Day two of the Oracle Developer Tools Conference. What a broad spectrum of topics, you can get presentations from six sigma techniques, SOA, ADF, spatial analytics, predictive analytics, OLAP, unit testing and so on. If only I had time to attend them to all. I think the biggest buzzes are around Application Express and SQL Developer. The best part of these conferences is meeting people face-to-face, people you know from various blogs and just being able to sit down and just chat about any topic.
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as an interest group within ODTUG is growing rapidly. The presentations on BI Enterprise Edition have been well attended and everyone is impressed by the quality of the presentations and most importantly the product demos.
Tomorrow is the last day and I will be in the hands-on sessions all day. In the morning we have the Warehouse Builder 10g and in the afternoon there is the Oracle BI OLAP tools. This session will be show casing the new updated version of Discoverer OLAP and the BI Spreadsheet Addin that supports custom aggregates. This allows business users to create their own dimension members by manually selecting dimension members or alternatively by using a dimensional query. Sales Analyzer used to have this feature and it at last been added to the BI OLAP tools so now customers can at last upgrade from OSA to Discoverer and still have all the functionality they enjoyed in OSA (apart from the ability to create a forecast). As an FYI, the OWB team has developed an OSA flat file migration Expert that uses the metadata flat files to create objects and mappings within OWB that can be deployed to an analytic workspace. Using the Expert and BI OLAP tools most OSA customers can be upgraded and up and running in a very short time.
There are plenty of people in cyber space blogging about the conference and so far everyone seems to be impressed. One more day to go...