ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 Days 3 and 4

It's just around 10pm on the Wednesday night now, and I'm back from the main conference party at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 conference in New Orleans. My hotel room faces on to the Mississippi and looking out of the window, you can see some of the hotels and casinos and the waterfront just in front of the hotel.

Yesterday started off for me with Borkur's presentation on Access Control for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, this was based on the session Borkur did at the last UKOUG conference but with some new material around row-level security and integration with LDAP. You can download the slides from here. The turnout for the session was good and I think the audience appreciated something on OBIEE that goes into a bit more technical detail than the usual overview sessions.

After Borkur's session was Mike Donahoe's Oracle BI Roadmap and Strategy one, a useful update on where things are and how the Hyperion integration is progressing. Once this session was over it was the start of my ACE Director duties, popping in to the product briefing, then the panel session and then the reception up on the 8th floor. The photo below shows the ACEs panel, you can just see Clemens Utschig, Chris Muir, Dan Morgan, Andrejus Baranovskis, more or less the first three rows of the room was full of ACEs and ACE Directors.

After this, around 8pm myself and Debra Lilley (UKOUG Director and fellow ACE) took a walk down to Arnouds for the ACE meal sponsored by OTN, followed by a leisurely walk back to the hotel around 11pm. In the photo below you can just see Dan Morgan, Mogens next to him and Cary Millsap's just out of shot; on my table I had Joel Kallman (one of the original creators of ApEx) whilst on the table opposite you can just about see Sten Vestali.

All in all it was a great evening, and thanks to Vikki, Justin and the OTN team for organizing the event.

This morning was spent mostly in the hotel room working, with a quick trip down to the hotel lobby for an interview with someone from Oracle who's working on the Open World daily magazine (apparently a few of us are being interviewed, Q&A-style, I went just after Mogens so I probably came across really boring), then it was time for my own first session, on A Future Oracle BI Architecture (slides here).

I was actually pretty pleased with this session, it's one where I try and start a bit of a disussion and go through my view on where Oracle's BI tools architecture is going in the next few years. Rather than present from the stage I brought the laptop down and presented down by the audience, I think also I finally managed to get across some of the concepts - BI as part of a SOA architecture, separation of business logic (the Oracle BI Server), presentation logic (the Oracle BI Presentation Server, Essbase, Office, SOAP interface etc) and the data services - in the way I wanted, the timing went OK and the bit about the prototyping methodology I think came across OK. If you were there any you've got any feedback, I'd be pleased to hear from you.

Well that's the conference almost over. Tomorrow I've got my 3.5 hour tutorial on OBIEE that I'm delivering as the final session (slides here), then Borkur and I are going to take the afternoon off and try and get on a boat down the Mississippi. After that we're hoping to hook up with John Scott, Dimitri Gielis and Chris Muir and head down to Bourbon Street again, my objective is to have at least one Hand Grenade before we leave the place. For now though it's an early night as the session tomorrow starts at 8.30am.