Oracle BIWA User Community

One of the privileges of being in the BIDW field for long enough, is to do book reviews. Currently, I am looking at the book by Packt Publishing, titled " Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Getting Started ." The author is Bob Griesemer. This book has 9 interesting chapters, however I am jumping to Ch5 for now as it is the Extract, Transform and Load Basics. Someone with a weaker ETL background could reach this first. The interesting section of this chapter is "To Stage or not to Stage." The author talks about key considerations in ETL, such as: > For faster movement of data, amount of source data, degree of manipulation of source data and nature of source is important; AND > Handling failures due to connectivity and handling changes in the source data. The author has presented options for extracting data directly into staging without worrying about computations in the source system or extract along with some manipulation from the source. He brings up a good poin

Cloud Computing is drawing attention from almost all the CIO's. Is it another fad or is the Cloud "real." Since the field is evolving, let us look at some of the details here. In general Cloud Computing allows users and organizations to use computing power on demand just like water or electricity from the grid. Users can request computing power, storage, enterprise applications or even databases from such Cloud services providers. These Cloud Services providers will act as data centers, except they are no longer privately owned by each company. I simpler analogy would be single family home v/s a condominium with multiple tenants who share the common facilities like the hallway, elevator, pool and the club house. The users of Cloud pay only for the computing or storage they use. Thus, companies no longer need to create their own data centers thus do not need to buy servers and massive storage arrays. Cloud Computing is not really something obscure, a lot of us are actuall

The keynote sessions have started and CEO of Infosys S (Kris) Golapakrishnan is now speaking on innovation and how he create a culture of innovation in his company. Each department has to come up with at least 2 new innovations for productivity boost every year. Every building looks different in Infosys, some even like flying saucer. Thus the culture of innovation has to be ubiquitous. Kris is explaining the need for simplifying Organizational complexity. They operate in 27 cities but airline booking is done from one city (Bangalore). Anyone can email Kris (Ask Kris) directly, he gets about 600-800 emails a week and directly responds or are posted in company blog. Kris saus we often use 2000 year old learning techniques..."Learning through collaboration and personalization delivered at their own pace" is most effective" Infosys uses web based training delivery internally to achieve these. ICICI bank of India is power by Infosys solution and is an exaple of branchless ban

Highlights include key note by Michael Dell Release of Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.1 with support for databases like DW DB2 and Teradata. My session was at 5:30PM

The OTN night started at 7PM, in the Tent, good food as usual and the drinks! Entertainment in the far side of the tent, Middle Eastern dancers... On the near side (towards 3rd st) was the Trivia sponsored by Blackberry. I was drafted to be on the stage with 5 other contestants to fight it out for a Blackberry, in front of the crowd! It was a tie with 300 points each, the other contestant from was from Canada. The questions were in three different categories - about Oracle , about RIM/Blackberry and about San Francisco. So what was my winning strategy? Let me explain it in Exadata terms. The storage index is a new concept which is not a pointer to the row or block rather a negative index, i.e. where not to look for data. Likewise, I won with a similar strategy today, the last question was about San Francisco and neither on knew the answer, the other contestant answered and lost the point on the tie breaker, I won... so my "negative" strategy of not answering won me the Bla

I spent a good part of the day in the Exhibit Hall (Moscone West and Moscone South). Some of the things that caught my attention were: 1) Pretty Large Presence of Salesforce.com ( I think it is their first time at OOW) 2) Focus on Oracle on the Cloud, Amazon is also present 3) A real Sumo wrestler in the booth on Application Security - You don't know who you are up against? Steve Miranda is talking now about Oracle Applications including Application unlimited. The customer Smucker is also expected. Janet Foutty of Deloitte will be on the stage. Deloitte is the sponsor of this session. "Business Led and Technology Enabled" is the mantra. Tie back every penny to shareholder value. Janet is talking about Value maps that Deloitte uses to map business problems to Oracle products. Janet has a financial services background. Clients are focussed on cost cutting, efficiency and re-tolling their IT. What's next, in the mind of clients - Improved Agility... is one of them. Nex

According to Ann 40% of Oracle deployments are on HP!!! Ann will tell how HP and Oracle work together to unleash the business potential. Now that EDS is part of HP, it is a big services company as well. Businesses spend 70% of IT budgets on routine operations and 30% on innovation. HP's goal is to help businesses reverse this tread. HP has 3400 Oracle related professionals. I wonder if that includes that came with EDS. HP's goal is to help manage the Information explosion. Now Ann is talking about BI solutions? HP is number 1 on number of server for BI deployments, a lot of these are on Oracle software stack. She mentioned about Neoview - the HP DW appliance.

It's Monday at the Openworld. Having breakfast when my biological clock thinks it is lunch hour (almost!). Karen Tillman VP of Oracle Corporate Communications is sharing details with the media today. Now Oracle is a software and a systems player rather than just a software company. This is the media briefing event. The keynote today is called the Art of the Impossible by Safra Catz and Charles Phillips. Next is Ann Livermore from HP. There are general sessions today in the Hall D (keynote hall) such as the Andy Mendelson's session on Database. Judy Sims is now introducing the event - 1900 sessions, 81,000 hotel room night impact, will serve 170,000 cups of coffee to the guests!!! Spin to Win is a new attraction where some attendees will be able to spin the wheel for VIP status in the customer party. This year most of the reading material will be in the Virtual Collateral with e-bag. Show your badge and get 15% off with 138 merchants here. Use opentable to book dinner. Ton

It's 5:30 PM (PST) now and am getting situated for the first keynote of the OOW. Just finished a hectic day of user group events, most of the BIWA SIG and Exadata SIG sessions were very well attended (multiple sessions with over 100) in the audience. That is impressive as there were ~140 user group sessions today at Moscone West. The day ended in BI Panel discussions that I moderated where Mark Hornick, Mark Rittman, Greg Rahn and Marty Carangelo kicked off some really interesting discussions with good audience participation. Now I see Safra Katz, Larry and Judy Sim walking in to take their seats... at 5:48PM The event starts with a video on Scott.... He is dressed in almost red... and he commented that as Sun is "almost" an Oracle company but not fully red yet. He started with his top 10 list that is known for....top 10 list that makes engineers go wild... Scott's list of top 10 innovations (after 27 yrs of business) under the "SUN": PC NFS SPARC first

Oracle Openworld 2009 is here, sitting in Moscone West (Room 2002 BIWASIG, Exadata SIG 2004), in San Francisco downtown. The sessions are open to all categories of registrant of Oracle Openworld 2009. The Special Interest Group sessions will go on till 5 PM. The first BIWA SIG session was on real world OBIEE implementation related experiences and had over 100 (114) attendees which is a good number for a session right 8:30AM in the morning while folks are busy picking up their badges and taking care of registration. The room 2004 is full of Exadata SIG sessions, the 8:30 session was kicked off by Matt Morris of TUSC and then Dan Norris did a session on best practices. The next session in 2004 is a panel of X team experts from Oracle. More to come....

BIWA SIG is very excited to be present at the Oracle Openworld 2009 with its sessions as below (all these are on Moscone West on Sunday Oct 11): 1) Deep Dive into Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition Support in Oracle BI by Mark Rittman 2) BI Panel: Critical Success Factors for Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing Projects, Moderated by Shyam Varan Nath 3) Lies, Damn Lies, and Visualizing Data with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications by Dan Vlamis 4) Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Implementations in Real-World Environments by Richard Solari and Teresa Wong 5) Oracle Industry Data Model: An “off-the-shelf” Data Warehouse- Faster and Cheaper by Sudip Majumder Thus the topics covered range from Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data Mining to OLAP. Enough content to keep you busy for whole day on Sunday!

I attended the Speakers meeting on Monday (Oct 5), and wanted to share some of the things I learned: 1) There are 5 Streams, 47 Tracks, ~1963 sessions and 398 Partners in the event. Last year the attendance was close to 45,000, I wonder with the developments with SUN, what will be the attendance this year! 2) Management and Infrastructure Track is new this year. This stream talks about OEM, Storage/Flash Storage, Compliance, Oracle VM ... 3) Primavera Conference is new this year with a separate 2 day registration. 4) Oracle Develop is a 3 day event at Hilton, San Francisco. Tom Kyte is one of the Keynote speakers in that event. 5) The Sunday keynote, after a full day of User Group and SIG sessions (140+), will feature Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison at 5:30PM. This is followed by the Tent Party on Howard Street , yes it is really a tent.... 6) There will be a Green Market Place this time. others things of interest are Solution Spotlight, open to Discover Oracle Openworld pass hold

I am getting ready to listen to LARRY Ellison's talk on OLTP version of Exadata using SUN hardware. I see that this may be useful for mixed workload boxes. Larry had said last year while announcing Exadata in Sep '08, that 70% of the workload of OLTP's are for querying of data. Oracle is claiming "The result is a quantum leap in performance over Oracle's previous generation Exadata machine, including a 20x increase in random I/O and a 5x I/O bandwidth speedup with FlashFire Technology, as well as a 2x speedup in compute and network performance capacity." Let us see how Larry is going to explain this.

I had posted about my BIWA SIG Techcast here . I would like this to follow up the event, if you had a question that you wanted to follow up, please use the comments here. I will try to answer those.

Today Oracle 11g R2 was released. It is interesting to note that Linux version is the first to be out as usual, even though Oracle is on verge of owning Solaris OS. Sun and Windows version are expected later this year. The timing is good, it's about 1 1/2 months to Oracle Openworld. I am sure the 11g R2 related session will be a good draw. So what's new in this release: 1) Enhancements to Real Application Cluster, Oracle RAC One Node option is now available for relatively less critical systems. The ASM get's a face lift with intelligent data placement leading to better retrieval rate for data. 2) Advanced data partitioning to allow more online application upgrades. 3) One of the Exadata related feature is called “Warehouse” Compression and is based upon Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression. This technique delivers a typical compression ratio of up to 10:1 for data warehouses, with virtually no negative impact on query performance, per Oracle. The "archive" compr

Here is my personal invitation to come and attend the next Oracle BIWA SIG Techcast called: OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite I p l a n to discuss the following high level topics: 1) Oracle BI Applications for supported Oracle E-Business Suite Modules and other Oracle Applications. It will include real world experiences for implementing BI Apps Version 7.9.6 {yes I have brought a 7.9.6 implementation to production recently!} 2) Custom OBIEE Development against E-Business Suite (when no BI apps are available) 3) Migration of Discoverer EUL to OBIEE RPD using Migration Utility While OBIEE and BI Apps are clearly the strategic analytics reporting direction from Oracle, only certain Analytics applications are available. Sometimes all customer needs for BI reporting may not be met by these pre-built analytics. For instance, JD Edwards has pre-built ETL connectors only for Financial Analytics. While more BI Apps and ETL connectors are in the pipeline, how can users

Dear Shyam Varan These are exciting times for SPSS and for you, our customer. By now you have probably heard the news that SPSS Inc. has entered into an agreement to be acquired by IBM Corporation. First, I want to personally thank you for your patronage over the years and for enabling us to reach this pinnacle event. Second, I want to assure you that, as we go through the process of finalizing the acquisition, our level of support and dedication to academia will remain as strong as ever. During this time, account management and support infrastructure will be at the forefront of our focus and, of course, we will continue to honor our outstanding commitments and contracts. In short, our action plan for the immediate future is business as usual. This agreement is a momentous step, as becoming part of IBM will provide us with the scale and resources to better meet academia’s need for the most advanced data analysis and decision-making tools. We are firmly committed to: Providing acade

It has been a while since I blogged, BIWA hosted a webcast on Data Mining by Charlie Berger and is ready for another one tomorrow on Oracle database 11g optimizer by Maria Colgan . Her talks are generally "sold out." In my opinion her topic is not mainstream BI, yet something that all BIDW professionals need to know to drive performance out of the Oracle DB based data warehouses. We have a few more talks lined up such as Oracle OLAP at Gallup: A Scalable Unified Approach to BI Reporting by the Gallup folks and then mine on OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite Now that my Blogger status for Oracle Openworld 2009, registration is approved, I am "licensed to blog." :) You might have observed that the title of this section is " The Business Case for Social Networks " yet I start talking about BIWA Techcasts. Well, I want to build the business case implicitly and not explicitly. You can note that today almost all the BI experts quote

Wednesday, July 8, 12 noon Eastern BIWA Wednesday TechCast Series - Second Event! Tales from the Front: Strategies for a Successful OBIEE Implementation Click here for details Are you starting a new OBIEE project? Or perhaps you're mired in the muck of an existing project, and things aren't going well. No matter what your experience with OBIEE has been so far, no matter what industry your company is in, this session will provide you with helpful tips and techniques to guide you toward a successful OBIEE implementation. We'll discuss topics such as: Divide and Conquer: The key strengths you need on your OBIEE implementation team. Nothing Stops a Train: But a lack of proper training can stop your project in its tracks. Any Way You Slice It: Why your security model should be one of the first, second, and third things you consider. What's In a Name?: Ideas for implementing a standardized naming convention for the objects in your OBIEE schema. Who's On First? The first,

The Monday keynote by John Kopcke (happy the keynote is in the BI/EPM space, so the lanyard by RittmanMead and bags logo of Interrel!) Do business executives really do not know what they want for BI/EPM is it simply the dashboard envy that drives the projects? John is highlighting the importance of economic downturn for new opportunities. Smukers has grown in profits recently. So what are the high impact strategies: - Cash conservation is a no-brainer here... - Manage risk and performance - Management Excellence (ability of business to be agile in changing times) E.g. Southwest took 4 days to respond to the 911, to change routes and supporting changes... how does this compare at other business... an example of management excellence. I would add the oil price hedging as an another example that has given Southwest an advantage over others. John is now talking about he Hackett Value Grid based on 2000 companies surveyed, as the foundation of World class companies and how they outclass o

Monday sessions start... Todd Trichler is getting the Oracle Contributor Award. Second award goes to Al Marciante - for contribution to Hyperion SIG, having seem him last year and this year at Hyperion Symposium, this is a well-deserved award. Paper awards being announced now ( Editor's Choice ) ...and the winner is Peter Koletzke! Speakers awards based on speaker feedback 1) Presentation style Peter Koletzke (won a kaleidoscope as his award! the real one) 2) Best presentation content topic ...and the winner is Dimitri Geillis (a proud new father this week) I am sitting next to Tom Kyte and have asked him to touch on the recent Big Blue announcement in the Database Panel, that he will participate in. Jeff is explaining why Kaleidoscope has grown in size this year in size, an important milestone in this economy...focus on content. They are inviting Track Managers for next year. The event received over 500 abstracts for 2009, in the 4 main tracks. The APEX track is shown explosiv

Hyperion Planning Roadmap 11.1.2 Release Theme Public sector Budgeting (out of box ERP implementation using ERPI, Support position based budgeting for public sector, public sector process / workflow management, budget books etc) Establish MS Office as a prominent Planning user interface Enhance and Evolve Planning Web Functionality and Usability 11.1.2 also has Data Validation Rules in the Forms for Traffic lite kind of display, based on thresholds. Also this release introduces a much robust member selector. ASO Reporting Cube Links are possible. Lightweight Data Entry Pages (Ajax grids): Planning client can retrieve data from the server asyncronously.

Financial consolidation is almost synonymous with HFM both for Oracle and SAP customers. Janette Hollar of Oracle will be speaking now. In last 25 yrs HFM is the industry leader. It has 1500 customers worldwide. EPMA is used to manage dimesionality over multiple applications. Calculation manager is coming out for it in CY09. On the roadmap for CY10 is better hardware utilization. HFN-GRC provides fully integrated GRC reporting. GRC has application access controls governor to enforce the proper segregation of the duties in applications. The OBIEE and HFM integration will allow HFM data participates in Common Enterprise Information Model. There is plan for BI app for HFM. It will be to see if new content for Informatica will be generated or only ODI connectors will be provided. With this HFM BI apps, dashboards will be able to BI and EPM data in same dashboard out of box. SEC is adopting XBRL for reporting 10K, Quarterly reports in a fashion such that companies can be compared

Mike Cassey is now speaking on ERP and EPM integration.FDM source adapters for eBS R12.06 and 12.1. Target adapters for HFM etc...the goal is to integrate metadata and prevent re-development for the users. FDM ERPI ERP integrator is a new product . Also see this Peoplesoft V9 is also supported. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is used behind the scenes. More support such as public sector planning, SAP and Oracle Fusion GL will be coming in future. Look for some of these in the Talleyrand release. Two important features are Drill Through and Budget write-back. Public sector Planning needs budget data being written for GL encumberances. eBS hierarchies can be pulled by the EPMI, with no need to re-define them. The EPM System workspace has a data load with places for creating the data rules. Likewise, the calendar mapping can be set. Incremental data loading is also possible. FDM allows flat file load, but there is no Universal adapter in the plan right now.

The first key note of today, from Robert Gersten, Snr VP (EPM and BI Development), starting now. Tim did a nice intro of the speaker but there audio problems to begin with... Robert, thanked the Hyperion customers for their loyalty to the product. The 5 core processes of EPM are metrics, planning, management reporting, specialized analytics and financial reporting. Specialized analytics includes what-if, predictive analytics etc. EPM is part of Oracle Fusion Middleware group under Thomas Kurien...The current largest install base of EPM is on 9.x Fusion EPM System 11 will work with OBIEE 11g. This version of OBIEE will support HFM etc. out of box. Oracle EPMS ERP Integration expected in Aug 2009. 11.1.1.x (also called) Kennedy) was a very feature rich release - HFM 64-bit), Essbase (ASO/BSO enhancements) etc. 11.1.2 (Talleyrand) will include features for Public sector, full-featured experience in Excel etc...expected in 4th Quarter. The OBIEE 11g is code named Negril (vacation sp

The sessions started today, got registered at 7:30AM, a see a lot of people, met MArk Rittman picking up his registration. The location is quite a contrast from last year..in the heart of New Orleans with all the traffic, here a very quite resort location, just off the Pacific, and the Hyperion session is in room called Pacific. Got a nice ODTUG jacket at registration, will be good for the chilly weather here (50's). Ed Roske opened the HYP session and talked about the Hyperion Board ballots in the registration bag for the ODTUG attendees. Ed mentioned that there will be a lot of Twitter use this year. And there is mid-night session with chocolates... Al Marciante, mentioned we do not have to see for 8 hrs today and he is going to delegate the tasks much more to the others today (unlike last year). First session on Essbase roadmap started around 8:30AM - speaker is Aneel Shenker. This was followed by the OBIEE 11g roadmap... a number of cool features were talked about - Mike Don

This is the week prior to Kaleidoscope and also the week when Oracle had started inviting the speakers based on the call for presentations. So let's look at what is hot this year, more from the Information Management perspective - i.e. Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Data Warehousing (DW), Enterprise Data Management or the Master Data Management (EDM/MDM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM). In other words, IM is the catch all phrase today for BI/EPM/DW, EDM/MDM and ECM. The Sunday Symposium in Kaleidoscope has Hyperion/ EPM as one of the tracks. BI will be in the back drop. However, there are about 13 talks in the BIDW track , about half are by Oracle speakers. There are about 26 talks in Hyperion related topics , and a number of hands-on sessions. Equal number of Essbase talks . Thus EPM outnumbers BIDW, a few times at Kaleidoscope and that has been the historical trend. What is interesting though that this is a Development Tools User Grou

It was not too long ago that I blogged about Collaborate '09 and now it's about time for Kaleidoscope. It will be my second time at this event. Last year, it was at New Orleans where I volunteered on Saturday to paint a school along with several other volunteers such as Mary Lou Dopart from Oracle. This year the scene shifts to Pacific, Monterey Beach, CA is a very beautiful location. So all those who do not often go to CA or more so to this part of coastal California, about 100 miles south of San Francisco, should definitely try to set aside some time to visit the surrounding places. About 30 miles south is Big Sur...the picture below is a nice view but any picture or video cannot do real justice to the natural beauty of the Monterey and its surrounds. Well enough about the surroundings, let's now get to what we are "really" to the conference for. So even though the conference starts on Saturday with the voluntary event, the main attraction for me is the full d

Check out my proposal for Oracle Openworld 2009, via the Oracle Mix: http://ow.ly/dVg1 Any comments are welcome. It is about implementing Oracle BI Applications - 7.9.6 Thanks

Returned home from a hectic week at Collaborate, was mainly focusing on the BIDW content and was nice to read this article of how BIDW is doing in the current market. Also read Larry's Q&A about his plans for Sun.. one of the obvious questions in people's mind is will Exadata support extend to SPARC processors, seems like that is not on his mind right now... Thanks Shyam

Sitting in the keynote by Al Smit h of IBM... towards the starts he talks about the importance of BI....liked the analogy of cost the of "dirt" in a landscaping project to the cost of managing the "data" as an infrastructure element in the enterprise. Interestingly, IBM handed DB2 flyers on the way in to the keynote....some of you might have seen the recent a announcement about emulating Oracle DB in DB2. This year IBM and Cognos booth are the same unlike the last year, however, noticed Piocon and TUSC have 2 different booth though both are under Rolta umbrella now. A good example of business case for Master Data Management (MDM. Stat from IBM keynote that managers spend more time looking for data than actually using it. Al gave a good example of series of hardware upgrades with small performance boost, but with dimishing returns as data / database keeps grows. Tomorrow, I am speaking on Oracle Exadata and this a great example of why large DW shops need to inclu

Here are the sessions for Tuesday...

Attend the IOUG SIG Orientation on Sunday at 6PM in Peabody Hotel, opposite the convention center.

It's only a day at Collaborate and I heard some folks asking where are the bars!  Well close to Convention center are the highways and it is not right in any Downtown... but there is plenty to do in Orlando, it is the Entertainment Capital of the World with about 52 million tourists every year! That is little more than Las Vegas (~48 million) or London (~27 million). Orlando has second largest hotels room, next only to Vegas... The top destination is Magic Kingdom, Disney.  Universal Studios and Island of Adventure are close to City Walk, i.e. you get to same parking lot and then walk to City walk (11AM onwards till 2AM!) or go to the Parks Universal Studios (movie based rides) or Island of Adventure (roller coaster like rides)- the two theme parks. City Walk is couple of miles from Convention Center, but I best bet is to drive or take the shuttle from the hotel.  Parking is $12 for cars or $3 after 6 PM (used to be free after 6 but 2009 it changed) These Universal Theme Parks riva

Arrived at Orlando today... to get situated before the event starts... The attendees can expect a "warm welcome"  as it will be 68-90F for the next few days... However, almost all hotels have pools and the shuttle from the conference hotel starts early, so one can easily avoid the hot day outside...unless you are from the Sunshine state like myself where 90F is the norm... Main activites start tomorrow for BIWA SIG... BI Panel will have a few BI experts such as Mark Rittman, Martin Carangelo,Dan Vlamis, Charlie Berger and Michael Schrader  and the mightly Ian Abramson moderating it... so do not miss it Sunday,  May 3   6:00 pm – 7:30 pm:   SIG Reception  -  come by the BIWA SIG table and chat with your Colleagues and Oracle PM's  Monday,  May 4 8:00 am - 9:00 am:     rm W230A   -  IOUG BIWA SIG Orientation  1:15 pm - 2:15 pm:    rm     W230A - BI Panel - Critical Success Factor for BI Projects  2:30 pm - 3:30 pm:    rm    330A  -   BIWA SIG - Meeting  Tuesday,  May 5 7:15

Just about when we though we were all set for Collaborate 2009, Larry throws a curve ball! Yes it is the SUNsational news that Sun will be soon under the Oracle umbrella. What does it means for the user community? Well if you check the picture below, newly posted on the Oracle's website, now the Linux layer has become Solaris/Linux: I really wonder how the marketing slogan of Oracle + Linux is unbreakable combination will change now?  Well, when I was sitting in Moscone Center in 2003, listening to one of the keynotes, I remember Scott McNeally joking telling Larry "Are you gonna buy us next?"  It's only six years later and several billion dollars lower, Sun is going to be part of Oracle family. While we rarely look at Sun as one of the database players, really Sun does own MySQL, that Oracle once tried to acquire for a billion dollars.  On the hardware front, it's not long ago that Oracle announced the HP Oracle Database platform. Going forward, it will be inter

We are just about two weeks from Collaborate 2009 , the user group event for Oracle Technology and Applications. My first event on this lines was IOUG Live in 2003 at Orlando. Year 2005 it was back to Orlando, while 2004 was in Toronto. The major change took place in 2006 where Collborate was born when IOUG, OAUG and Quest shook hands together, the event grew many fold in size. Now I am told its over 5000 attendees. 2007 the Collaborate went to the Sin City and from there to the Mile High City in 2008. 2008 was my first time being in the IOUG Conference committee and get a behind the scenes feel. Being a Floridian for a long time, I am happy to see Collaborate being held 2 1/2 hrs of drive away! And I am a big fan of Universal Studios and Disney. The Wed night event will be at City Walk. So what I am looking forward to this time... Apart from the 50+ sessions related to BIWA Track, I am also looking forward to the launch of the Exadata SIG. I thing the release of 1/2 the Exadata rack

Competing on Analytics - Jeanne Harris at BIWA Summit 2008 Listen to Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics and keynote speaker at BIWA Summit 2008 speak about her key ideas in this brief (1 minute) audio clip. Thanks to Jeff Erickson of Oracle for sharing this!

Oracle Exadata Storage Technology See Oracle Vice President of Data Warehousing Development, Ray Roccaforte, discuss the value of Oracle's new Exadata Storage Technology in this brief (under 2 minutes) video clip taken at BIWA Summit 2008.