I am sitting on an airplane heading for home after a very busy 5 days at the conference and a few personal days braving a Washington D.C. heat wave. Not that you really care, but after the conference I took a couple of days off to view the sights of the city. My wife and I spent the 4th on the National Mall watching the fireworks behind the Washington Monument. It is a something everyone should experience.
About the conference. It was all the hype said it would be. Sunday started with the Oracle symposium where product managers gave us insight of things to be. Of course we are not allowed to blog about such things. Drats. Leave it to say that there was some interesting stuff.
On Monday the real conference began. In the opening session, it was announced that Edward Roske will be the conference chair for the upcoming year. The site of next year’s conference was announces as the Long Beach, Ca. Conference center, June 26th – 30th. So mark your calendars now. I understand if you register now, you get the lowest possible rate. Edward did say you can already submit abstracts for the conference. I don’t have connectivity now or I would blog you the site. Another announcement at the opening session was Hyperion SIG board member and all around nice guy Cameron Lackpour was awarded the best new speaker for his presentation last year. If you have a chance, congratulate him.
I started off the conference with my session on MDX practical examples and it seemed to go well. Over 80% of the room had little to no experience with MDX so I think the presentation was at the right level. As typical I had more content than time (even for a 90 minute presentation) so I was rushed at the end. I think I will talk to Danielle White at interRel and have it added as part of the weekly interRel broadcast series. I will either have to cut it down or do it as a two part series. I think the latter would be better. Later in the day, I did Edward Roske’s presentation on ASO optimization. It was like trying to swim through jello(umm red strawberry jello with whipped cream). He had so much great content, There was no way to get through it all. In the end, I ran out of time and did not talk about a few important topics like cache settings. Luckily for people who attended the session following mine, There was a lot of overlap of content and they were able to pick up what I missed. Monday “officially” ended with a session with the Oracle Aces and a reception following. We could have been answering questions for hours, but time was limited. There was a lot of great interaction. I did not see much of the reception as I was in the interRel booth meeting people and seeing old and new friends.
This year the conference had a room reserved for werewolf and there were games every night starting at 10:00 pm. IT worked out well. It was a full moon during the conference and the wolves came out in mass. we has multiple games going every night. Edward did not want to sleep Wed night so the game went till 4:30 am. I was lucky to make it to bed by 2 am most nights as I moderated games.
Tuesday came too early and fast. Luckily I did not have any presentations to do. I ended up doing some work for clients. I popped in and out of sessions all day long and have to say overall I was very impressed by the presenters. Most sessions had between 80 and 120 people in them (not including the labs). I did sit through Doug Pearce and George Cooper’s presentation on a case study on how GAP (The clothing company) used a combination of BSO, ASO, Varying attributes and text measures to allow users to track the uplift of promotions. (I hope I got that all correct). It was a very interesting session. I have worked with Both Doug and George in former lives and it was fun and interesting to watch their interaction. The presentation had good technical content on how they overcame problems, but I would have liked to have seen a bit more talked about on what text lists and Varying attributes are (I did mention this to Doug later).
Tuesday night was the interRel client event so I was busy. We had three (or four) Werewolf games going at once in a kill all competition. The winners of each game played in a final game for great prizes (don’t ask me what I have no clue).
Wednesday was a busy day. I did a presentation on Advanced Essbase Studio tips and tricks. There was a Essbase Studio Basics session going on a few doors down, but over three fourths of my room had no to little experience with the product. I afraid some of my presentation was over their heads. The information was good and when they start using Studio, it will help them but until then I’m sure I confused more than a few people.
I was the Ambassador for Cameron Lackpour and Markus Shipley’s (forgive me is I spelled names wrong) intro to ODI session. At Kaleidoscope, every session has an ambassador to introduce the speakers, record attendance and overall be a go-for, in case of problems. It was a 90 minute presentation and they needed every minute of it to get the information across. Cameron went into detail on what you have to do to create an integration and then Marcus gave a real world example of how his company implemented it, solving multiple problems. They went from days, literally days, of work to get data loaded into Essbase into multi-minute long automations. It was amazing to hear how much his users love the results of the project.
I later sat in on Edward Roske’s Hacking Essbase session. The room was packed with standing room only. Edward is a great and knowledgeable speaker. He could have spent a day just with this one session and answering the crowd’s questions. He promised a mush longer session next year.
Wednesday night was the Kaleidoscope event where John Heffron (the winner of last comic standing) entertained us all. I had never seen him before. I was laughing so hard, I had tears in my eyes. If you have not seen him, I highly recommend searching him out and listening to his work. Than k you interRel for co sponsoring the event so the conference could afford him. The other entertainment that night was a band that I was not impressed with. I' will not tell you their name as for me it was not worth remembering.
Oh one special note about the event. The volunteer of the year award was given out. This year it was not to a single person, but to the entire Hyperion SIG board for the amount of work they put in to make the week a success. Thank you Gary Crisci, Angelia Wilcox, Natalie Delemar, Cameron Lackpour, Doug Bliss Quinlann Eddy, Tim Tow, Jeff McAhren and Edward Roske. The executive board could not have made a better choice. (see my note below about board elections held)
At 4:43 am on Thursday, I got a text telling me, I was doing Edward’s 8:30 session on BSO and ASO internals. So I was bright eyed and not so bushy tailed very early in the morning to give it. I was really amazed that on Thursday so early, the room had a good number of participants. I guess they had not heard that Tracy or Edward was not presenting, but I was. As typical I talk too much and ran over a few minutes, but most people did not mind and I think there was a lot of good content. I got a small break then presented my load rules basics to advanced. Lots of good questions, but to a much smaller group. The conference was winding down.
Overall I think the conference was a great success. I heard multiple time from participants “That tip paid for the whole conference” during various sessions. While this year I did not get much time to see other sessions as I would have liked, The feedback I got from others was that the conference was outstanding.
On a personal note, I was re-elected to the Hyperion SIG board along with Joe Aultman (Autotrader), Brian Suter (Dell) and Alice Lawrence(LSGSKY Chefs) so if you have any suggestions for next year’s conference or have an abstract to present or something you would like the board to do, please let me know.
Posts
