Essbase Classes by Edward

In case anyone wants to attend, I'm teaching my annual class on Oracle Essbase Design & Optimization on May 28-29 at our Ballpark offices in Dallas, Texas. It was originally supposed to be the week before, but I asked that it get moved back a week so I could personally teach the class. The class will cover Essbase versions 7, 9, and 11, since most design tips are the same across all the versions. Here's the description:

This training course will teach you the steps effectively design and optimize your Essbase environment. We’ll review design best practices used by the consultants to improve the end user experience and make your life easier as an Essbase administrator. We’ll cover how you can improve system performance by an order of magnitude as well as how you can realize faster dimension builds, speedier data loads, and blazingly fast calculations by modifying caches, configuration settings, calculation commands, outline optimizations and more. This knowledge is gained through material review and hands on exercises. This course is recommended for Essbase administrators and developers.

The class is only $1,500 for both days and there are spots available. If you want to sign up, e-mail Danielle White, interRel's Director of Client Education. As a bonus, if you get in early enough on the night of May 27, you can watch the Texas Rangers play the New York Yankees from our balcony in the outfield of the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas. This is a sold out game, and it should be a great one.

Calc Scripts for Mere Mortals

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm also teaching my annual class on Essbase Calc Scripts at our Ballpark offices on the 12th of June. It's only a one day class, so if you don't want to fly in just for this class, we can make arrangements for you to participate remotely. If you've always wanted to learn more about Essbase BSO Calc Scripts, this is your one-day chance. Yes, there is also a baseball game that day, so if you're a Dodgers fan come in person and stay around after the class to watch the Rangers take on Los Angeles. After the game, there will even be a remarkably impressive fireworks show. All that for only $750? Money well spent, people.

Solutions Road Trip - End of the Day

After the sessions and before the baseball game started, we had a networking event that the North Texas HUG (NTxHUG) likes to call "User to User Exchange." It's an opportunity for everyone to ask questions about his latest Hyperion issue to see if anyone else knows the answer. It can turn into a bitch session at times with everyone complaining at length about their bug of the week, but today was thankfully restrained.

Mike Burkhart from Alcon started off by asking how many new attendees were in the audience. Over half the audience raised their hands to say this was their first NTxHUG meeting. Each of the new members got to give a brief introduction. To my pleasant surprise, half of the new attendees were from out of town. Some were from Austin (about 200 miles outside of Dallas), a lot were from Oklahoma City and Houston, and there were a few from farther away than that. Two guys actually flew in from San Francisco which just goes to show how starved for a Hyperion conference people are. Humorously, one of the guys from California won a pair of Dallas Stars NHL Playoff tickets we were giving away. He asked to swap it for a certificate for 1 free day of Hyperion training. Another person who won a pair of playoff tickets asked to swap it for one of my Essbase books. I guess the National Hockey League isn't as popular as it once was.

Speaking of sports, the baseball game pitted the Texas Rangers against their hated rivals, the Oakland A's. Note that while the Rangers hate the A's, the A's couldn't care in the least about the Rangers, because as a general rule, the Rangers are shockingly awful. Tonight though, the Rangers not only won, they posted their third straight shutout. They've now gone 31 innings without a run scored on them which apparently hasn't happened since 2005. Here's the view from our patio:

In total, I think today was a great success. We're definitely going to repeat this in the future at locations other than North Texas. Already, two other regional Hyperion User Groups have contacted us about hosting similar road trips to their areas. We're more than willing to travel around the United States or the world, so if you're interested in having us come to put on, say, "Solutions Road Trip to Alaska," don't hesitate to send Danielle an e-mail.

The only thing I'd probably do differently is to expand the event to an entire day. This would allow us to get 6-9 more presentations in (3 tracks times 2-3 presentations per track in the morning). We'd probably need to charge a fee, though, to cover costs of the food for lunch. We ate all the costs (pun possibly intended) for this event and with the rooms, food, drinks, door prizes, travel costs, and so on, we ended up spending several thousand dollars. Was it worth it? Yes, but if we had just asked each person to pay $49 for the day, we wouldn't have lost money with the event. Any overage we could have given to the local Hyperion User Group, and people would be thrilled to pay $49 for all these hours of education. I talked to several people that were shocked we weren't charging since they're used to paying $750 for a day of Hyperion training.

Would you pay up to $99 for a full-day conference? Discuss.