What Happens at Collaborate...

Mark Rittman

Apr 23, 2010 • 5 min read

Well I'm currently sitting the in the departures lounge at the Las Vegas Airport, about to catch a flight ... to Denver. Like Jon, Pete and Venkat, I was caught by the airspace restrictions in place earlier this week, except like Jon, I was trapped in the States rather than in Europe. Janet and I flew over to Las Vegas a few days before the Collaborate'10 conference started, so that we could spend a few days together in Vegas before she flew back on Sunday. As everyone knows now, just after we landed all of the airspace over Europe got closed down due to the volcanic eruptions in Iceland, and in the end Janet had to stay for the week and now we're flying to Denver, hoping to catch a flight back to London on Sunday. At least I know Denver, having stayed there for Collaborate a couple of years ago, and RMOUG this year, and we're staying at the Hyatt so it won't be too uncomfortable.

And what a week it's been. What with client work in the UK still going on, the conference itself and Janet being here, I haven't had time to update the blog, though if you've followed me on Twitter (@markrittman) you'll have had an idea as to what I've been up to during the week. Sunday started with my "deep dive" session on Oracle BI Enterprise Edition 10g (slides are available here), which I pitched as a look at some best practices techniques for building repositories and creating dashboards. I also took the opportunity to road-test some of my new BI Server materials that I'll be using at the BI Forum in May, and given that many of the audience were database people it was interesting to go through some of the join strategies and diagnostics that the BI Server uses, comparing them to the equivalent features in the Oracle Database. Funnily enough, I find it's easier to deliver six hours of material than one, as you don't have to rush through everything and you can take the time to talk to the audience at the start and find out where their interests are.

Straight after Sunday's session was my session on Monday on New Features in Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Release 2 (slides available here). I actually managed to be fifteen minutes late for my own session as it'd been moved forward by 30 minutes but my calendar still had the old time; after a few frantic calls and SMSs from Stewart I managed to find the room and (hopefully) get across most of the points and demos in the remaining forty-five minutes. Again, the slides are here, and if you were interested in the code templates demo you might also be interested in this new Oracle Magazine article by myself which goes into more details on this feature.

Oracle Magazine actually featured quite heaving in my week, starting with a reception in the Mandalay that the magazine team ran to launch their new design. One of the things they were doing was taking people's photos and putting them on a mocked-up Oracle Magazine cover, like this:

Oracle Person Of The Year

and the photo above is me showing off the cover at the BIWA reception which ran afterwards. A few people took my photo (thanks Ravi for the one above) including Chet Justice, a.k.a. @oraclenerd, and I thought nothing more of it, retiring back to my room with Janet later on.

In the morning, slightly bleary-eyed after the free drinks at the various receptions, I checked my email on my iphone and saw a whole bunch of congratulatory emails from inside the company and from people around the world. Not quite sure what was going on, I checked Twitter and saw this:

Oraclenerd Personoftheyear

followed overnight by lots of RTs (retweets), congratulations and so on, such as these ones by @lex and @brhubart:

Lex Congrats

Rubart Congrats

Of course then I had to spend the next couple of hours writing back to people, saying that it was actually a hoax, letting everyone know within the company that we hadn't won a new award, don't start telling the customers and so on.

Deny Personoftheyear

Anyway, I ran into Chet later in the day and found he was furiously back-pedalling on his blog having realized most people didn't get that it was a joke. Still, it was funny looking back afterwards...

Of course I also had Chet to thank earlier in the week, as he'd picked up an Apple iPad for me in Tampa. All of the local Apple Stores in Las Vegas had sold out, and of course they're not on sale over in the UK, so it was good to pick one up and give it a spin. One catch I found just after getting it all set up is that if you've got a UK iTunes account, as I have, the iPad App Store is also closed to you, but one way I found around this was to get an iTunes gift card from the States and register a new iTunes Store account using this, as if I'm an American. Of course now I need to keep using this account to ensure all the apps will update in the future, but it also means I get access to American films, TV shows etc so I'll probably stick with it.

So back to the conference, in terms of sessions the highlight for me was the BIWA "Get Analytical Training Days" stream that was effectively a "BI Conference within a Conference". Congratulations to Shyam, Dan and the rest of the BIWA board for putting the event on, and for me the highlights of this stream were the bootcamp sessions (single streams that covered a technology from start to finish over the day, with no overlap), the panel session that I took part in with Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Matt Vranicar and Joe Thomas, and the BIWA reception (where of course the fateful photographs were taken).

Well now it's time to leave Las Vegas and for Janet and I, it's a short three-day stopover in Denver and then hopefully back to the UK. Once I get back it's a quick turnaround and then off to Sarajevo, to run a BI Masterclass for Oracle, and then hopefully by the time I'm back next weekend I'll have time to unpack. Thanks to all the IOUG, OAUG and Quest organizers who put Collaborate together, and we're looking forward to taking the kids over to Orlando for next year's event.

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