Miracle DBF - Day 2.0

I thought I was going to get my own back on Tom Kyte for Hotsos by blogging at the back of his presentation, but I kept losing my connection and was getting to the stage where I was worried about p*ss*ng off Toon Koppelaars (sp?) who was sitting beside me, so I had to give in. Toon warrants a mention for saying he liked the blog, particularly the 'Goodbye Cruel World posting'.

Anyway, I thought it was the best presentation I've seen Tom give. It was on Worst Practices. He started off by suggesting that there are probably four types of Oracle Professional

DBAs

DBA / Developers

Developer / DBAs

Programmers

He thinks the first and last are bad news and that the good guys are in the middle somewhere. I suppose I'd put myself in the second category and that I'm going to have to promise to let this subject go

Next he went on to his central theme - 'You should probably never question authority'. (Remember that this was a worst practices presentation.) I was amazed (but maybe shouldn't have been) with the volume of crummy advice from the early 90s that he'd managed to dig up. I really enjoyed this one.

I saw several other top quality presentations today. I've rabbited on about Jonathan's presentations often enough in this blog before. Suffice to say it was of the usual high standard.

Mogens was also his usual self - funny, incisive and downright lazy (if you ask me) for having no slides! I can't help wondering why he has to mention prostitutes so often, too

The one other presentation I attended was Tim Gorman's 'How not to do your data warehouse'. Yes, believe it or not, I am occassionally interested The stand-out thing about Tim's presentation for me is that he's a stunningly good presenter - just to my taste. I was thoroughly engaged and yet the content wasn't light-weight. I'll certainly be attending more of his presentations in future.

It's been a great day so far, then, but I've finally decided I owe it to regular readers to buy a new camera soon because my photos are so cr*p. I might post a few later, in any case. Just time for a quick beer, then it's on to the Abba musical, drinks, dinner and the beach party.

Phew! I hardly have a minute to blog around here