means I'm going to have to get up to Heathrow dead early and try and pay for one of the exit seats (£50 each way). If I manage to bag one of those, I'll be ok, otherwise it'll be a nightmare. Apart from that though, it's a week in Las Vegas which isn't bad, and I'm going as part of the UKOUG delegation so I should get to meet some of the IOUG, Quest and OAUG folks as well.

Later on in June is ODTUG Kaleidoscope, but before that is the next UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG on May 25th in London. If any SIG attendees are reading this, and if you've either got a presentation or speaker request, or you'd like to present yourself, drop me a line and I'll try and oblige.

Next, here's a few links and news items that I've bookmarked recently. The first one on the BIWA Summit looks particularly interesting:

• The Oracle BIWA SIG are running an international summit in Reston, Virginia on October 2nd and 3rd and are accepting presentation proposals at [email protected]. I meant to go along to the BIWA SIG meeting at the last Oracle Openworld, but it clashed with the ODTUG BIW SIG meeting (both on at the same time...). What looks interesting about the BIWA SIG is the partipation by senior Oracle PMs and development leads. Looks like a very interesting user group, sounds very similar in fact to our UKOUG BIRT SIG but with a North American focus. Certainly Jon and I will be looking to go over in October if we can get a paper accepted.
• The latest Oracle OLAP Newsletter is available, which includes a link to some Oracle-by-Example exercises on plugging Oracle OLAP in to Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition - something I coverered late last year but not in as much detail - take a look if you want to find out how to 'transparently' boost the performance of your star schemas when using BI EE.
• Nigel Pendse and Carsten Bange recently wrote an article on A Dozen Next Big Things that Didn't Happen In BI. As usual Nigel (and Carsten's) bang on although I suspect one or two within Oracle won't agree with the database-embedded OLAP bit...
• This is one I keep meaning to follow up. Phil Bates from Oracle mentioned something called Continuous Query Language to me at the last Open World, and this posting on the IT-Eye blog has been in my bookmarks to follow-up for a long time. Continuous Query Language is something you use with streams of data, business activity monitoring, situations where there's a continuous stream of data and you want to "dip in" to it from time to time to take a sample. Sounds very interesting from a BI perspective, and something I'll dig in to more when I get a spare day or so.
• Here's an interesting one if you fancy seeing what the other lot are up to. The Microsoft TechNet SQL Server 2005 Virtual Lab is a fairly complete, free set of tutorials on SQL Server 2005 and in particular the BI components. Again, time stops me from taking a look myself, but if you're interested, it looks like a neat resource, a bit like the OBE examples on OTN.
• "So What is Better, ETL or ELT" is a nice round-up of the pros and cons of the two data extraction and integration techniques. Useful to have up your sleeve if called on to justify a data loading approach, although of course bear in mind the author's an advocate for Informatica and Datastage (and of course I'm an advocate for OWB and ODI...)
• "New Features in Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3" is a white paper from Oracle on the new features in the Maui release of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, the one that's currently available for download on OTN.

Finally, thanks to all the readers who sent in comments and advice on content for the next round of Business Intelligence Masterclasses to be run via Oracle University later this year. I've taken the feedback on board and worked out a final agenda now, and it's with Oracle to work out when and if they want to schedule it. Once I get some dates confirmed, I'll post details of them on the Events page of this site, but until then, have a great Easter weekend.