Planning for ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008

I'm writing this posting mid-way across the North Sea returning from the Swedish and Finnish User Group Conference, and looking in my diary I've noticed it's only a few weeks until it's time for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 conference in New Orleans. As the flight's a couple of hours I thought I'd put my slides together and take a look at the agenda that I'd downloaded before I came over.

ODTUG has always been my favourite of the two US-based user group conferences as it's small enough to get to meet everyone, and it's 100% focused on developers. This year I've had a hand in putting together the BI, data warehousing and Essbase tracks and there's some particularly good sessions on OWB11gR2, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI Publisher, Essbase and of course Discoverer. It's always good to meet up with an hear such presenters as Jean-Pierre Dijcks (OWB), Dan Vlamis (Oracle OLAP and Essbase), Michael Armstrong-Smith (Discoverer), Tim Tow and Edward Roske (Essbase), and as it's a general Oracle development conference I can usually slip into some of the more general sessions on products such as ApEx and SOA Suite.

This year I'm running two sessions myself, the first on "A Next-Generation Oracle BI Architecture" where I'll be putting forward a development methodology for Oracle's new BI tools, and the second being an extended session on the last day called "Advanced Development using Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition" where I'll be talking about and demonstrating the following OBIEE features:

Model-first development
Adding additional data sources
Time-Series analysis
Aggregate Persistence
Cache Management
Incorporating Oracle OLAP and Essbase Data

Apart from the regular sessions, we're running an Oracle BI and Essbase Experts Panel on the monday where myself, Michael Armstrong-Smith, Tim Tow and Edward Roske will be answering people's questions, and on the Sunday before the main conference there's an all-day Essbase symposium chaired by Tim and Edward that aims to emulate the old "Essbase Top-Gun" event that used to run prior to the acquisition by Oracle.

If you hurry the Early Bird registration offer is still available, and the event itself runs from June 15th - 19th in New Orleans, USA. If you're going, it'll be good to see you there.