Arrived in Singapore

Well I've just arrived in Singapore, the view below is the view from my hotel room across the Singapore Marina. Flying in, down from the tip of Malaysia and across Singapore, you certainly get a feeling for where all the world's industry, shipping and so on are now located; looking out from my hotel room, there must be hundreds of ships either docked or waiting to load or unload; compared to London where you hardly see any shipping activity at all now, it's an eye opener to see the level of activity over here.

I've only been in Singapore itself for a couple of hours, but it's interesting to see a few of the British influences left over. The plus they use are the standard 3-pin UK and Irish plugs, the cars drive on the left-hand side of the road and there's a few British (particularly Raffles) place names still around. That said, this is one big multicultural city and it'll be interesting walking through the city tomorrow to get to the client site, and visiting a few of their offices.

I've realized that I've been a bit quiet on the blog recently, this has been pretty much down to being so busy what with client work and with preparing presentations and course materials. I've almost exclusively been working on the area of Oracle BI EE and Essbase integration, particularly around architecture, high availability and creating mixed relational/Essbase logical models, in fact I've got a ton of material to blog about but I've just been too busy to get anything down. Once I'm back from Singapore it should get a bit easier, I'm planning on putting a series of posts together about how to bring OBIEE and EPM product architectures together and what that means in terms of use of products such as Weblogic, how you make everthing highly available and so on. This is definately an interesting area and one that clients are keen to find out more about.

Other than that, in a couple of weeks time I'll be taking the family over to California for a few days in San Francisco, a few days at Yosemite National Park and then down to Monterey for ODTUG Kaleidoscope. In between I'm popping over to Utrecht to take part in the OBI-Live event that John Minkjan is helping to organize, delivering an OBIEE course for another Oracle partner who wants to train up some of their team, and popping up North to install and configure a Discoverer and Application Server setup. It should be a hectic few weeks but the two week holiday at the end should make it all worthwhile.