Doug's Personal Blog

I'm 42 years old soon.

42 is quite a special number in the lives of a certain generation of British grammar school boys; geeks in general and admirers of Douglas Adams' books in particular.

For my part, I don't think there's anything special about the number at all but I loved the absurdity of Deep Thought's solemn delivery in the TV series. (I'm not nearly cool enough to be able to claim I listened to the original radio series.)

So, 42 it is. I'm going to spend this year waiting to be enlightened.

Sorry we're so late sending out best wishes. Douglas claims he's been busy again - hopefully buying us lots of nice presents



(Psssst ... we've bought him a new camera for Christmas! We think he's got us a new chair!)

I'd love some of these for the comfy seat! Sadly, I think if they were introduced I might have a Cuddly Toy massacre on my hands, and that wouldn't do

My thanks to Mark Bobak for enlightening me.

Geoffrey drowns his sorrows after being dragged down to Birmingham

Monday 3 December

09:40-10:30 ‘30 years at Oracle’ - Tom Kyte. I own a couple of Kyte’s excellent books and various sources report he is an excellent speaker.

10:40-11:00 Visit a few stands. A quick game of ’spot the colleague’ and ask 27 different companies ‘How can XYZ help me grow my business ?’

11:15-12:00 ‘Siebel Keynote’ - David Mills. Possible sales and marketing fluff alert. Need to sit at the back adjacent to an aisle to allow a potential rapid escape to ‘Oracle RAC versus Oracle Data Guard - which should I use for Disaster Recovery and which should I use for High Availability ?’.

12:25-13:20 ‘Under the Covers of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus’ - Mick Bull/Lisa Dobson. I would like to learn more about Oracle’s Business Intelligence tools. Plus I have an innate weakness for presentations titled ‘Under The Covers…’

13:15-14:15 ‘TimesTen: Anatomy of an In-Memory Database’ - Chris Jenkins (Oracle). Curious to hear more about this technology.

14:15-15:15 ‘Remote Hand Held SFA solutions need housekeeping - Ian Keleher/Nicola Burrows (Gallaher). A verbose and hardly compelling title but I have worked with this customer so I might get a mention on the Credits slide.

15:20-16:25 ‘Oracle 10g: RAC Tuning Tips’ - Joel Goodman

16:45-17:30 ‘Siebel Marketing and Marketing Analytics’ - Ben Wales

17:35-18:35 ‘11g new features for DBAs’ - Tom Kyte. This has better be worth it. I am missing ‘Siebel Networking’, free beer and prawn volavons for this !

Back to hotel to dump marketing literature, USB memory sticks and complimentary gifts from Quest Software.

Shower, brush teeth, apply deodorant and slip into something more comfortable. Head over to the Pitcher and Piano to gatecrash the Oracle bloggers meetup.