Meetings and so forth

In London today for the UK OUG BI and Reporting SIG meeting – some cracking good talks ranging from spreadsheet reporting over E-business suite through an overview of the latest incarnation of Oracle Warehouse Builder to practical experiences of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition – all these topics are highly relevant to the things that my customers are doing right now. The DBI stuff was completely new to me but I can see how it might fit within our portfolio. However, as always with such meetings it’s the social dimension of meeting other people doing similar things that makes user groups worth attending.

Earlier this month I wrote of the forthcoming UK OUG meeting in Birmingham. Yesterday I made my booking for he event and started to go through my personal agenda – I can do the whole week except for a couple of hours on the Thursday when I need to see a customer, and as they are in centre of Birmingham, I can fit that around the conference. The first day looked especially intense with a lot of ‘must see sessions’ both in the BI stream and on topics such as data pump (which is highly relevant to some of the things I wish to experiment with) Then late last night I had word that space had been found for my paper, “A brief, but practical introduction to Oracle analytic functions” As I am scheduled for the last slot on the first day I will miss out on data pumps. At the end of a long day I would not be surprised if the numbers in my audience are low, especially given the quality of the competing eight attractions in the other rooms. I must remember to take a towel with me, not because of some reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I may need to mop up water spills from the preceding speaker (if she too accepts her late place offer!)

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