Oracle BIWA User Community

From the 2010 BIWA Membership Survey, the BIWA Board of Directors received a lot of valuable insight into the interests of BIWA members. While at Collaborate ’10 last week in Las Vegas, we agreed to post these interests to help presenters tailor their TechCast proposals to meet these interests. Even though a particular topic may have received a small percentage interest among members, the BIWA Board of Directors may still consider a presentation on that topic to ensure a well-rounded set of TechCasts for all of our membership. 1) Type of TechCast – percent of members who rated these “very useful” or “moderately useful” Best Practices – 98% Tips and Tricks – 96% Case Studies – 91% Oracle product demonstrations – 79% Oracle product overviews – 73% 2) Database Usage – percent of members who use the specific database Oracle 10g – 83% Oracle 11g – 58% Microsoft SQL Server – 39% Oracle 9i – 30% MySQL – 17% IBM DB2 – 16% Oracle 8i – 13% Teradata – 11% 3) Technol

The major events for Tuesday included the second data of the BI BootCamp that started with my talk "De-Mystifying OBIEE / Oracle BI Applications" at 8:00 AM and ended in the BI Panel at 4:30-5:30 PM slot. My talk was followed by the General keynote where IBM's VP of the Optim group, Al Smith delivered the talk. The BI keynote at 10:30 AM was delivered by Robert Gersten, SVP of BI and EPM at Oracle, who finally managed to fly back from Europe after being stuck due to Iceland volcano. The room was jam packed in Robert Gersten's talk, my estimate is about 110 people. Gaurav Rewari, VP of Product Strategy spoke with Robert and gave an overview of the current product and Robert gave the overview of the future roadmap. He mentioned that OBIEE 11 g is expected this summer! There were a fair amount of questions and discussions after his talk on BI/EPM topics. The data mining and the OLAP bootcamps took place and were well attended. Karl Rexer delivered the data mining lab

The highlights on Sunday at Collaborate 2010 were: 1) Deep Dive into OBIEE by Mark Rittman (9-3 PM) the session was well attended (~30) people who came on Sunday. While I could not attend in person, I looked at his handouts and saw that he covered from the the basics of OBIEE and BI Publisher with product demos. He also covered integrating with Essbase towards the end with details like registering an Essbase cube in OBIEE. 2) Apart from attending the IOUG Conference Committee Meeting and helping in setting up the hands-on-lab for BIWA Track, I was able to attend the IOUG Speaker orientation meeting. As IOUG Conference Committee we got some cool Hawaiian shirt and was able to wear it around. 3) At 5 PM was the SIG Reception that was very well attended. Apart from some food and drinks and the SIG tables, there was also the painting of the Mural in the center of the room. The artwork will be donated to a local hospital. IOUG also gave away the Volunteer awards. The Ken Jacob award went t

Collaborate 2010 Conference starts in a day! BIWA SIG will be present in full force at the event, most of our Board of Directors are speaking at the event under the " Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days " BIWA SIG started in 2006 and now has over 2100 members worldwide. It hosted two BIWA Summits - first one at Reston, VA in Sep 2007 and then in Oracle Headquarters (Redwood Shores), CA in Dec 2008. To take a conference to next level BIWA SIG joined hands with its parent organization IOUG, to be a part of Collaborate Conference. "Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days" is a Conference within a Conference. The highlight of the events are: 1) Sunday Deep Dive session covering OBIEE by Mark Rittman 2) BI Boot Camp spanning over two days Mon and Tuesday (all sessions listed below) 3) Hands on Lab covering topics like OBIEE, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), BI Publisher (BIP), Oracle Data Mining (ODM), Oracle OLAP, Excel Plug-in for OLAP and Oracle Spatial (demo). The