Wrapping up Collaborate 10
It's been a fun week in good old Las Vegas. Though in the end I broke even at the tables, I enjoyed holding a large amount of the Mandalay Bay's money for them for two or three days, just to give it all back to them last night before leaving. There wasn't any interest charged, unless you count enjoyment and free drinks.
On Tuesday I gave an OWB 11gR2 Hands-on lab as a part of the BIWA SIG, and it was very well attended. I'd like to thank Shyam Varan Nath and Dan Vlamis for including me in this worthwhile program, as every single lab seemed to be attended with max capacity. In the OWB lab, we walked through creating files, external tables, relational tables, and in the end, mappings, and everyone seemed to get along very well with the somewhat accelerated nature of the course. After all, there's only so much we can do in an hour. Today, I had two sessions back-to-back. The first was "Getting Real", a look at real-time data warehousing, This presentation was supposed to be given by Peter Scott, one of the world's foremost experts on real-time data warehousing, and it's a shame that he couldn't make it to Collaborate. Pete and I have worked closely on the principles on real-time data warehousing on previous projects, and that really paid off, as I gave the presentation to a large crowd who seemed to benefit from the information. Pete did a great job putting the slides together... but next time I'll try to persuade him to bring all the bullet points in at once for each slide. Sorry you couldn't make it Pete... but the content was excellent, and the attendees thought so as well.
My next session was "The Three R's of Data Warehouse Fault Tolerance", where I talked about Resuming, Restarting and Restoring. This was also a virtual event, where remote attendees could watch the presentation over the internet in real-time. However, the technology used for this had not been fully vetted on the Mac, and from the feedback I received, Keynote wouldn't allow the remote viewers to see my slides, but I think they could see the demonstrations I did on the Linux VM as well as in SQL-Plus. For those virtual attendees, I really apologize for the inconvenience, and if you have questions, or need collateral material around the presentation, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].
Jon Mead made an unsuspected appearance in Vegas, which was excellent. While Pete was stranded in the UK, Jon was stranded in the US, and it was good to talk "Managing Director" shop with an excellent businessman from the UK. All in all, I really enjoyed catching up with Mark and Jon, and wish that Pete and Venkat could have been here to have the full Rittman Mead experience.
Next up... ODTUG Kaleidoscope. Watch the blog for details.