Lunch meeting with the OWB Product Managers
1:40pm
Hanming and I had the pleasure to sit down with Jean-Pierre Dijcks and Antonio Romero at lunch for over an hour. We started off with giving them (well-deserved) props for a solid product, as well as the time and cost savings we already realized with only 5 months in to production.
Topics we discussed:
- Lineage and impact analysis fail when case statements or pivot/un-pivot operators exist in a map
- Business drivers and problems can be solved by incorporating specification authoring into OWB; or, even better, combining the two tasks into one unified GUI: specifications authoring and map creation
- The uphill battle of data quality/standardization we fight everyday, especially lab test labels and unit conversion. What can we do to first make it a linear problem, then experience complexity reduction over time (i.e., present possible matches through a scoring mechanism, save the manual matches into a library, then reuse what it learns)?
- How will the new flashback archive feature in 11g how us reduce the maintenance overhead for audit trail for ViewPoint and other applications?
They are committed to come on-site, possibly in December. We talked visiting their HQs the Friday of OpenWorld. JP suspected some of our challenges are solvable using Experts (i.e., OMB+, coupled with Java). So, he hopes Dave Allen can help us out as well. We will send them some of our problems and go from there.
10.2.0.3 porting is still underway, citing resource challenges. Though, the upgrade path from 10.2 to 11.1 will be very straightforward, as simple as applying a patch.
