ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 Day 1
I'm over in New Orleans at the moment for ODTUG Kaleidoscope, this is the first day of the conference with a series of full-day symposiums on ApEx, Fusion Middleware and Essbase development. The main conference sessions then start tomorrow with myself and Borkur presenting later in the week.
I arrived in New Orleans around 6pm after flying down from Halifax, Canada via Newark. The flight got delayed by 20 minutes and we only just made the connection to the New Orleans flight, which was lucky as the next flight wasn't until tomorrow. I guessed at the time that whilst I made it, I didn't think my luggage would have and sure enough, when I got to the baggage carousel it wasn't there. A few of us seem to have had the same problem yesterday, John Scott (from ApEx Evangelists) and Lucas Jellema (from AMIS) have had the same problem, however it's not been too much of an issue as the travel insurance on my AmEx card gave me some money to spend on getting some new clothes. I've just realized that my phone charger is in the suitcase though and as the charge has run out, I've entered a temporary radio silence so hopefully I'll catch up with everyone at the reception event tonight.
After we dropped our stuff off we went down to the bar, met up with Aino Andriessen and Borkur for a couple of beers. After that we went down to Bourbon Street, the main street with bars and restaurants and hooked up with John Scott, Dimitri Geilis and Wilfred Van Der Deijl, found a bar selling Absinthe and things got progressively more interesting from that point on. I have to say that Bourbon Street at midnight on a Saturday is a pretty wild place, it surprised me actually as I kind of expected it to be like a few jazz bars and people sipping beers, in the end it turned out more like Amsterdam crossed with Animal House.
Regrettably I have to say that I was still in the bar with Borkur and John at 3am and I eventually rolled back to the hotel, just before the thunder started, around 4-ish.
As you'd expect I wasn't quite at my snappiest first thing in the morning, but after I managed to get a cup of tea from the Starbucks in the hotel lobby, force down a croissant and have a shave I managed to make it to the Essbase Studio preview and the Beyond Essbase Kennedy sessions at the Essbase symposium. I've seen presentations on the Kennedy (a.k.a 11.1.0 release) of Essbase but this was the first time I'd seen the new Essbase Studio application demoed, it's a cross between Essbase Integration Services (the bit that lets you define cubes off of relational star schemas, a bit like Analytic Workspace Manager) and Essbase Administration Services, it looks quite smart actually although funnily enough it's based on the Eclipse IDE, wheras of course most of the mainstream Oracle development and data warehousing tools (SQL Developers, Oracle Warehouse Builder) are moving to the JDeveloper/Fusion Developer framework. The Oracle Real-Time Decisions IDE is similarly based on Eclipse, it makes you wonder whether they'll all get re-written again in a couple of years time to work off of Oracle's framework.
The other talk I saw was a preview of the alpha version of the integration that's coming between Essbase and JDeveloper, in this case though it's more a case of making Essbase data available to the ADF environment that JDeveloper now works with. The idea here is that Essbase data can be connected to your ADF environment, whereapon the new Data Visualization Technology (DVT) that's now in JDeveloper can be used to create crosstabs, graphs, maps and so on. You might have seen a posting I did on DVT a few months ago - here's the link - where I talked about it as the replacement for Oracle BI Beans; the idea here is that DVT, which takes its data from relational tables rather than the multi-dimensional Java OLAP API that powered BI Beans, provides a super-set of the BI Beans functionality but without the dependency on the OLAP Option, something that's now possible due to SQL being promoted as the primary interface for Oracle OLAP rather than the Java OLAP API. I couldn't help sensing a bit of deja-vu when hearing the announcement though - the basic premise of the Essbase/JDeveloper integration is exactly the same as was the case for BI Beans, but as with BI Beans I wonder who the audience for this is - BI Beans never really took off with Oracle OLAP and (migrated) Express developers as compared to Express Objects, Java is just too complicated, so I think this is going to be a fairly specialized, minority interest. That said, you obviously need this sort of integration to be available and with the wider audience that Essbase (compared to Oracle OLAP) has got, and the fact that declarative development using JDeveloper has got that much simpler and more productive since the 9i days, it'll be interesting to see how this all shapes up when it ships later this year.
It's now five o'clock and the Tom Kyte keynote is on in about an hour. After that it's the welcome reception, then I'm definitely not (famous last words) heading back down to Bourbon Street afterwards, instead I'll hopefully be back in my hotel room and preparing for the list of events I'm supposed to be taking part in this week, which includes:
- BI&DW Experts Panel (myself, Michael Armstrong-Smith, Tim Tow, Edward Roske) - Tuesday 9:15am
- Oracle ACE Directors Panel - Tuesday 5:00pm
- Meet the Oracle ACE Directors Reception (sponsored by OTN) - Tuesday 6:00pm
- Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE Directors Meal - Tuesday 8pm
- My first talk, A Next-Generation Oracle BI Architecture - Wednesday 1.30pm
- My second session, a three hour Advanced Development Techniques using OBIEE session, on Thursday at 8:30am
Apart from these talks I'll also be going along to Borkur's one on Implementing Access Control for OBIEE, Jean-Pierre Dijcks' one on Heterogeneous Access for OWB11gR2 and the BI Roadmap and Strategy talk by Paul Rodwick. Apart from those I'll be dropping in to other talks as I get a chance, in between sessions I'm working on getting the BI Apps up and running and answering customer emails. That's it for now, back tomorrow.