Doug's Oracle Blog

So having dashed out of Peter Scott's analytics presentation, I headed back to my hotel to drop my laptop off and find some food! At least when your conference is in Brum, you can find a chippy! There are some strange moments at these conferences, you know. As I walked back to the Blogger Meet-up, still in my suit, carrying a bag containing two small animals and munching my way through a bag of chips, who should I bump into but Graham Wood (big cheese architect bloke from Oracle - father of all those 10g Automatic features and a good guy) and his better half. They stopped me, I thought because it was good to see each other, but actually it was so that Graham could steal some of my chips! I thought about this later and, given how he polished off my lobster at the Miracle DBF, I wonder if he isn't stalking me in the knowledge there'll be some tasty pickings. Then again, it is a bag of chips I'm talking about!

In All Bar One, the Oak Table chaps were there early (no surprise there, then) and at 7, the various bloggers, User Group volunteers and staff turned up and the free bar was on! It definitely worked much better as a networking event with free beer and snacks than last year's sit-down meal because it was easier to mingle. Having said that, it was a struggle to get round everyone I wanted to talk to but it seemed that everyone had a great time. The food was universally acclaimed. Party Planners take note - having large plates of chips/fries as part of your buffet seems popular. I saw Anjo Kolk grab handfuls and realised we may have something in common, although I bet he was disappointed when he couldn't find globs of mayonaisse to smother them with.

On the Housemate front, I suspect Mark Rittman may have some interesting photos to post later. We'll see. They went down a storm when they were occassionally allowed out of the bag and possibly my favourite bit of the evening was Tim Hall almost begging me to justify myself so that he wouldn't just have to think I was weird. The more I explained what it was all about, the worse the expression on his face became. I think I can state quite confidently that he had now decided that I am just weird

Later it was a big crowd of us in the hotel bar again with much discussion of Thomas Presslie's bruise, Alex Gorbachev's opinion of The Simpsons - which I'll translate into 'he doesn't like it very much' and assorted Oracle nonsense. As Alex got drunker, the Guinness started flying and for once I wasn't last to go to bed, but I'd have to admit it wasn't early either.

... when it comes to your presentation audience. Thanks to Dan Fink for being a gentleman, a scholar and the owner of a rather nice camera

Wow! As the lack of any blogging should indicate, it's been a pretty busy day and a half or so. First, the good news. Although I have my camera with me, I don't have the cable for my laptop so you'll be spared my usual pathetic pictures. However, I've seen a few other cameras in action so I don't expect I'm going to get away without some embarassment via other blogs.

The trip down and hotel check-in was largely uneventful until I started to unpack. As I lifted a pair of jeans out, who should be stowed away in my case than Polly Piggy! The only Housemate who was supposed to be coming was The Rabbit, who won the election fair and square but I'd left my case open while I was packing and she must have sneaked in. I genuinely wasn't expecting to see her - thanks for that Madeleine!

Yes, I hit the bar straight away, but in my defence there were plenty who were in there before me - a real gaggle of geeks. A good time and interesting chat was had by all. I can't say it did much for my presentation preparation but then I could have taken the hint when all the next day presenters disappeared one by one for a little quiet preparation time. Note to self - must try harder.

Yesterday I attended plenty of presentations for a change, but didn't quite manage my full agenda. First up was Tom Kyte's keynote presentation 'What's Coming Next?' about the proposed features of Oracle 11g (?). I have to say I was a bit surprised by the sense of disappointment I picked up from various bloggers who were at the Openworld presentations. The way Tom told the story got me pretty excited about some of the change management features. Assuming they work as advertised then the businesses I work for are going to love them. It's not just about cool new features but about helping us with our day to day work of building test environments, software releases with minimal down-time and the rest. I found myself thinking - 'mmm, that would really help us with that problem at work'. I still can't get over seeing him presenting in collar and tie, though

Next it was onto Alexander Gorbachev's Extending Oracle 10g Grid Control presentation. The truth is that, although I was slightly interested in the subject, I really went to check out Alex himself and this was the most convenient of his three (!) presentations for my schedule. The presentation seemed pretty deep - too much for me to take in in the morning, so I'll pick up the slides and have a proper look later. Nice guy, though, despite the fact he has now taken over Lisa Dobson's position of infamy, after knocking almost a full pint of Guinness over his colleague, Babette Turner-Underwood! (Not during his presentation, I should add, but much later yesterday evening.)

Larry Carpenter's HA Best Practices talk was pretty high on my list of must-sees because I'm becoming more and more involved in availability and recovery issues at work at the moment. There was tons of useful information in here for me and that guy really knows his stuff. Thoroughly recommended should you get the chance to see it. I suppose the top message was on the importance of tuning your network when implementing Dataguard. To some extent, that's obvious, but the benefits were incredibly significant.

By now the final minor panic was beginning to kick in about my back-to-back presentations and I'd left myself a little work to do so I skipped both lunch and Dan Fink's 'Understanding Logical I/O' but I'll be sure to pick up the material and take a look later. One very important tip if you're ever planning to speak at a conference. Avoid Jonathan Lewis like the plague until *after* the presentation then he isn't likely to fill your head up with related material that you hadn't thought of

In the end I felt both presentations went fairly well although the first one, to steal a line from Dan Fink was perhaps 'over-optimised' (i.e. I finished early). The attendance was pretty low at both but the quality of the questions and contributions was pretty good and I had a good feeling that people enjoyed them. Not my best, but certainly not my worst either. Tip two - try to avoid having a room full of Oak Table types at your presentation because you know they probably know things you don't! It's very hard to try to claim any authority at all on a subject in that situation.

After the two presentations I was dead-beat so just popped my head into Lisa Dobson's DW for DBAs presentation. Apparently I missed the joke from the start with a photo of Jeff Moss and I in deep discussion in a bar in Manchester, but she still managed to make a show of me by claiming I had some sort of expertise on something or other. Strangely enough, Mr J. Lewis was sitting a couple of rows in front of me again and I couldn't help feeling embarassed!

Last but not least was Peter Scott's introduction to analytic functions. By now I was virtually asleep and realised I hadn't eaten anything all day (I mean anything at all) so it was a struggle but suffice to say that Peter has kindly agreed to let me steal his slides so that I can give the same presentation to some of the developers back at work so I must have been impressed.

This blog is already too long, so I'll cover some of the fun stuff later and will try to get my blogging act in order now that I'm free of any responsibilities.