Doug's Oracle Blog

As I keep saying (and I know you'll be sick of this but it needs to be on each post in case they're read in isolation).

"Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. The time off work is my own choice."

Well I decided that I should really join in the Unconference fun and do my bit. I haven't previously for a couple of reasons.

1) Initially, I was keen that an Unconference should be filled with new faces and not the same old ones, but I suppose it's down to who is prepared to give it a go and people see who they want to see anyway. Part of the reason I'm going to so many Unconference presentations this year is because I know the quality of the speakers.

2) These guys are *so* quick to claim slots! LOL I'm glad there are a few left over for onsite registration.

So I've booked a slot at 10am on Thursday morning - maximum cold recovery time and I already know I'll be watching Kevin Closson in the slot before. But I need some help ....

At the moment, I've put the 'How I learned to love pictures' title there and could just give a similar presentation to the one I've given at several SIGs and will be given at UKOUG in December. But, to be honest it's different every time and is very unstructured with almost no slides.

However, I also have some other ideas and am wondering if they sound more appealing.

"Why you need a variety of performance analysis tools"
"ASH - strengths, weaknesses"

I expect these to generate more debate which is a more suitable style for an Unconference presentation. So, what do you think? I'm all ears.

Well, it's definitely a cold. Made it to bed just after 1 after a party which had convinced me I was feeling better, only to wake up stuffed with the cold, completely convinced that I'd slept in. It was 4:45 Bizarrely, I feel fully refreshed sleep-wise, but blocked up with cold. Just one 'normal' day would be nice ....

Many thanks to Jeremiah Wilton for herding Oak Table cats into two transports out of town and for showing up with these ...



The party was well worth it - tons of lovely food, excellent company and a few drinks here and there - and one snippet I did pick up is that Jonathan Lewis will be doing an Unconference presentation at 10:00 this morning - "How to become an expert". Typical - decided to go up against Charles Phillips' Keynote. Now far be it from me to say that he might even consider writing the presentation in the middle of a party, the night before, (Jonathan, I mean, not Charles) but if that was true I think it's in keeping with the informal spirit of the Unconference! At one point I tried to convince him in the middle of a run of funny stories that perhaps he should just do stand-up comedy for the hour. I also pointed out that perhaps he ought to stick to the Oracle-related presentations. We'll see.

As the Unconference rooms are fairly small, can I just point out that I will be attending and will be sharing my germs with everyone. Perhaps better if you stay away, in fact, and guarantee that I can find a seat.

Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. The time off work is my own choice.

That's my first couple of sessions done and dusted, both pretty good ones too although I'm going to have to admit defeat now and try to catch some sleep in the hope it will pay off over the rest of the week.

First, though was a nostalgic trip to Lori's Diner for some breakfast. Although not the greatest hotel, The King George is my usual haunt and has three distinct advantages for me :-

1) It's cheap.
2) Smoking Rooms.
3) The 24-hour Lori's Diner next door.

The diner delivers what I'd think of as classic American breakfasts and just watching the short order cooks is interesting. Right up my street.

So how do you get people to attend a presentation at 9am on Sunday?  Get Tom Kyte to present it

His Oracle Developer Keynote - 'What are we still doing wrong' - was a light-hearted tour of the same old mistakes we see time after time. I recommend you take a look at his slides if you can because they contain a bunch of links to articles, forum threads and blog posts he's discovered on the web to reinforce his arguments. In fact, as there was a large camera at the back of the room, I think you'll be able to watch it online soon, as suggested by Tom's post. (I know a few people back at work will be pleased about that.) Good easy-going stuff which was just what I needed when I was feeling a bit tired and low. Oh, but I'm not entirely sure you can't send Euro symbols via SMS. My phone seems to be able to, but maybe I'm missing something?

Next up was supposed to be "Oracle Database Machine and Oracle Exadata: Best Practices and Customer Considerations" as part of the IOUG's Exadata Special Interest Group Stream. In fact, it turned out to be a panel Q & A with Dan Norris chairing and a bunch of smart guys from Oracle's MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) team. As I expected, the questions varied from the interesting to the slightly bizarre but there were a few about what gives Exadata V2 an OLTP or mixed workload advantage or V1 which could be simplified to the Flash technology. There were also a few interesting questions about support and management issues around something that is sold as an appliance but clearly has a lot of vanilla Oracle components in there. Can you change the configuration of those to suit your enivronment. The answers generally seemed to be yes, but that this would take you into custom configuration territory and Oracle would probably prefer that you didn't go there. It was a pretty interesting discussion all round, but about half-way through, I got a call from a friend who wanted to meet for lunch, so bailed out early.

Oh, one important thing to mention is that Oracle have a full rack Database Machine in Moscone North and will be running demos there from 4pm today through the rest of the week. So lots more opportunity to see Exadata and talk to those involved in customer implementations.

[Intermission]

Just woke up, have had some sleep and now feel worse. Mads had a cold all week before I came out here and we kept wondering why I hadn't got it. Well I have. Sigh. I'm supposed to be going to a party tonight that I've been looking forward to. I suppose it's time to take some drugs and hope it's not too bad.

Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. The time off work is my own choice.