Oracle BIWA User Community

Day 2 My presentations were related to Total Recall and Database Development Best Practices. The day ended with the invitation only Geek meet that also had the Linux installfest managed by the OTN staff. Day 3 The Grand BI Debate, Topic was: Are Pure Play BI Vendors on Road to Extinction? The pro team was Joe Thomas, Matt Vranikar and Dan Vlamis The against team was Steve Lemme, Scott Rappoport/Steve Stein and Shyam Varan Nath. The debate was moderated by none other than Ian Abramson who will be the next IOUG President. Both sides gave good arguments such as pro side stated that Larger companies only can afford to invest in the integration of BI technologies with the Applications and Database. An example is IRI the owner of Oracle Express or the root of modern day OLAP was in heavy debt when Oracle bought it and helped revive the OLAP technology on Oracle platform. The against side pointed out the cannibalization of products by Oracle such as OLAP/Essbase, Discoverer/OBIEE and poin...

Day 1 we had the first Unconference session in PowerPoint free zone followed by the BIWA SIG meeting. The SIG meeting was very interactive dicussion between some of the BI industry experts and Oracle PM's and touched different aspects like ETL, BI tools and Oracle's direction in the BI space. I delivered the hands on lab on Oracle Text and Oracle Text Mining in the state of art hands on lab. James Liu has done a wonderful job managing the nuances of the onsite 50 PC lab. I was forced to move the lab to 11g as I could not create text index in 10.2.0.3 where the fix was not available on the OS I used. The attendees loaded unstructured data in Oracle database, ran text queries, setup SQL Developer and Oracle Data miner on the fly to get a good feel of it. The Keynote by Chuck Phillips at 4:45PM was well attended and lead to the Exhibition hall night but that was not the end. The evening ended with Oracle Tuning Coffeehouse....

Monday morning started with opening key note by Andy Mendelson who talked about the DB features that provide Oracle the edge in the world of DB vendors. He highlighted features like Real Application Testing (for realistic testing), Information Lifecycle Management to save on storage costs, on the features for compliance like Total Recall, Database Vault etc. The IOUG voluteer award were also awarded, Tom Kyte got the Ken Jacobs award for contribution to the User Community (they called it IOUG Oracle Contribution award till last year when I got it!). It was nice to hear Ken's recorded video, he was the first recipient of this award, of cource we would have love to see Dr DBA in person but as he joked the technology to cyber port people or replicate people is not there yet! Today we also had the first Unconference session (power point free zone) for BIWA SIG, next is the formal SIG meeting at the Korbel ball room at 11:45 EST. I am using the conference center wireless so connectivi...

On Satthe all the user groups were seen actively setting up their head quarters, registration desks and so on. The hands-on labs are being setup. The conference committees are taking the guided tours to give them membership base a superior experience. The entire Denver Conference center will be used for the conference and the spill over sessions go to Hyatt, which is right next doors on the big blue bear side of the convention center. The convention center has three levels, the street level where you register, the upper exhibit level and the lower level where labs etc will be held. The unconference is the new feature this time and BIWA SIG will host the Business Intelligence case study related session.

Here I am in the mile high city with the mile high spirit! At the Denver airport it is nice to see the banner about Collaborate from the city, reconfirms that you took the right flight and landed in the right city for the next week full of excitement. After getting to Denver and checking in early to the hotel (one of the perks of being a Platinum member of that hotel chain), contacted my former Oracle colleague who lives here. He is conducting the ful day OBIEE training tomorrow, of late any OBIEE related talk has been a big crown puller, we experienced that in BIWA Summit as well. Also getting ready for the conference committee meeting today at 4:00PM. Saw a bit of snow after landing in the city, the airport is about 20 miles NE of the city which means a lot of such will be cutting it close on Thursday on way back home. There are fewer red eye flights out of Denver to East coast than say out of SFO or LAX, so you kinda have to leave at mid day and reach home late night, for those fro...

The Collaborate is almost here.... This year we have to go there with "mile high" spirits, it's in Denver, CO. The snow is melting, too late to ski! ... so time for some serious stuff next week. I look forward to the keynotes by Chuck Philips and Andy Mendelson. There are a lot of BI/DW and Advanced analytics sessions, you can get to a list of these at BIWA site. There will be a debate on Pureplay BI vendors: are they on road to extinction, where debators are from different segments of the industry including from Oracle. Watch out for more details out here....