Collaborate'08 Day 1

Well, that's Day 1 of Collaborate'08 over and I think I've just about got over the jet lag. I'm up early again - today it's 6am - but at least I'm not suffering from altitude sickness like a couple of people I bumped in to. We're actually a mile above sea-level in Denver which means the air's a bit thinner here, so far I've been OK but then again I've not exactly been running around or climbing lots of stairs.

The first talk I went to yesterday was Edward Roske's on "How Essbase Thinks". Seeing Edward was interesting as I'd had him down as a business-type person, in real-life he's obviously a bit of a techy and certainly knows his stuff around Essbase and the Hyperion tools. The room was packed - around 170 at last count, with people standing at the sides and sitting in the aisle - which is about 160 more than the average Oracle OLAP talk in previous years. Edward's a bit of a pro when it comes to speaking, a mix of technical stuff, a few bits of gossip and some audience participation, the session was very good and helped me understand a bit more around Essbase's internals. For example, the Indexfile that Essbase uses roughly corresponds to Composites in Express and Oracle OLAP, whilst blocks roughtly correspond to pages in Express/Oracle OLAP. I was talking with Dan Vlamis after the session and he pointed out that Essbase is actually very much, architecturally-wise, like the old mainframe version of Express, which also had separate files for each of the database data elements, the programs and so on. A good session and good educationally as well.

After that was Vincent Chazhoor's talk on Oracle 11g data warehousing. This year I'm trying to take in a few more database presentations as I'm due to put some new material together for Oracle University on 11g data warehousing, and I was therefore interested to hear Vincent's take on this. I'd actually first heard him speak at ODTUG (I think) a couple of years ago on advanced dimensional modeling, again he had some good content although perhaps could have got through it a bit quicker, he ran out of time in the end and had to rush the bit I was most interested in, around summary management. There was some good content however on the new key 11g DW features and whilst most of it I concurred with, there were a couple of points I wasn't so sure about - the range-range partitioning scheme for solving the old "do you partition on invoice date or load date" question for example - but overall it was a good session and made a few things around, say, virtual columns (main benefit - you can index and gather statistics on them) a bit clearer. One question did come up (OK, I asked it) on the interval partitioning scheme - Vincent thought that when you create an interval partitioned table, Oracle creates the metadata on the partitions upfront but not the segments, so I asked how far forward does Oracle create the metadata - for all time, for a year, for three years or whatever? Vincent wasn't sure (neither was I), I'll have to look this up as I suspect that the metadata doesn't in fact get created upfront, otherwise where would it stop? If anyone has the answer on this I'd be interested to know.

After Vincent's talk was the BIWA SIG meeting, which really turned in to "ask Matt Bedin (one of the Oracle BI PMs) any questions about Oracle BI product strategy". Matt was good enough to take the stage for most of the session, some of the questions were around OWB vs. ODI, Oracle OLAP vs. Essbase, and whether Oracle plan to offer OBIEE as part of the Oracle On Demand service. I had to leave the session a bit early as lunch was only for an hour and we only had 15 minutes or so to go. After lunch, it was off to Dan Vlamis' session on Essbase vs. Oracle OLAP.

Dan did a very good job of explaining the nuances and technical differences between Essbase and Oracle OLAP, and went into some good detail about the differences and similarities between the two products. I did a similar session myself at the Norwegian Oracle User Group (slides are here) and I'm doing something similar at ODTUG in June, it was interesting hearing Dan's take on the two technologies which generally more or less matched my take on this subject.

After Dan's session was my one on solving generalized business problems using Oracle Real Time Decisions. Seeing as my session apparently wasn't listed in the main conference guide the turnout was pretty good, there were a few people in the audience with some good questions and I think I managed to get the point of the session across OK. Again if you're interested the slides are here and so is the conference paper.

After my session I was just about done for the day, so I ended up missing Mike Donahoe's talk on BI Publisher futures. Luckily Mike's paper was up on the Collaborate website and I'd managed to take a look on the flight over, so I saw from the slides that planned features for future releases include integration with Hyperion Workspace and Hyperion SmartSpace (the widgets that ship with the latest version), support for MDX and XML/A data source (Essbase, MS AS and SAP B/W) including an MDX query builder, enhancements to the MS Word Template Builder and a web-based Layout Builder that looks like Microsoft Office 2007 and is an alternative to building report templates using Microsoft Word. If you've got access to the Collaborate proceedings there are some interesting screenshots of these new features in the slides.

Anyway, for me, my schedule today looks like this:

09:45 : Are you a Money or an Astronaut : The Oracle Advisors from a Different Perspective (a Hotsos talk)
11:00 : Real-Time Data Integration via CDC, Oracle Notifications and Java Messaging
13:45 : Data Warehouse Design Templates
15:30 : Robust ETL using Oracle Warehouse Builder
16:45 : Why I use Oracle's OSWatcher

I've got a meal in the evening with some customers and partners who are using Oracle Real Time Decisions, so that should wrap up a busy day.