Days 2 and 3 at the UKOUG Conference
I'm sitting up in the speaker lounge at the UKOUG Conference, getting thing sorted out for my "Advanced Development Techniques with Oracle BI EE Plus" masterclass later this afternoon. After the fourth night out in a row - last night with Dimitri Gellis and Jon Scott together with Pete and Borkur, and once again ending up in the Tap and Spile - I'm feeling a bit frayed around the edges. Still, it's been nice to meet up again with people such as Doug Burns, Mogens, Lisa, Julian Dyke, Alex Gorbachev and everyone else, apart from the quality of the presentations the social side has been particularly enjoyable.
Tuesday was a day off for me, but Wednesday started with reading about Doug's presentation slides incident and then off for the 9am session by Pete Singleton on Essbase. Then it was down to the coffee area for a meeting about the forthcoming UKOUG BI and Performance Management Special Event we're planning for next year, then I went down to Hall 11a for Borkur's talk on Access Control with OBIEE.
I know Borkur does some work with us but even so, I thought his presentation was pretty excellent, seeing as it's the first time he's spoken at the UKOUG Conference he was very relaxed, very professional and handled the questions well at the end - nice one. After that it was the BI Round Table up on the Level 5 Foyer, this was a chance for customers and the user group to get together and debate Oracle BI & Data Warehousing in an informal, "workshop" environment.
Other than that, we've got another meeting about the BI Special Event later this morning, then just after lunch I've got the BI Masterclass I'm running in Hall 11b. If you're not here I'll be uploading the slides shortly you to take a look at, we're basically covering OBIEE data modeling, fragmentation, combining multiple data sources, incorporating Essbase data, guided analytics and a bit on Oracle Data Integrator. It's a bit of a "taster" for the 2-day masterclasses that I run through Oracle University, if you like the material keep an eye out for the full sessions which will be running in Europe in the first half of 2008.
Anyway, just to finish off, here's a few pictures from the rest of the conference, as I finally managed to borrow a USB cable and upload the pics to Flickr.
Here's Jonathan Lewis doing his "Russian Roulette with Silver Bullets":
Frank Buytendijk and Nick Whitehead doing the Business Intelligence keynote:
Mike Durran and I doing the Discoverer Roadmap talk:
Me doing the OWB Best Practices talk:
... and answering questions afterwards:
Phil Bates, Jonathan Forshaw and Nick Whitehead doing the BI Panel session:
Lisa, Bence Arato, Borkur, Jon and Pete, just before Borkur's presentation:
That's it for now. Ten minutes to finish off the blog posting, then across to Hall 9 for Doug Burns' talk on Oracle Server standards.