I'm writing this on the plane back from Hyderabad, sitting opposite Jonathan Lewis who like me has just finished presenting at Sangam'10, the annual conference held by the All-India Oracle Users Group. I was invited over by Murali and the AIOUG conference committee to do a presentation on OBIEE 11g, which turned out to be a nice opportunity to road-test one of my Open World presentations before delivering it again in a few weeks time. The event itself was pretty good, with a welcoming team from AIOUG and a great audience at the actual talks. Here's the introduction by Murali, which was followed by Oracle talking about the wider user group community and the new features in the Oracle platform.
Jonathan was of course the main attraction, running one of his one-day tutorials over two half days and with most of the audience attending both days. The room was pretty packed-out for both of his sessions, and here he is on the first morning talking about the pros and cons of analytic functions.
Given that the audience was mostly DBA and database developers, I was pleasantly surprised at the attendance on my BI session, which was on RPD data modeling techniques and new features in 11g. As most people were new to OBIEE and mainly worked in database maintenance and support, I tried to put RPD modeling in this context and in particular, how the features in the RPD could be used to complement and add-to the base data warehousing capabilities in the Oracle database. If you were there and would like a copy of the slides and accompanying white paper, they should be on the Sangam'10 website, and I've uploaded them to our Articles page as well.
After my presentation we held a joint BI and EPM SIG meeting, a "round-table" event where we discussed the various Oracle BI and EPM products and answered questions from the audience. One major difference I found in this event, compared to say SIG meetings in the UK and USA, is that the audience were mainly database administrators and would typically need to maintain an Oracle BI installation, rather than develop it from scratch. As such, they were interested in comparisons with competitors tools such as Cognos and Business Objects, and what advantages it gave customers compared to just running SQL reports against the base data warehouse. As such, some of the product capabilities that were of interest included the federated query capability in OBIEE, the packaged analytics that come with the BI Applications, and the ability of products such as Essbase and Oracle OLAP to make user queries run faster. In all, a great session and I was pleased I'd been able to get over to the event.
So whilst I'm on my way home now, I'm back over in November to run our three-day Oracle BI Training Days event in Bangalore, where we'll be rolling out our new OBIEE 11g training materials and taking delegates through an end-to-end tour of the features in this new platform. We've still got a few places left, so if you were at Sangam'10 and you'll like to get some hands-on OBIEE 11g training, or you're just interested in skilling up on this new release, drop us a line at trainingdays2010@rittmanmead.com and we'll reserve you a place.