ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 Day 2

I'm now back in my hotel room after having taken part in the Oracle BI, DW & Essbase experts panel, I've got three quarters of an hour spare until the ACE Directors Fusion Middleware Product Briefing that's going on for the rest of the afternoon. The panel itself went well, the audience was primarily Essbase developers (the session was placed in the Essbase track), with myself, Jean-Pierre Dijcks (OWB Product Manager, interview here), Michael Armstrong-Smith (Discoverer), Edward Roske and Tim Tow (Essbase). The idea we had with the panel was to try and create a forum for both "traditional" Oracle BI&DW developers and the Essbase developers who've now come into the Oracle fold, as I said I think it went well with most of the questions around how you develop using the new set of technologies and where we all think the tools will begin to integrate.

Yesterday was a "down day" for me with no presentations and no user group duties. I did make it along to Jean-Pierre Dijcks session on OWB Tips and Tricks (some good content on using mappings to define views, the benefit being that the lineage metadata is then available in the repository, plus some discussion around the OWB11gR2 likely feature set). Apart from that though I was mostly in my room getting the BI Apps product stack installed in a new virtual machine, so far I've got OBIEE, the BI Apps, Informatica and the DAC up and running, the next step is to try and run the ETL routines and bring the data into the BI Apps data warehouse. I'll post more on this as things progress.

In the evening I hooked up with JP, Borkur, and an ex-colleague of JP's from the Netherlands, and went down for something to eat in the French Quarter. On the way back we hooked up with Dan Vlamis and his brother Tim, and I eventually turned in around 11.30pm. For now though, I'm running through some more bits for my architecture presentation tomorrow, then it's off for the ACE Director briefing, Mike Donahoe's BI Roadmap and Strategy and then the various ACE Director events this evening.