OOW Day 1

Well, I've attended my first couple of presentations - Dan Norris' "Building an Oracle Real Application Clusters Environment on VMWare for Free". I suppose this is one of those subjects I knew a little about, but I haven't played with VMWare really enough and I was quite keen to hear Dan speak again. He's a good presenter despite last year's presentation not really being right for me. Now I know why they have those 90 minute IOUG presentations though, even though they are far too long for me - to cope with the large number of questions from the audience, some of them only tangentially related to the subject. Dan coped really well with them, though. As Dan pointed out, the presentation slides will be posted in the near future, so you might want to take a look. Good stuff. I did plan on catching up with Dan but there was quite a huddle of questioners at the end - always a good sign.

Next was Tuomas Pystynen talking about the different experience of presenting at European User Group events. He talked about OUGF, Slovenian and UKOUG conferences. This presentation came under the User Group umbrella and (although it was very sparsely attended and two of the attendees were Ronan Miles (UKOUG Chairman) and me (both of whom know the subject quite well already), I thought it was fascinating to see the conferences compared and Tuomas is always a funny speaker. In fact, it was interesting to hear some of Ronan's informal thoughts on the future of the conference.

Now I'm going to take a short break, clean up and attend Alex G's "Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware" presentation at 13:00. After that, Alex and I will be driven off at high speed to attend a barbecue at a friends house, which will make a nice change from the usual atmosphere at the conference. Unfortunately it means that as well as missing the opening keynote and welcome reception (not too worried there) I'm probably going to have to skip the Bloggers Meet-up too. Apologies to anyone I was planning to meet there, but there should be plenty of other opportunities this week. Then again, looking at the social schedule for the whole week, it's pretty packed!