Yesterday I went to a “best practices” session for universe design on SAP. I would have to say it wasn’t really a best practices session. I expected some tips and rules on when to use what technique, but instead got an overview of universe technology and a workshop where we created and updated universes on BEx queries and relational databases. We used Island Resorts for the relational exercise. 🙂 At the very least I did learn some about building universes on BEx, which isn’t very difficult. They have improved that process in 3.1 as you can use the “View – Refresh Structure” option to review changes that may have been made in the query (or a BW cube) since the universe was built.
I think I need to learn more about how cubes or queries are built in SAP to completely appreciate what’s going on.
As an SAP Mentor I did get a really fun rugby shirt. It has my name on the back which has proved to be beneficial as several folks have recognized me and come up and talked to me. One gentleman was in from Australia; I had met him at the Mastering Business Objects conference earlier this year.
Last night I attended “Insight Night” which was the first edition of this event. The plan is for this event to evolve into a community event, where folks that show up are presented with a problem and given tools (and some time) to solve it, then they will share their solutions or at least the proposed solutions to the audience. Last night we watched a demo of how SAP products (including Explorer and Xcelsius) were used at a yacht race in San Francisco. I should be able to dig up a link and post it; it was fun to see how the different technologies were used by the various race captains.
The crowd here is certainly smaller than last year. I asked someone yesterday, and they suggested that attendance was bout 3,500. I believe last year it was over 6,000 so the number of attendees is really off this year. On the other hand, the folks that did come certainly seem to be appreciating the content.
Yesterday was the first day of Tech Ed 2009. I didn’t attend a lot of specific sessions but had some good conversations with various folks. The main presentation that I did attend was the “roadmap” for the BI products. Nothing too surprising… Crystal and Web Intelligence and Xcelsius featured prominently and Deski was not mentioned even as a legacy product. It’s like they didn’t want to acknowledge that it exists today. There was talk about a “common semantic layer” which is going to involve something new in the universe arena, but they were fairly quiet about specific details.
I was looking forward to the Demo Jam again this year but that got trumped by a dinner invitation. I will make up for it by attending the “Insight Night” tonight instead, which is more specific to the BI products.
Not much more to say right now, more to come later.
The last few weeks have been busy. Oh, I know it doesn’t look like that with the lack of new posts coming out on my blog. But trust me, things have become quite hectic. 🙂 I am getting ready to head off to SAP TechEd 2009 in Phoenix next week. I get to follow that up by attending the GBN Annual Conference for 2009 right here in Dallas. I was able to almost (but didn’t quite yet) make my goal of documenting all of the slides from my GBN presentation last year as blog posts. I have one more post to finish that will complete the extended version of the Designer presentation from 2008. (Maybe I will get the post done one evening at TechEd.)
I hope to put out some daily blog posts from both conferences. My focus this year for TechEd is going to be to try to learn as much as I can about BW and BEx and how they integrate with Business Objects tools. I haven’t done much in that area yet, and I am starting to see more questions on BOB related to these concepts and I would like to know what’s going on.
Another task that has occupied time over the past few weeks was moving to a new laptop. My older laptop had done a great job over the years of supporting my demonstrations, but it was getting “tired” and not able to keep up with the larger virtual machines required to run the latest software. My new laptop should do a real nice job running VMware: I am running the 64bit version of Vista with 8GB of RAM (half of which I can dedicate to the virtual machine). It has a dual-core CPU (3GHz clock speed and 6MB of cache and 1066MHz front-side bus) as well as a 7200 RPM hard drive and… and well, you probably don’t care about the rest of the hardware specifications. 🙂 Suffice it to say, it runs XI 3 in a virtual image along with Oracle and all of my other goodies quite nicely.
I have several draft posts queued up to finish, including the already mentioned completion of the Time Sliced Measures implementation, part II of the rebate post that a couple of folks have mentioned, and I have a head start on some posts related to my 2009 GBN presentation ready to come out. All of this means there should be more than just filler “news” posts in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. 😎
