Well we’re back now from two weeks in the States, the first week of which was vacation in San Francisco and Yosemite, the last was at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 in Monterey. Well done to the ODTUG team and to the Oracle ACE program for an exceptionally-well organized conference, as I’ve said in the past ODTUG Kaleidoscope is big enough to draw in the best speakers but small enough to get to meet everyone, and Mike, Kathleen, Crystal and the rest of the team make us all feel very welcome. Thanks again for the invite over.

As I had the family with me I spent a bit less time at actual sessions this time, but still made it to the key events. Tim Tow and Edward Roske did an excellent job of organizing the Hyperion stream and gave me a few ideas for the BI stream for next year; on reflection, although we had some good BI speakers this year the BI stream itself was a bit disjointed and didn’t really have the coherence that the Hyperion stream did. Next year our plan is to take a much more proactive approach to the BI content and try and organize it in a similar way to the Hyperion sessions, with streams dedicated to ETL + DW, OBIEE and so on. If anyone reading this is likely to go next year and wants to help shape next year’s agenda, drop me a line and we’ll make a start soon.

Rittman Mead had a great turnout at the conference, with our names on the lanyards and Stewart Bryson kicking off the sessions with a deep look into the functonality of Oracle Warehouse Builder. Stewarts’ presentation is on our Articles page and here’s a quick video clip of him presenting:

In case you’re wondering, that’s Joe Leva (our US MD) and Lewis Cunningham (Oracle ACE Director) that I pan to towards the the middle of the video.

My two sessions were on Optimizing Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, and a joint paper I wrote with Venkat on Creating Hybrid Relational/Multi-Dimensional Data Models using OBIEE and Essbase. Both papers are on are articles page, including a white paper that accompanied the Essbase paper that goes into a number of different integration use-cases. Now that Venkat has joined us you can expect him and I to be authoring a bunch of other papers together, and to start things off we’ve had an updated version of the Essbase and OBIEE paper accepted for Open World 2009 in San Francisco.

Unfortunately as Venkat has only just left Oracle and joined us he couldn’t make it in person to Monterey, however I had a good stand-in as my six year-old son Scott was able to introduce me instead … we’d talked about this the evening before and he was up for doing a short introduction, and here he is introducing me at the start of the talk:

Well done to Scott! I’ll have him doing the demos next time…

Well for now it’s a quick turnaround and repack, as I’m off to Istanbul tomorrow to deliver a two-day Oracle 11g Data Warehousing seminar for Oracle University. After that it’s back up to London for a couple of days of client work, and starting to write the presentations and papers for Open World 2009.

I’m currently sitting in the Hyatt lobby at 6am, with the family fast asleep back in their hotel rooms and myself getting ready for ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009. This I brought the family over and we took a week out before the conference to visit San Francisco and Yosemite National Park, and our weather has varied between sunny but mild in San Francisco, very hot in Yosemite and now worryingly windy and chilly in Monterey. For me now it’s time to get down to some technical stuff and I’m currently running through my two sessions and making sure the demos are still working.

After breakfast this morning we’ve got what is now the annual Essbase Symposium at ODTUG Kaleidoscope, organized by my good friends Edward Roske and Tim Tow, starting off with an introduction by Edward and then handing off to Al Marciante for the rest of the day. As I’ve got the family here and it’s fathers’ day I’ll be dipping in and out of this session rather than attending right through, but there are some good sessions on Essbase futures, Planning futures together with sessions on how the Hyperion stack is further integrating with the BI stack that we work with. It’s a shame I can’t stay all day but it looks like an excellent session organized by Tim and Edward.

Starting on Monday are the sessions proper, and again I’m balancing presenting, being a session ambassador, getting to the sessions organized by a few friends and colleagues and spending a bit of time with Janet and the kids. As things stand, here’s what I’m planning to attend:

• Monday : Stewart Bryson, “What to Consider Before Selecting OWB” (Regency Ballroom III, 10:00 - 11:30)
• Monday : Doug Burke , “OBIEE Answers+ on Essbase: The Future of Ad-Hoc Analysis” (Big Sur, 13:00 - 14:00)
• Tuesday : Mike Durran, “Enabling Actionable Business Intelligence with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition” (Regency Ballroom III, 8:00 - 9:00)
• Tuesday : BI/DW Panel (I will be on the panel) (Pacific, 09:15 - 10:15)
• Tuesday : Mark Rittman, “An Oracle BI EE Optimization Methodology” (Grove, 13:30 - 14:30)
• Tuesday : Michael Casey, “Managing your EPM applications centrally via EPM Architect” (Cypress I & II, 14:45 - 15:45)
• Tuesday : Michael Bowen, “Workarounds for Those Little Things You Hate in Hyperion” (Cypress I & II, 16:15 - 17:15)
• Tuesday : Sundown Sessions - Hyperion, Essbase, and BI (I will be on this ACE Director event) (Big Sur, 17:15 - 18:15)
• Tuesday : Oracle ACE Director Meal (19:00 onwards)
• Wednesday : Mark Rittman, “Creating Hybrid Essbase / Relational OBIEE Logical Models” (Grove, 13:30 - 14:30)
• Thursday : Jean-Pierre Dijcks, “Best practices for deploying a Data Warehouse on Oracle Database 11g” (Regency Ballroom III, 10:30 - 12:00)

Apart from my ODTUG BI&DW SIG duties, I’m also here courtesy of the Oracle ACE Director program, so I’ll be taking part in the Sundown Sessions on Tuesday along with Tim Tow, Tracey McMullen and Edward Roske, and going to the ACE Directors meal just afterwards. Because I was on vacation the week before I missed the ACE Director product briefing on the Friday, but although this was a shame based on previous years it’s likely the focus was more on middleware and the database rather than BI and Hyperion so I doubt I missed much that was directly relevant to me. Still, I expect there was some news on the 11g Application Server release due on 1st July, and maybe even something on the 11gR2 release of the database, I’ll have to try and catch up with some of the other ACE Directors over the week and hear what was new.

On the Rittman Mead side, we’ve got myself, Stewart Bryson and Joe Leva at the conference for most of the week, so if you see us in our Rittman Mead shirts or during a session, come and say hello. We’ve also got a rather special announcement to make this week at ODTUG that I’ll reveal later in the week, and this will be a good chance for me to catch up with our US-based colleagues.

Finally, I think both Stewart and I will be blogging this week on the event, and Joe and I will be posting updates on Twitter (@markrittman, @joeleva). ODTUG have their own #ODTUG tag for this week’s event, and are also suggesting a scheme where you add the session number to the ODTUG tag (for example, #ODTUG S043 for my OBIEE Optimization session) so that the presenter can run a live Twitter client on his desktop during the presentation and take questions online as well as in-person. Personally, I think this is a bit ambitious as it’s hectic enough taking questions from the audience as you’re presenting, but I’ll try and give it a go and see how it works. Kudos though to the ODTUG committee for embracing these new collaboration methods.

Anyway, that’s it for me now. The Essbase Symposium starts in just over an hour, I’m going to go and register shortly and get myself ready for some hard-core Hyperion action.