Today was the first day of Oracle Open World in San Francisco, with most of today's sessions being organized by the various user groups. For me, as usual on the first day over here, I was up at around 4am, so I used the time to get my demos sorted out for the two sessions I'm running today. I did plan to just use slides and miss out the demos completely, given that they're the only part you end up stressing about, but in the end I decided to do a couple of demos which I think turned out to be worth the effort.
My first session, at 8.30 am over in Moscone West, was on Extending and Customizing the Oracle BI Applications Data Warehouse (slides here). This was one of the BIWA SIG sessions and I think it went down fairly well. Most of the sessions I've been to on the Oracle BI Applications are more on the functional or product marketing side of this, the angle I decided to take for my session was to look at the internals and underpinnings of the BI Apps data warehouse including how the base data model is extended and customized using the Informatica and DAC tools. The turnout was pretty good and there were lots of questions, so I think this went down pretty well. After this first session I rushed back to the Hilton where the ACE Directors product briefing was being held.
Later on in the afternoon was my second session, this time as part of the Hyperion Symposium, organized by Tim Tow and Edward Roske. The title of this session was "Integration Essbase and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition" (slides here) with a focus on bringing Essbase data into the OBIEE semantic model, and using the OBIEE semantic model as a data source for Essbase. The demos for this session should have been fairly straightforward except for the fact that I decided to upgrade my copy of VMWare Fusion from 1.0 to 2.0 in the morning, and when I plugged my Essbase virtual machine into my laptop it decided to uninstall all of the virtual drivers and then install new versions, which caused me a bit of consternation as this all started to happen about ten minutes before my session was due to start. In the end it all came together just in time and the session went down well, I hope.
I'm currently sitting in the OTN lounge waiting to catch up with Jon and Borkur, and then later tonight it's the Blogger meetup at the Thirsty Bear. So no product news at this point then, hopefully we should start to hear some news from the main conference sessions starting tomorrow. One thing I heard is that 11gR2 definitely won't be announced this week, it's not even in beta yet, but I'm pretty sure there'll be a major announcement around the data warehouse / database accelerator product about which the blogosphere got so exited about last week.