Looking Forward to the BIWA Summit

I've been "heads-down" working up in Canary Wharf over the last month (with Adrian Billington actually, which has been a pleasure) and in my spare time putting seminar and course material together, but one thing that's kept me going is the thought of the BIWA Summit event that's running next month in Reston, Virginia. It's a BI & data warehousing conference organized by the Business Intelligence, Analytics and Warehousing SIG (part of the IOUG) and the line-up of speakers is a who's who in the Oracle BI&W world (myself excepted, of course...)

Looking at the agenda for the two days, there's keynotes by Tom Kyte, Rich Niemiec, Ray Roccaforte and yours truly, and talks over the two days by such well known BI&W speakers, writers, PMs and bloggers as Hermann Baer (partitioning), Lilian Hobbs (ILM), Dan Vlamis (BIEE and OLAP), Charlie Berger (Data Mining), Anthony Waite (OLAP), Adrian Ward (BIEE), Marcos Campos (Data Mining), Jean-Pierre Djicks (OWB), Mark Van De Weil (DB scalability), Andrew Faulkner (RAC and DW), David Fuston (EPB & Hyperion), Nicholas Bonnet (RTD), Shyam Nath (Oracle Text), Chris Claterbos (OLAP) and Bud Endress (OLAP). Jon Mead is also presenting a talk on his own on OWB & agile development, and is working with Jean-Pierre on an hands-on OWB tips-and-tricks workshop.

I've often thought over the past couple of years that it'd be good to run a BI&W-focused summit, like the database ones such as Hotsos and the Miracle events. Hats off to Shyam, Charlie Berger and Jon Haydu for actually sorting this out, and it'll be an honour to be doing the opening keynote and getting things off to a good start. With that in mind, I've got the next week or so to actually put the keynote together, on the history of Oracle BI&W, where we are now and where the technology is going, and I'll certainly be very keen to hear Tom's talk, on the free BI&W features in the Oracle database that we can all use here and now.

I think I've mentioned before that I can only actually stay for the first day as I'm due to do the same presentation at the Scottish OUG Conference a couple of days later, but Jon will be staying for the whole event, and I'll be flying in to Washington on the Saturday so if anyone's around on the Sunday, it'd be good to meet up. Until then, back to the course preparation work, or shall I chip in on the ACE Director's thread...