More on BIWA

I was at the BIWA conference earlier this week (Tuesday and Wednesday), BIWA is an Oracle user group, which as the name suggests, specialises in Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics, more info can be found here on their website. They are planning to run a yearly conference, plus other events and also a series of e-seminars. I am quite interested in the e-seminars as they will a good way to get the benefit of some of the talks you hear at these type of events from the comfort of your own home.

The event was good, it was useful to have a clear focus on all things BI and DW related. I ran a hands-on OWB tips and techniques session with one of the OWB product managers, Jean-Pierre Dijcks. The sessions were set up on a room with 12 PCs, with the idea that each PC would be shared by two people. We were pretty over subscribed, we had tried to aim the session at some more advanced techniques, however upon launching into OMB Plus scripting and integrating OWB with CDC I realised we had quite a mix of abilities and experience. I think if I were to do it again I would like to break the session out into beginner/intermediate and advanced sessions. Everyone did pretty well though and picked stuff up and hopefully saw a few useful ideas. The slides I used for the session are available here. Jean-Pierre also provide a detailed approach to using the Match-Merge mapping operator, although we didn't really have time to cover this, people could take it away in hand-out form.

In the afternoon I gave a talk entitled 'Ensuring quality software using OWB and agile development techniques' which tried to distil some of the principles and ideas of Agile Methods and Extreme programming and apply them to experiences I have had on OWB projects. The result was a list of approaches that would enable you to fulfil these ideas. I will post a separate entry with full details.

So I would like to say thanks to the BIWA guys for a good conference and thanks to those who attended the hands-on and talks, hope they were useful to you.