Traveling from Halifax to New Orleans

I'm just getting my things together at the moment before I leave for the airport, as it's Saturday morning and the ODTUG Conference starts tomorrow in New Orleans. I've actually been in Halifax, Canada for the past week so this will be my second week away, at least the flight will be a bit easier as I'm just flying within North America rather than crossing the Atlantic.

Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia and it's a city with a lot of history. After the American Revolution many of the loyalists from the old colonies settled up here and it's a place with a lot of links back to Britain. During the First and Second World Wars most of the convoys across the Atlantic sailed from Halifax across to Liverpool, and just across the road from my hotel is the Citadel, the old fort built by the British to defend the city when it was first built. In an interesting coincidence the original French settlers in the area, the Arcadians, were expelled when the Loyalists arrived and eventually settled in Louisiana, which of course is where I'm heading next on my trip.

I like Canada. I like the States a lot as well but Canada seems to have many of the positive characteristics of the USA - lots of nice scenery, people with a positive outlook, big trucks and decent food - with a bit of a British, or at least Commonwealth style to it. There's lots of pubs, a double-decker London Bus doing the rounds for the tourists, everyone seems fairly laid-back and of course lots of people have family back in the UK. I got the chance to go to someone's house during the week for a Barbecue in Dartmouth, just across the Halifax Harbour and as with my visit to Australia and New Zealand last year, you come away from the place wondering why everyone in the UK doesn't just sell up and move out over here - the scenery's fantastic, there's lots of space to move around and house prices are about half of what they are back home. It was a nice week and I'd hope to come back some time in the future, maybe even go over to the West Coast instead.

Anyway apart from my trip over here I've been working on getting the Oracle BI Applications up and running, the objective here being to get my head around Informatica and in particular how you extend the pre-defined dimensional data warehouse that comes with the BI Apps. Part of this is driven by the fact that my session on Data Modeling using OBIEE has been accepted for Open World, along with my talk on Automated Decision-Making using Oracle Real-Time Decisions, in the former talk I'll talk about how extending the pre-build BI Apps data model can be a viable alternative to building your own from the ground up.

Anyway, it's half nine now and I need to get on my way in half an hour. Borkur is also flying over and I'm due to meet him at the airport around 5pm, then it's off in to New Orleans and out for a nice cold beer.