Oracle Open World 2008, Day 2 : Presentations and Keynotes
Day 2 of Oracle Open World 2008 started off with Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat's keynote setting out, at a high level, all the innovations around the various product lines over the past year. There wasn't anything around BI in the session, it was mostly around what's been happing with Fusion Middleware, the database and the applications, I ended up watching it in the OTN Lounge sitting next to Lewis Cunningham as I was still unable to sort out my blogger credentials at the reception desk. I'll try again later today as it'd be good to get a good seat for the Larry keynote on Wednesday. One thing they did mention though, was that the Oracle database and application server can now be licensed to use in Amazon's cloud environment; prior to this you could use XE in this environment but not one of the proper products, now you can use this in production and even backup your data to Amazon's cloud storage.
The BI Roadmap and Strategy talk took place a bit later, for me it was a bit disappointing as for the first time that I've been to Open World, there was no product news that I'd not heard before. The main "new" stuff was around the new EPM 11.1 release, how Essbase Studio can be used to bring in OBIEE data, how Smart View is the new strategic direction for Office integration, and a reminder for developers to take a look at the new (extensive) Sample Sales demo that comes with OBIEE 10.1.3.4, which I'll be covering in more detail in some future blog postings. No new news though, and I guess we'll end up putting OOW 2008 down as a "fallow" year before all the big product announcements around OBIEE11g next year.
Other than that I went to Bud Endress' and Marty Gubar's talk on Cube Organized Materialized Views; I've been presenting on this myself for several months and it was good to hear their talk on this, I was also encouraged by the interest shown by the audience in this new feature. If you want to read the low-down in this feature then take a look at this blog post from a few months ago, and I also put together a write-up around the Oracle OLAP / ApEx integration demo that Marty did towards the end of the session if you're interested in how this works.
My last big event of the day was my session on Automating Business Decisions using Oracle Real Time Decisions (slide here). I had the usual hardware problems just before the session started but things came together in the end, I was also pleased that the audience seemed to get what I was talking about and I had people coming up at the end to ask for more details. The issues with the demo though have got me thinking - given the fact that, with the last two sessions, the only bit that caused issues was getting the demo running, is it best to leave these out and just use slides? For me, having the demo makes the session "authentic", it shows that the speaker actually knows what he's talking about and can do what he says he can do, but if it goes wrong then it tends to (a) make you look a bit stupid and (b) cause you to stress out as you're preparing. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Authentic but with potential for glitches versus slick but less informative? What's your opinion?
Anyway, I'm just getting myself sorted out for my last session, at 9am in the Moscone West on Data Modeling Techniques using the Oracle BI Server. I'm just checking my demo (I know, I never learn) and hopefully we should get a good audience. After that it's the ODI Partner Advisory Board, not sure whether what we'll hear will be confidential but if not, I should be able to blog about the product roadmap afterwards. Then there a session on new technology in OBIEE (so we might actually get some new news after all) and the Thomas Kurian Fusion Middleware keynote, which might perhaps have some new information on where EPM and BI fit into this product category, and what's going to happen regarding the old BI tools and the fact that they presumably are going to move to Weblogic as their application server. More from me later.