Day 1 at Open World
Well it's early Tuesday morning over in San Francisco and we're in the middle of a storm. Apparently we've got the tail-end of a monsoon coming over from Japan, and coupled with some local bad weather it's looks like we're in for a stinker. The local newspaper is reporting where sandbags can be picked up from (though as I'm on the 23rd floor of the Intercontinental Hotel, I'm reasoning I should be ok), but later on I've got the Oracle Press Publisher's seminar to go to, then some EMEA partner events, which means I'll have to venture out at least at some point.
Monday was pretty hectic for me, as my first session (on Oracle BI Management Best Practices) was at 11.30am followed by my second, with Venkat, on OBIEE and Essbase Integration at 5.30. Before that though I was able to get to Jonathan Lewis' Unconference session for twenty minutes before my one started, here he is (sorry about the sound) talking about redo and undo and how understanding it is fundamental to understanding how Oracle works.
Excellent stuff from Jonathan as usual, and just as important in the BI context particularly when thinking about ETL and data loading processes.
The BI Management Best Practices one had a full room which to me shows how much people are interested in migrations, tuning, optimization and so on around Oracle's BI Tools. The session was a join one with Amjad Afanah from Oracle and we also went through some of the new systems management features coming in OBIEE 11g. Here's a quick clip from the speaker podium with Amjad speaking:
Between the two session we popped down to the Rittman Mead booth in the main exhibition hall (stand 144, come down and see us) before going back for a session on New Technologies in Oracle BI EE. Nothing particularly new as most of the effort is going on getting OBIEE 11g out of the door, however some more details on how parent-child hierarchies will be supported for relational sources, and how changes to Essbase outline metadata will be handled were provided in the Q&A.
After that was mine and Venkat's session on Essbase and OBIEE integration. We billed this as a "deep dive" into this integration, and we were working on the basis that anyone coming would know the basics of OBIEE, Essbase and how the integration is supposed to work. I think in the end we had a 50% Essbase audience, 25% Essbase and 25% wondering if they were in the right session, but we started off with a basic introduction to the enabling technology:
with Venkat then going on to the technical details:
After the sessions finished up, it was off to Johnny Foleys for the BI Meetup. This was particularly enjoyable as I was able to catch up with some of the attendees at the sessions, some of our friends in other partner companies and of course some of the OBIEE development team who were around. Thanks to everyone for coming down, looks like we missed the last of the bad weather last night.
That's it for now, off to brave the rain on the way to the Publisher Seminar.