Back in Action
Well, this must just about be the longest stretch of time between a blog post in the last couple of years. After the Christmas break and a trip with the family to Egypt, I'm finally back in action and raring to go.
Christmas was a bit of a nightmare this year, as both I and my wife had stinking colds for more or less the entire Christmas and New Year break, which meant for me that I couldn't get a bunch of things done that I'd planned to do - write the Essbase article for OTN that I've had commissioned, get to grips with the new data quality features in ODI 10.1.3.4, read the Essbase book that arrived over the break and so on, although it did give me a bit of an enforced break and I did end up missing the other bug that was going around at the time. After a couple of days back at work at the start of January, we went off to Marsa Alam in Egypt for a week's winter break, which was nice as by then we were more or less recovered but it did mean I'd been out of circulation for three or four weeks.
Anyway, I'm back now and getting things lined up for the next few months. Apart from a number of DW and BI healthchecks, consulting exercises, mentoring sessions and private training events we've got lined up, I've worked out that I've got around five conference papers to write, including a BI Architecture one for the UKOUG BI & Performance Management, 11g data warehousing, ETL and OLAP ones for the Red Database Symposium, and one on using Real-Time Decisions for Collaborate'08. In my spare time I'll be reading the Edward Roske book on Essbase that arrived over Christmas, together with Neil Raden's "Smart (Enough) Systems" book which looks like being a good input into the RTD presentation, and I'll also being going to the Norway User Group conference in April and possibly the Swedish one in May.
All in all, a pretty hectic start to the year but it'll certainly be interesting, especially seeing as I've more or less been in "read-only" mode over the past few weeks. Keep an eye on the blog and the rest of this site for some interesting upcoming articles and presentations on RTD, 11g, OLAP and Essbase over the next few months, and a posting fairly soon where I start putting some ideas together on a future Oracle BI architecture.