OUG Scotland 2005 Conference

Yesterday I attended the one day OUG Scotland conference in Glasgow. I think there must have been 200-300 attendees and there were three streams of presentations. I was immediately impressed at the organisation and venue. It felt like a proper conference rather than just a slightly bigger user group meeting.

After the usual opening from Gary Derrick (OUG Scotland Chair) and a few words from Ronan Miles (UKOUG Chair), there was what I could only describe as a typical Oracle sales pitch around Project Fusion. While I know these are interesting times for Oracle as they try to integrate their various business application acquisitions (Peoplesoft, Siebel etc.) with eBusiness Suite, I don't really care, so the presentation wasn't of much interest to me. Oh, and my not-very-sincere thanks to Oracle for deciding to change the name of their app server again! Well, that's what it sounded like to me - Fusion Middleware.The presentation ran over time significantly and I got the feeling that most people in the hall weren't too impressed!
So the next presentation I attended - Julian Dyke's Rough Guide to RAC - had to be curtailed and I felt sorry for him. I wasn't hoping to learn much from this presentation though and was just interested in hearing Julian speak because I hadn't before. He came across very clearly and I wasn't bored. Can't say much better than that!

Next up was Bill Ferrari from Standard Life (an Edinburgh-based company) talking about their experiences implementing Partitioned IOTs to improve the performance of their overnight batch on of their applications. I thought this was a terrific presentation that combined plenty of technical substance with some common sense and a good presentation technique.

I skipped the next set of presentations because I had a meeting with one of the managers at the company I work for.

The next presentation was a keynote by Douglas Shand of Oracle on Innovation. Frankly, I was dreading this because I thought I was going to get another sales pitch and decided I might walk out at the first 'Project Fusion' slide. What a pleasant surprise it was to listen to Douglas (fine name) talk about what innovation means to him and how Oracle are trying to manage the process. He was a good speaker, had some interesting and funny things to say and it was a nice bit of light relief from the purely technical presentations.

Immediately after was an Ask Oracle session and as the crowd seemed a bit shy, I decided to pipe up with the first question. I can�t remember the detail but it was something along the lines of :-

If Oracle have about 230,000 customers, of whom about 26,000 are applications customers, aren't they forgetting their core customer base a little by going on and on (and on ...) about Project Fusion.

The answer was something along the lines of,

Well, they haven't all been apps acquisitions - what about TimesTen, Oblix and so on and then some other stuff I didn't hear in the midst of bland reassurances.? ?

I have to say I'm still not convinced that Oracle�s 9,000 engineers (not sure I caught that right) working on Project Fusion might not be a bit of a distraction from the database. I'm also concerned that the UK OUG doesn't become a Peoplesoft / Siebel / eBusiness Suite user group when the majority of Oracle customers don't use these products. I'm all for a strong and powerful user group, but not to the detriment of users who don't use these apps. We only have a 3 day annual conference (which I think many would agree is one of the best) so if we keep adding more and more subjects to the agenda, are we still going to have enough room for the number and quality of presentations? I hope so.

Fortunately, the next presentation I attended made me forget all that stuff. Rob Squire from Oracle demonstrated a working solution to the problem of storing Time Varying data. It was a small room, with standing room only, and I feel some of it might have gone over people's heads a little bit. I could be wrong, but there were a lot of nervous grins, sideways glances and sucking in of air. Rob didn't show us exactly what was going on underneath the covers, but the end results were extremely impressive. It seems this is just something that Rob is playing around with under the umbrella of Douglas' innovation umbrella and who knows in what form it might appear. We spent quite a bit of time talking about this later and this is not some dry academic subject, but an ongoing database design problem that businesses face all the time. Best of all, the majority of the presentation was straight SQL run in a SQL*Plus session! Anyone who is interested in this subject could attend a one day seminar in Edinburgh that Peter Robson and Oracle are organising where Chris Date will be talking about the theory behind temporal databases and Rob will be demonstrating his solution. I'll be attending and I think it'll be an interesting day. http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/601/

I was faced with a dilemma for the final presentation. Peter Robson, who is a pal, was presenting his SQL*Flow paper for the first time and I'd promised I'd go along and give him some feedback. Unfortunately he was scheduled at the same time as Pete Finnigan's security presentation which I'd been looking forward to as I only know Pete F online really. In the end, length of friendship won out, particularly as I'd never heard Peter Robson present either - we just always seem to have missed each other. Peter's presentation is based on trying to develop a way of diagramming the workings of SQL statements so that you can work out what they�re doing, or to help you develop them in the first place. It's a brave attempt at something most instructors have tried at some point and I could see it showed promise. Peter will be giving the same presentation at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham this year if you fancy seeing it for yourself.

After that it was free beers (thanks Quest) and enjoyable chat - thanks :-

• Pete Finnigan

• Mogens, who managed to get the Scottish folk band to play some Danish waltzes in exchange for free drinks. I think he might also have won a raffle prize, but that's a bit hazy.

• The chaps from Oracle with the interesting ideas and the best names to drop (Bill Joy, Danny Hillis, Ray Kurzweil)

• The user group directors and organisers. They're always useful people to know, with all those drinks vouchers.

Eventually I had to extricate myself for my train back to Edinburgh! I had a great time yesterday and it was one of the better user events I've attended so thanks to everyone who put so much work into organising it and I'm looking forward to next years already - once Birmingham's out of the way