And ... Finished

Well, I've just realized that for the first time in what must be six months, I've not got any course material, presentations, articles or blog posts to write. Today was the last day of our inaugural BI Training Days event, and now that the event has finished and the material has all been delivered, I'm now in the strange position of having a bit of free time in the evening and over the coming weekend.

Around six months ago, I started off by putting an Oracle BI Enterprise Edition course together, followed by an Oracle BI Applications course containing slides, hands-on labs and delegate notes. These typically take several weeks to put together, not least because of the need to create all of the labs and demos. Around this time I also had my presentations for ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Collaborate'08 to put together, followed by sessions for Open World and a two-day data warehousing seminar for Oracle University in Denmark. Just when that died down, I started work on an OBIEE Performance Tuning session for the Training Days event, and with all of these presentations I usually develop and fine-tune the material first by running them as articles on the blog. So now I'm in the funny situation of, having worked flat out on all of this for the past few months, actually having completed it all including the sessions that I'll be running at the UKOUG Conference in December.

So what am I going to do now? Well, we've got the beta for OWB11gR2, and I want to take a closer look at the integration between OWB and ODI, and OWB and OBIEE, though I can't blog about this as it's under non-disclosure. Same goes for the forthcoming OBIEE 11g beta, which we should have around the turn of the year and I'll be using as the initial development area for the forthcoming Oracle Press OBIEE 11g book. I'm also looking to revise the section in my Oracle University Data Warehousing Masterclass around bitmap indexes and bitmap join indexes, and I'm also tempted to try out one of the new column-store databases such as Vertica to see how it's ETL and query performance compares to the Oracle database.

Most importantly though, I'll now get a chance to spend some time with the kids, as what with all the recent traveling and presentation writing I've hardly spent any quality time with them at all. For now though, it's time I think for a few cans and a chance to catch up with the football over the weekend. So how have Spurs been doing...?