First of all, if you were at the recent UKOUG BIRT SIG or the Scottish Conference, our papers are now available for download:

• To EPB Or Not To EPB
• Oracle BI&W Product Update (slides)
• Oracle BI&W Product Update (accompanying paper)

Both days went really well, and it was particularly good to chat to a few people who read this site and Orablogs. If ever you're at an event and you see me there, come over and say hello as it's always interesting to get a bit of feedback.

I've also updated the articles and Oracle resources pages with links to articles and presentations I've mentioned recently. If you've not seen them recently, be sure to check out these previous postings:

• A Look Into The Future Of Microsoft And Oracle OLAP (DBAZine)
• Application Tuning Using Extended SQL Trace And TKPROF
• Eric Sink On The Business Of Software (... And Consulting)
• The Best of Both Worlds - Cross-breeding Java and PL/SQL
• Controlling Mythological Code
• Five Practical XQuery Applications
• An Alternative Approach to Summary Table Management Using Advanced Queues
• Analytic Functions In Oracle Warehouse Builder
• A Database-centric Approach to J2EE Application Development
• Reporting tools available for e-Business Suite 11i
• HTML DB Best Practices

Also, if you're looking for new books, be sure to check out Oracle Insights: Tales From The OakTable and Joel On Software : Selected Essays which I highly recommend.

It's almost time for the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition, and one of the things I do each year is volunteer to chair a number of presentations. If you agree to chair a set number, you get given a free conference pass (although I get one anyway as a SIG chair, and through doing one presentation myself) but it's a good chance to sit in on some interesting presentations, help out a bit, and get to meet some interesting people.

This year, I speculatively put my name down to chair some of the bigger-name presentations, and surprisingly enough I actually got most of them. So this year, if you're going to Jonathan Lewis' "Statistics - how often and how precise ?", Niall Litchfield's "You Probably Don't Need Dataguard", Tim Gorman's "Scaling to Infinity – Partitioning Data Warehouses in Oracle" or Lillian Hobbs' "Keeping the Database Open 24 Hrs with Oracle Online Redefinition" then look out for the bloke making the introductions, looking at his watch and hoping that the speaker finishes up in time for a few questions...

On the product front, things are going to get a bit busy over the next couple of months, with all the new versions of Discoverer, AWM, OWB and the rest of the Oracle BI&W tools due for release soon. The latest I've heard is that Discoverer 'Drake', together with the Excel Add-in and the new version of BI Beans will be released in the first week of November, and will be collectively known as 'Oracle Business Intelligence 10g'. Analytic Workspace Manager 2, together with the 10.1.0.3B database patch, should be out around the same time (if not earlier), with Oracle Warehouse Builder "Paris" due out either at the end of 2004, or in early February 2005, depending on who you speak to. Enterprise Planning & Budgeting, as you probably know, was released in its initial version earlier this week.

I'm obviously a bit limited in what I can say (beta program restrictions) but what I've seen of the new tools is very, very exciting. Analytic Workspace Manager 2 in particular is a huge improvement over the first version, and makes it extremely straightforward for a departmental 'power-user' to put together Oracle OLAP cubes without worrying about OLAP DML and how AW objects are defined and built.

I mentioned the other week that I'm giving a presentation at Open World in San Francisco in December. I'd had a paper on 10g Business Intelligence accepted for the UKOUG, and thought I'd submit it as one of the ODTUG papers for Open World. To be honest, I'd forgotten all about it, but a couple of weeks ago I had an email through saying that it'd been accepted, so now when I go over there I'll actually have some work to do :-) I've presented in Munich before but never over in the USA, and for this paper I've said I'll actually build a demo during the presentation using AWM2 and Discoverer 'Drake', so if you've over at OOW and can make it to the presentation, make sure to pop along as it should hopefully be quite an entertaining sixty minutes...

Lastly, If you're wondering why there haven't been many in-depth technical articles recently, it's because I've been getting to grips with the various 10g BI&W product betas, and whilst the beta program is going on, we're not allowed to publish details about the tools. However, once the products are released, check back for a number of articles, tutorials and "how-to's" on building 10g business intelligence application, as I'll have quite a bit ready to publish.