BI Forum in England

I'm here in sunny (well, rainy, to be honest) Brighton, England after a near 24-hour trip from Dallas, Texas. The view out my window is of the ocean (and both a carnival pier and a burned down pier) and it's stunningly beautiful. It's about 11:30PM here in Brighton, and my screwed up inner clock just woke me up for the day. Who needs jet lag: just wake up and go to sleep by your internal clock, time zones be damned.

I'm here to speak at an event Mark Rittman's company is putting on. They've invited people from around the world including some from as far away as India and the United States (that'd be me from the USA). We're all going to be talking about Oracle EPM and BI. Though they do tend to skew more towards OBIEE and Oracle OLAP, there are two presentations on Essbase. I'm doing one on the inner workings of Essbase which is basically a "How Essbase Thinks" presentation but taken down to a slightly lower level due to the expert-level of the audience.

I'm looking forward to getting grilled during my session as the attendees play a rousing version of "Stump the Speaker." [Is it weird to look forward to that sort of thing? Discuss Edward's potential mental issues in the comments.] The schedule for the next two days is fairly comprehensive and includes speakers from Oracle as well as the partner community (and maybe a customer or two):

May 14

• Craig Stewart : “Pure Oracle - New BI Applications with Oracle Data Integrator”
• Edward Roske : “The Internal Workings of Essbase”
• Mark Rittman : “Optimizing the Oracle BI Apps using Oracle Data Warehousing Features”
• John Minkjan : “OBIEE Cache Management”
• Venkat Janakiraman : “OBIEE and Essbase Security Integration”
• Adam Bloom : “How to Blow Up the BI Server - A Case Study for Diagnosis of Performance Issues “
• Andreas Nobbmann : “Scripting OBIEE - Is UDML and XML all you need?”

May 15

• Mike Durran : “Oracle BI Roadmap & Strategy”
• Emiel van Bockel : “OBIEE - The Rising Sun to Leave Stars and Snow Behind”
• Daan Bakboord : “Oracle BI EE and Mapviewer”
• Gerard Braat : “Understanding the Oracle BI EE Server Engine - Mastering the Random Request”
• Adrian Ward : “OBIEE Global Implementations”
• Antony Heljula : “Oracle BI & SOA Integration”
• Peter Brink : “Integrating Cube Organized MVs into a Data Warehouse Environment”

If anything interesting comes up, I'll be sure to mention it. My presentation is in less than 12 hours, so now I just need to figure out if I should force my body to try to sleep or just stay up all night?