Open World Tuesday

OK, I’ll start out with a couple of observations about the conference. First, I find it interesting that the scheduler builder web site went down Sunday night and was not available Monday most of the day when I tried. Also getting to the agenda did not work most of Monday. Perhaps Oracle should talk to a software company to help them have software to support the load. Not a good showing Oracle. Second, I don’t understand why snacks come out at the end of breaks and right before the next session is starting. In addition, why are coffee and tea limited to certain breaks. It would be nice to have it available between sessions. With all the money Oracle is spending on the conference, I’m sure this could not add much to the cost or running the conference. It would also keep more of us awake on these long days. Finally, why do we need an hour dedicated to the exhibition hall? I realize the vendors paid a whole lot to be there, I’m sure most people have been though the exhibition halls multiple times already. We don’t need to cram everyone into the feeding frenzy at one time.

My first session of the day was “Management Excellence, Performance Leadership” by Frank Butterendijk (Hope I spelled that right). Although this session was listed as Hyperion, It wasn’t. Frank is an interesting speaker and related Performance management to cultural Analysis. He did this only using one power point in the presentation. He wrote a book on the subject and although I have not read it, if it is anything like the way he talks, it should be a good read. Frank talked about compensation being related to revenue which is his opinion is wrong, He says it should be more related to contribution. I agree with this. It is wrong due to two reasons, thoughtlessness and laziness. It’s easier to do things the way then always have than to come up with better ways. Some other things Frank said that I thought interesting were? Performance indicators need to be assigned to individuals and not shared. Shared responsibility is no responsibility. He had some interesting cases which the audience helped him evaluate (His powerpoint slide). Overall he was informative and enjoyable, but I left a little empty thinking it should have been related to how to define key metrics or how to evaluate them or something related to software that would provide tangible results.

Most of the rest of the day was a bust. I had to skip a couple of sessions I planned to attend to provide my own little un-conference for a client that had created a cube and had performance issues with it, I spent a couple of hours teaching them about dense/sparse settings, outline organization, cache settings, Load rule optimization and ASO cubes. In the end I think they got a lot out of it.

I did find what I think the best deal of the conference is.(At least to me). While I didn’t pick up any of the junk any of the vendors were offering. I found if I had lunch at the Yerba Buena gardens, they gave me a cool oracle blanket to sit on in the grass. I got to keep it. Ok so I picked up one think I don’t need, but really like.

I finished off the day listening to Ray Roccaforte and John Kopke on Oracle Essbase in the middle tier and Oracle OLAP in the database tier. I thought Ray was a bit boring, just re-reading what was on his power points. John was much more polished and more enjoyable to listen to. While I though this session was going to explain to me how to integrate the two technologies together, it really was two distinct presentations. The first describing Oracle Olap and the second describing Essbase.
Is short the grid they provided showed the differences. They went though it quickly and hopefully I got everything correct in it. Some of it is summarized.



I was supposed to go to a party hosted by Applied OLAP and a couple other companies, but I got out the session late and didn’t want to figure out how to get to the hotel. Instead I want to the Oracle Ace dinner and had a nice time talking to a number of other Aces and Ace Directors.

I’m afraid, this will be my last post on the conference. I have to go back to the real world tomorrow and meet with a client.