Day 1 at the UKOUG Conference

I'm currently sitting in the lobby area of the Jurys Inn hotel, having just missed the 9.30am finish of the breakfast service and currently therefore putting together an impromptu breakfast of coffee and custard creams that they've left out. I'm normally up with the larks but last evening was the blogger do (thanks again to the UKOUG for sponsoring this), today for me is a bit of a rest day as the BI streams are only running on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I seem to have left the USB lead for my camera at home so can't post the usual photos of the conference or blogger do, but last night's event went off well and it was a good chance to catch up with Lisa, Niall, Adrian , Pete, Doug and the rest of the blogger community. The day itself went well - Monday was my key day for presentations and other events, with the day starting off gently with a session chairing, then a joint Discoverer update session with Mike Durran, then my own two sessions on OWB Best Practices and OBIEE and Fusion Middleware. One thing that I was pleased about was that all of my demos went off flawlessly - getting Discoverer, OBIEE, SOA Suite and so on up and running on a single VM on a laptop takes a bit of co-ordination but on the day, it all went off fine, which was a relief.

Other than my own talks, the only other one I went to was Jonathan Lewis' talk on Russian Roulette with Silver Bullets - the crux of which is that almost all "silver bullet" approaches to solving a performance problem - setting a database parameter, say, to lower the perceived cost of using an index - actually has a system-wide effect on performance that may solve one issue but introduces several others of its own. As usual Jonathan is the master speaker, his is an approach I try to aim towards with my sessions with a mixture of seriousness, technical insight and a bit of humour. The highlight of the day as usual.

Anyway, I've got a couple of hours free now, so I'm going to pop along to the Bullring to pick up a couple of things and then go across to the conference around lunch time. My next official duty is the Community Focus Pubs this evening in Hall 4, then tomorrow I'm hosting the BI round table in the afternoon, other than that its a case of clearing through any outstanding email and getting the examples set up for the masterclass on Thursday afternoon.