After a late night last night I was definitely dragging this morning getting to the conference, I came in about 10 and caught up on email until lunch time. I caught the BI / Data Warehousing Panel discussion, it was good with where people had been, but due to poor attendence there really weren’t any ground breaking questions. I was amazed to see how many Oracle BI employees were at the conference and had made it to this session, I swear half the room had come from Oracle. Its good to see them all coming out and supporting the BI development community at conferences like this.
I had to sneak out early to prepare for my “Quick Web Development with jDeveloper” presentation. The presentation went well, its actually a presentation put together by own of the owners (Brad Brown). I think it went over well, one thing I noticed at the conference were a lot of Reports and Forms developers looking for the next thing and direction on those tools. I think this presentation helped a lot of people to realize that jDeveloper is nothing to be afraid of and how easy of a tool it is to create basic forms and reports.
After my presentation I spent a good half an hour talking with people about jDev and where I though Oracle was going with it. Lastly, I went back and did booth duty until 5 when I met Dan Norris an ex-TUSCer and Shaun for dinner. It was good to catch up with Dan, he was one of the first people I went out on a project with when I joined TUSC. He’s always good for some database war stories and to bounce new ideas off of.
The last day of ODTUG started much like the rest of them, on the Metro at 8 and to the conference by 9. I caught up on some email and client work that I’d been putting off and then went off to Dan’s presentation on “Why you need a technical review board.” This was a presentation based on a client that Dan and I both worked on together and is really something that I believe should be part of every organization. No matter how formal or informal it is, a TRB should really help drive a company technically while controlling the environment from being completely out of control. I also served as Dan’s moderator for the talk and got a “nifty” ODTUG hat for it.
After Dan’s presentation I headed over to Andre Beland’s presentation on the “Oracle 10gR2 Rules Manager” based on the name I had hoped this was the new rules manager that links in with BPEL, but it was the database version of the rules engine. There was definitely some interesting content in there on creating and linking rules, but I think the most fun was watching Mark Rittman try and get his change data capture process up and running again before his presentation.
After a client call I caught Mark Rittman’s “Building an Effective Data Warehousing Architecture”, it was a good overview presentation on building an effective warehousing environment, but what I enjoyed the most was the change data capture and new Oracle Warehouse Builder profiling pieces. CDC is something that I’ve always built custom scripts or used MVs to manage (I could never get streams working flawlessly) but CDC seems to help solve a lot of those problems. With the 10.1.2 release of the DB a lot of the overhead from triggers on tables is replaced by reading the redo logs. The profiling piece is a nice add-on to the Warehouse Builder tool, I struggle with its $15K per CPU price tag, but it definitely helps automate some of the profiling I’ve traditionally done with scripts and SQL statements. But with that price tag I don’t think my scripts will be collecting dust anytime soon. I checked out of Marks talk early so that I could prepare for my “Changing the World with Oracle Web Services” presentation, of course it was right as Mark was getting to some of the really good stuff.
Being the last presentation time for the conference I thought the room would be empty, but it was anything but, the room was packed. I saw many of the same faces from my “Quick Web Development” presentation so it must not have gone that badly (honestly, I felt flat for that one for some reason). The presentation went very well and I received a lot of compliments on how I cleared up some of the haze for people my breaking it down into easy to understand parts. This was another presentation I did for Brad Brown, but modified and went off on lots of tangents of my own. I got a lot of ribbing for drinking a RedBull during the presentation, but I honestly think it helped me concentrate.
Well thats all for another ODTUG…sorry these got finished so late, I’ve been starting a new project with a client thats very aggressive and didn’t get a chance to finish these up. I’m hoping to have some more interactive articles up shortly and a big announcement on this site I’ve been working on.