The 2011 TDWI Global Conference is off to a great start. Attendance appears to be up once again compared to the previous year. We’ve been seeing the attendance climb steadily since the Chicago conference in 2009. That was the year many companies were cutting back severely on travel expenses.


At this conference, I co-taught the TDWI Data Warehousing Architecture course and the TDWI BI Fundamentals course with Tony Lopykinski. We had a great group of students who were very engaged with the class. Both of these courses are considered fairly fundamental so it was interesting to see that about 10% - 15% of our students had at least 10 years of experience with BI. Comments were made that these more experienced people were taking this course as a refresher and to try to catch up with current advances in this area. It’s great to have people like this in the class because they can add enrich the class discussions with their own experiences.


Now I’m off to a couple guru sessions where I get to meet one-on-one with a couple attendees and discuss their specific situations with them. It’s always great to be able to go into some depth about specific issues they are having and try to come up with some ideas to help them out.