Snowing in Helsinki
I'm currently over in Finland, waiting to travel back after the OUGF Autumn Conference in Helsinki. Together with Dan Morgan, Piet de Visser and Joze Senegacnik we were providing the English-Language track, and thanks again to Heli from the user group for inviting us all over.
The event started on the Wednesday evening for us, with a visit to a Laplandish restaurant where we were all given our own personal "Kuska" cup, something you have to initiate and then keep for life. Here's a quick clip of the Kuska ceremony, Dan and Piet are sitting just opposite me.
There's more of the ceremony here. I also got to see the first snow of the year (for me), on the way back it began to snow quite heavily and carried on during the conference yesterday, and there's still some outside my hotel window now. Here's Piet, and Tiina from OUGF who helped organize the event (more photos on Flickr.)
My session was on Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2 New Features, and I talked about the new code template, hybrid mappings, heterogeneous sources, OBIEE integration and SOA integration features in the product. There were quite a few OWB developers in the audience but none that had tried OWB11gR2, I guess this is mostly down to it only being available currently on Linux. Certainly for me the most interesting part of this new release is the code templates feature, and I'll be interested to see how much this gets used on new projects - we do a lot of OWB development for clients and once the Windows version (so that you can use the client tools) is available, we're expecting to see big uptake on this. We're also in the middle of developing new course materials on OWB11gR2 and are looking to have these available early in the New Year, again to coincide with the Windows version of the tool.
If you're interesting in seeing the slides, I've uploaded them here.
So, it's goodbye to Helsinki soon, and back to the better weather in the UK (never though I'd get to say that). Next week I'm off to Ireland for the Irish BI SIG, to talk about Essbase and OBIEE, and Hyperion Planning, then it's off to Kenya for an engagement with a local bank. Then it'll be heads-down and planning for Birmingham, where most of the company will be converging for the upcoming Tech and EBS UKOUG Conference, our main event of the year.