• George Mathew (@gkm1)
• Mico Yuk (@micoyuk)
• Greg Myers (@gpmyers)
• Gabe Orthous (@orthous)
• Mark Hudson (@antivia)
• Dan Grew (@dangrew)
• Ingo Hilgefort (@ihilgefort)
• George Peck
• Peter O’Donnell (@podonnel)
• Corey Adams (@oz_bob)

I participated in a BI4 Ramp-up panel discussion, and also presented on ‘New Features in the BI4 Semantic Layer’.  You can view my presentation here (MBO11 – Joshua Fletcher – New Features in BI4 Semantic Layer).  I am very excited about this major upgrade to universe functionality, and is something that has been sorely needed for a while now.  For those who were (un)fortunate enough to use classic BusinessObjects 6.x and prior, you will know the universe hasn’t had much change in the last 4 major releases.

I attended mostly technical sessions, and some of the highlights for me were my fellow DSLayer member Greg Myers presenting on server architecture and uptime best practices, Mico Yuk presenting on Xcelsius (now SCDD) best practices and dashboard scoping, and George Mathew’s keynote on what to expect from BI4.1 and beyond.

If you want to check out the mass of tweets from the conference, check out the #mbo11 hashtag.

My next conference will be at the Mastering Business Intelligence with SAP 2011 in Johannesburg, South Africa, towards the end of August.  This will also be hosted by The Eventful Group, and I’ll be presenting twice.  One presentation will be an end-to-end live demo of BI4, and the other will be on managing your data with Data Services 4.0.

I’ve had several frustrations with optimising VMs to run for demos.  Pausing my VMs caused poor performance, and even cold-booting the VMs still didn’t perform as well as I’d like.  I attribute this mainly to the bottleneck caused by my 320GB 7200rpm internal hard drive.  Both my CPU and RAM seem to never max out while running VMs – current specs being 2.4 GHz and 4GB RAM.

I’ve been planning to upgrade for a while and I’ve finally signed the documents and ordered the new laptop.  I’m staying with MacBooks, but am going to try out Bootcamp this time.

Here’s the specs:

• 15″ Apple MacBook Pro
• 3.06 GHz CPU
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB SSD (Photofast G-Monster)
• Matte screen (glossy screens = mirror)

The Photofast SSDs apparently sustain 270Mb/s reads and writes, so I’m expecting this baby to fly!  I could have stayed with a 13″, but I would only have been able to get a 2.53 GHz CPU and the screen size is also getting on my nerves recently.

In terms of the software setup, as I’ve had to reduce my hard drive space because of the cost of SSDs (this one is costing me AUD $1,450, ouch), I’m going to dedicate most of the drive to a Bootcamp partition, and the rest of the space will house a Snow Leopard OSX partition.

I’m planning to install Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, with all the usual workstation apps such as Microsoft Office, and this WinServer instance will also be joined to our corporate domain.  I’m also planning to install:

• SQL Server 2008 (DBMS only)
• Oracle 10G XE
• SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1
• SAP Data Services XI 3.1
• Crystal Reports 2008
• Xcelsius 2008

You may wonder why I’m only going with XI 3.1, and not 3.2?  Well (and listen clearly anyone working for SAP) as Edge XI 3.1 SP2 (or XI 3.2) hasn’t been released yet, all of our in-house developed Rapid Marts for clients aren’t backwards compatible.  And a lot of our clients are using Edge XI 3.1, so this means I need to ensure my development platform is compatible with most of our clients.  Frustrating, but necessary… (sidepoint – I heard from the BOB forum the other day that Edge XI 3.1 SP2 has been delayed till mid-2010!)

I’m going to setup the WinServer instance similar to the internal CDI image that SAP release, which means that all the services that run the DBMS, BOE and DS will all be stopped on startup (making sure the system boots very quickly), and then use batch scripts to start up separate components as required.  I will also start to compile multiple demo databases, universes, dashboards etc and hope to grow a large collection of demo material.

I will then setup OSX to use VMWare Fusion to use the Bootcamp partition, which will mean that most of the time I’ll still be able to be in OSX if I’m not demoing etc.

Apparently the timeframe for delivery is 7-10 days because of the matte screen and modded CPU.  I’m hoping to spend a weekend getting everything up and going – I’m really looking forward to it actually, kind of sad – then I’ll be looking to benchmark and take some video tests.  I’m expecting a beast of a machine, but as to how beefy, remains to be seen.

Stay tuned for more in the new few weeks…

- Josh