Collaborate'08 Finishing Up

After the various sessions in the afternoon, I finished off yesterday with a meal with ODTUG, the Oracle Developer Tools User Group (I'm one of their SIG leaders). Apart from Mike Riley, John Jeunette, Jerry Ireland, Jeff Jacobs and John King, Kathleen and Karen (who do a lot of the organizing), we also had Dan Vlamis, Edward Roske and Tim Tow come along. Dan of course is a good friend and we're generally the two main speakers on Oracle OLAP at the various conferences, however Tim and Edward are new to ODTUG and in fact IOUG/OAUG as they're from the world of Hyperion, or more precisely Essbase. As you'd expect we all had a great deal in common and I'm looking forward to keeping in touch with Tim and Edward (and Tracey, the co-author on their book) in the future.

As a few others have mentioned we went from sunny weather and temperature in the 80's to sub-zero temperatures and a blizzard, here's Dan Vlamis and Kathleen just outside the restaurant in the middle of a snow shower.

It was actually pretty cold and wet and certainly a contrast from earlier in the week where we'd been sitting outside in shirtsleeves in the sun. Today though it's cleared up and whilst it's been cold, it's been sunny with clear skies.

Today we were up bright and early for Pete's talk on Cube Organized Materialized Views. I'd actually been teasing him over the past day that no-one would come along as it was at 8.30am on the day after the main party (this actually happened to me at Collaborate'06, when my OLAP tuning talk had been put in the JD Edwards stream, and then moved forward a day just in case anyone had actually seen it in the catalog) but in the end he had a good turnout, probably more than came to my talk actually. Pete's talk looked at Cube Organized Materialized Views, the new OLAP feature in 11g, from a DBA's perspective rather than a BI developer's, and in particular looked at the actual performance of the feature and whether it actually delivered the performance boost it was supposed to.

Pete's slides should be up on our site fairly soon, I'm also trying to talk him in to expanding on the subject and using it for his BIWA Summit submission for later in the year.

Apart from Pete's talk, that was it for me for Collaborate for this year as I had to get back and start doing some work on a presentation I'm doing at our BI SE One event later in the month. I spent most of the day in my hotel room putting the presentation and demo together, I did however get a chance to pop out for lunch for an hour down 16th St just next to our hotel, this is the mile-long pedestrianized mall with lots of shops and so on, I walked on down to the end and took some photos of the Capitol building and some more of the historic area of Denver.

Tomorrow I'll be holed up in my hotel room again catching up on work, and working through a BI Publisher course that Borkur's been putting together that I'm delivering next week. The flight back to London is at 8pm, hopefully there'll be no delays and in the meantime, if you're interested, there's the full set of pictures on Flickr.