UKOUG Conference Call for Papers - Just Two Weeks Left!

Although it's great fun to travel the world speaking at events such as Oracle Openworld, Collaborate and ODTUG KScope, Rittman Mead in the UK still consider the UK Oracle User Group Conference, held in Birmingham in November or December each year, to be our "home" conference and our main showcase for what we've been up to in the last year. Like most of the big annual conferences, the UKOUG event has multiple streams and the one we're particularly interested in is the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing stream, covering topics and products such as OBIEE, ODI, Essbase and Oracle OLAP, BI methodologies and the BI Applications.

Jon Mead is on the board of directors for the UKOUG, and both Jon and I have chaired the Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG within the UKOUG in previous years. I'm particularly keen that we get some good, new and in-depth content around Oracle BI, DW and ETL for this year's event, and I'd imagine papers on the following topics might go down well:

• OBIEE development methodologies and best/right practices
• OBIEE metadata modeling techniques, particularly against OLTP sources, OLAP sources and federating disparate data sources
• Dashboard design best practices, and anything around effective / innovative visualizations
• Presentations around data mining, Oracle R, big data and Hadoop
• Tips and techniques around ODI, including migrations from OWB and Informatica
• Papers around mapping, mobile, scorecards or any of the other OBIEE extensions introduced with 11g
• Techniques to get the best out of the BI Apps, including handling upgrades, preparing for the Fusion Apps, and combining packaged data models with custom ones

I'll be putting a paper in on real-world use of the Exalytics In-Memory Machine, based on testing we'll be doing over the summer along with feedback from customer PoCs. All speakers get a three-day pass to attend all of the other sessions, and if you get accepted you'll be presenting at Europe's biggest Oracle conference as well as knowing you're contributing to a great event. There's also a number of great social events and awards over the three days of the conference, and the photo below is of Debra Lilley (UKOUG President) and Lisa Dobson (Vice President) giving the awards whilst Vikki Lira (OTN and the ACE Program) stands in the foreground.

The call for papers website is here, and you've got until the 1st of June to get your abstracts in. Hopefully I'll see some of you attend, and maybe present,