Day 1 BIWA
Today was the first of the BIWA Summit at Redwood Shores, California. It was also the day of my presentation on Cube Organized Materialized Views in summary management.
The conference packs a lot in over two days; 66 sessions running across 6 streams, 4 keynotes, and two streams of hands-on workshops. Today was a busy day, with an 8:30 opening session leading into the first of three keynotes; Jeanne Harris talking on Competing of Analytics. Then I stayed in the auditorium to listen to Robert Stackowiak talking about bad practices in Data Warehouse deployments - as a consultant that does data warehouse health-checks, there was certainly a ring of truth about what he had to say. Next I was torn between a presentation by Simba on their new drivers to allow Excel 2007 to natively connect to Oracle 11g OLAP using MDX, and the panel session on Critical Success Factors for BI, DW and analytics. In the end I decided to do my presentation instead :-) - I was surprised to have a roomful of delegates (say 30 to 40 people). I think the talk went well, and from the feedback I heard afterwards it was well received. Next was second keynote of the day, Usama Fayyad, CEO of Open Insights; Dr Fayyad used to be Yahoo's Chief Data Officer and responsible for a stream of over 25 terabytes per day!
After lunch the third keynote was Ray Roccaforte, the Oracle VP responsible for DW and the BI Platform talking on Oracle 11g and the Oracle/HP Database Machine. When Ray got to talking about Oracle OLAP 11g he mentioned my presentation a couple of times!
Choosing sessions when there are so many available can be daunting. I tend to either go for those that directly relate to project work we doing within the company or those that fit in my specialist area. So this afternoon I went into a session on Maps and Spatial data in BI dashboards (a hot topic with users) and a session on Best Practices for Data Warehouses using Oracle 11g. As a closet DBA, I really enjoyed that session, it was a shame that the presenter (Maria Colgan) had so much to get through in so short a time, but I found the content good and I learned a few things and was reminded of a few others which had slipped my mind. I love to learn new stuff, so this was an excellent way to round of the day's technical sessions.