UKOUG Conference 2011 and AIOUG Sangam'11 Conference, Bangalore

Well I've just got home now after the eleven hour flight from Bangalore, India, after attending the AIOUG Sangam'11 conference on behalf of the Oracle ACE Director program. This is now the second time I've attended this event, last year speaking on RPD Modeling techniques and this year, talking about OBIEE 11g Systems Management Tips and Techniques.

Well done to Murali and the AIOUG team for organizing the event, and I was pleased to get a full room for an 8.30am session - the traffic in Bangalore can be a bit interesting and so it was great everyone was there so early. Well done also to Venkatakrishnan Srinivasan, one of my colleagues in Rittman Mead India, who presented a beginners guide to OBIEE 11g Dashboards and Analyses.

Here's the links to my presentation, and also Venkat's one on dashboards and analyses:

• OBIEE11g Dashboards and Analyses - Venkatakrishnan Srinivasan
• OBIEE11g Systems Management Tips and Tricks - Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE Director)

So Sangam'11 was actually my second conference of the week, as I was also representing the ACE Director program at the UKOUG Conference and Exhibition 2011 in Birmingham, which also had a number of my Rittman Mead colleagues presenting on topics such as Oracle Golden Gate, Oracle BIEE 11g, Oracle BI Mobile as well as BI project management techniques.

It was actually a pretty hectic three days at the conference, with a great chance to catch up with some old friends, one particularly crazy night, and lots of presentations and participation in talks and round tables. We took a conscious decision not to have an official Rittman Mead stand this year, and instead put all of our energies into presenting and attending talks, and thanks again to the UKOUG for inviting us, and the ACE Director scheme for sponsoring my attendance.

Here's a photo from the ACE Director meal on the first evening, with fellow ACE Directors Tim Hall, Sten Vesterli (out of shot), Hans Forbrich, Edelweiss Kammermann, Frank Nimphus (Oracle) and others on my table, along with Stewart from Rittman Mead.

And here's Jon, Stewart and Pythian's Paul Vallee, at what became our unofficial home for the week, All Bar One just across from the ICC.

Again, the slides from the event are now on our site and available for download, here:

• OBIEE11g Regression & Load Testing - Venkat Janakiraman (Oracle ACE)
• Extending the BI Half-Life - Mike Vickers
• Oracle GoldenGate 101 : A Newbie's Dive into the Unknown - Borkur Steingrimsson
• Aggregation : Oracle BI Server vs. Oracle Optimizer - Stewart Bryson (Oracle ACE)
• Agile Data Warehousing with Exadata and OBIEE - Stewart Bryson (Oracle ACE)
• OBIEE/ADF Integration using the Action Framework - Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE Director)
• OBIEE11g Answers + Dashboards New Features - Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE Director)

So that's it for now for conferences, with the next one being RMOUG Training Days in February 2012. Hopefully see some of you there.