Day 2 at Collaborate 08

I am sitting in my hotel room, bathed in beautiful sunshine as the sun dips towards the snow-capped mountains. Better make the most of it for tomorrow is forecast to be a lot (like 19ºC) colder and maybe even a touch of snow. Not that we will see much of the outdoors from the convention center across the street from the hotel.

I am still getting use to the time zone, that means I wake too early, sleep too early and really feel tired by the last conference session of the day, perhaps I might give the city a miss tonight

Yesterday, I said that Mark and I often attended different sessions so that we could see as wide a spread of presentations as possible; but today was an exception, we seemed to want to go to the same sessions - I did start off on my own at a vendor presentation about reporting from EBS with OBIEE then met up with Mark for a rather good talk by Mark Brooks on the deployment of change data capture, change notification and java messaging to implement a realtime feed between an Oracle database and a packaged web application with a SQL Server 2005 database. I don't know why, but change data capture seems to be a underused feature - it really is a good technique and to my thinking a better methodology than adding masses of horrible triggers to an application to capture data change on a row by row basis - what do you think?

After lunch we both sat in on Scott Rappoport's dimensional modelling talk - it was nice to hear another take on the topic, you always pick up a new insight, and for me this was quite timely as I am preparing a revised version of my DW design course. The final session of the day (for me) was one on robust ETL using OWB, an interesting talk from a user organization - it is always good to hear practical advice from people that have done things for real, especially if they have tackled in in a similar way to the one I would have done!