UKOUG Breakthrough 2022 : Day 1

The evening before the conference the Oracle ACEs met up for some food at a curry place in the city centre. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for organising this! Earlier that day I presented my first face to face session in 3 years, and now it was time for my first social event in a similar timescale. I was pretty nervous going into it, and quite standoffish at first, but I gradually relaxed and “conference Tim” started to come back. By the end of the evening I was feeling a lot more comfortable with the situation. It was nice to get to meet up with a bunch of people I had not seen for a long time. It also made me feel a bit more relaxed about going to the conference the next day.

The one downside of going to a conference in your hometown is commuting. I don’t live far away from the venue, but regardless of the mode of transportation, commuting during rush hour is a nightmare. Instead I chose to wait for the rush hour traffic to die down and be fashionably late. That was the right move.

The first session I went to was Simon Haslam speaking about “Platform Engineering for the Modern Oracle World”. I’ve got a lot of time for Simon. Him and Lonneke Dikmans sowed some seeds in my brain a long time ago, which have ultimately had a big influence on me over the years. In this session he talked about the various approaches to automation over the years, culminating in where many people find themselves today. I found myself nodding my head in agreement with most of what Simon was saying during this session. I joked later that his session gave me post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when I thought back through many of those stages. 😁 A group of us continued the conversation about the topic after the session, which is always fun.

Next I moved on to the Oracle ACE Briefing. The first rule of the Oracle ACE Briefing is don’t talk about the Oracle ACE Briefing. Once again, it was good to see a lot of familiar faces, and some new ones. Once the session was over, and we knew everything there was to know about the Oracle Games Console (#OGC), I spent some time talking with Dominic Giles, while he desperately looked for ways to get rid of me. He didn’t succeed. 😉

By the time I finally let Dom go, it was time to watch Jasmin Fluri and Gianni Ceresa presenting “Git Branching – the battle of the ages”, or “Development Workflows: The Battle of The Ages!”, depending on which title you prefer. The session was a celebrity death match between trunk-based development (Jasmin) and Gitflow style development (Gianni). Gianni fought dirty, but ultimately Jasmin was able to overpower him and grind him into the dirt. At least that’s how I saw it. 🙂 Both sides gave compelling reasons for their preferred method, and ultimately there is a lot more similarity between them than some people would have you believe. As is often the case, there is no “best”, but what is “best for you”. Not surprisingly, this sparked another conversation at the end of the session, with a few war stories thrown in for good measure.

At that point I had to head off to beat the traffic across town, as I had some “real life” things to do.

So that’s was day 1 of UKOUG Breakthrough 2022. I know it will sound silly to most people, but I was stressing about the conference and it turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. Fingers crossed day 2 will go well also.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Monday – Day 1

I’ve been away from home for over a week and we’ve finally got to Day 1 of the conference… 🙂

After not feeling too great last night I skipped the bay swim. I headed down to the conference and my first stop was the AppsLab Internet of Things (IoT) Workshop. With some help from Mark Vilrokx, I have now joined the world of the cool and hip. During the workshop you get a little Arduino board that is wifi enabled. You connect a button and a speaker, then upload a program to the board. Once you’ve done all that you can press the button, it connects to the Oracle IoT Cloud Service and it plays a little tune. You can also control other people’s devices. Next stop, world domination…

iot

From there I moved on to the “Oracle Applications User Experience Cloud Exchange”, hosted by the UsableApps folks. They had a whole bunch of stands, each demonstrating a different facet of user experience (UX). For example:

  • Large multi-screen visualisations.
  • Desktop and mobile UX from the current Oracle Cloud Applications and future directions of these products.
  • Current and future versions of the extensibility framework.
  • Rapid Development Kits (RDKs) for ADF, Mobile and JET, allowing you to quickly develop PaaS applications that look and function the same as the SaaS applications.
  • Office of the future.
  • Customer success stories.
  • Some were just plain fun, like using a toy guitar to control a player in a virtual world, who could throw Pokeballs. What’s not to love? 🙂

For someone from my background this is a totally different world.

I especially enjoyed speaking to Basheer Khan about the work his company (Knex) has been doing extending Oracle SaaS using Oracle PaaS. In a world of proof of concepts (POCs), it’s great to see someone successfully delivering real products on top of Oracle Cloud Services. It’s also good to see all the messages from the UX team being put into practice by him and is company. If you get a chance to speak to him about it you really should.

The combination of the IoT and UX sessions put me in a super-positive mood. Happy days! 🙂

From there it was back to my day job, so I headed off to see Andrew Holdsworth speaking about “Real-World Performance Monitoring: Can You Believe the CPU Numbers?” Turns out you can’t believe the numbers! The Real-World Performance Group, which Andrew heads up, always deliver quality sessions, based on science and real-world experience, rather than the fluff you get from some. I try and get to their sessions every year for this reason. There was also another reunion with Dad, who has started on the Marmite and teabags I brought him. 🙂

After that I headed down to the exhibition hall to say hello to the Dbvisit gang. They’ve got a new version of Dbvisit Standby coming out soon, as well as a product called Dbvisit Replicate Connector that can stream data from Oracle to Kafka, amongst other things. I’m definintely going to kick the tyres on both of these once they are released!

Cheers

Tim…

AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon – Day 1

amisWe had already been at the venue the day before for the beginning of the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge, but today was the first day of AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon. The day started at about 07:00, with a short minibus trip to the venue.

The first session I attended was “Get your money’s worth out of your Database” by Patrick Barel. He presented a whole bunch of database features that developers need to be using to make the most of their Oracle databases, including a bunch of 12c features. I like these kind of sessions. Much of what we end up doing at conferences is giving people pointers to what we think is interesting.

Next I went to “Smart Offices Are the Future of Work, Powered by the Internet of Things” by Noel Portugal. This started with some talk about designing for mobility, because people are connected all the time. It then moved on to the internet of things, where he discussed how small, cheap electronics can bridge the gap between the physical world and the internet, using examples like Amazon Dash, gesture controls, voice controls like Amazon Echo etc. The UX team are regularly using a lot of this stuff for their own office, kind-of making it the office of the present, not the future.

At this point, our team got together to carry on working on the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge, which took a big chunk of the day…

Later I headed off to see Jonathan Lewis present a session called “Just Don’t Do It”. As the name suggests, this session was focussed on improving performance by avoiding unnecessary work. The session was made up of examples from the OTN forums and consulting jobs where SQL was doing loads of unnecessary work. Often reframing the question allowed the statement to be rewritten to reduce the amount of work necessary to achieve the same goal. Neat!

From there it was back to the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge. All the groups got together to do the pitch for their solutions. With such a short timescale and the complexity of some of the services, most groups had hit some roadblocks, but everyone produced something. Debra actually did the pitch for two groups, but she did an exceptional job for ours. As I mentioned in a previous post, our team didn’t actually include people who do development outside of the database, and the challenge focussed on the non-DB side of things, which left us in a rather awkward position. By substituting comedy for content, Debra managed to make our pitch sound a lot better than it was. She also demoed our mobile app on her phone, and conveniently forgot to mention it was written in APEX. Your can see the home page below. 🙂

otn-cloud-dev-app

From there is was on to the evening event. Lots of food. Lots of drinks for those that do. There was also a covers band called The Originals who took request for literally anything. Pretty impressive. A few of us old folks ducked out a little early and headed back to the hotel and our beds.

That was Day 1 over. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

InSync11 – Day 1

Getting to Sydney:

No major drama there. I didn’t sleep much on the plane. A couple of 15 minute stints during the 22 hours on the plane. Slept well on the first night, so day 1 of the conference was relatively jetlag free.

InSync11 Sessions I attended on Day 1 included:

Me: Clonedb: The quick and easy cloning solution you never knew you had.

This was my first presentation at the conference. The majority of the talk went pretty well. The demo didn’t go quite to plan, which was my own fault for making some last minute changes. Even so, the clone worked and if you managed to ignore the bumbling idiot at the front, I think it proved the point. I’m presenting this again in Canberra in a couple of days, so I guess the wrinkles will be ironed out by then. 🙂

Tom Kyte: Efficient PL/SQL – why and how to use PL/SQL to its greatest effect.

I’ve done similar presentations to this myself, but Tom is a better presenter than me, so it’s cool to see him doing his stuff.

Richard Foote: 10 things you possibly don’t know about indexes.

Richard is fun guy, who doesn’t look at all like David Bowie! 🙂 The presentation mostly focused on refuting many of the myths surrounding indexes, with some really neat examples. It would have been cool if he had been given a double slot for this as it was a struggle to fit it into 45 minutes.

Angus MacDonald: An insight into what is coming next.

Angus works for Oracle, and main focus of this talk was Oracle-Sun related technology, including general hardware, as well as the Sparc and Solaris roadmaps. It was well presented and the subject matter was interesting, but a few comparisons grated on me a little. I felt like some information was a little like, “This is what Solaris on Sparc will be capable of in 2015, and Linux on x86-64 can’t do that now”. OK, but what will Linux on x86-64 be capable of by 2015? I think I was being a little over-sensitive, so perhaps it wasn’t a big deal. 🙂

Sydney Oracle Meetup:

In the evening a number of us (Connor McDonald, Craig Shallahamer, Chris Muir, Guy Harrison, Marcelle Kratochvil, Tom Kyte, Richard Foote and myself) were invited over to the Sydney Oracle Meetup to sit on a panel session. It was very informal and good fun. Probably the most enjoyable panel session I’ve been too. After the panel we all went out for some food, so the panel session extended into the night a little.  Thanks to the Pythian guys, Noons, Gary Myers and others for sorting this out… 🙂

I didn’t sleep well last night so Day 2 will be a struggle. I’m presenting in the last slot, so it’s going to be a long day. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld 2010: ACE Director Meeting – Day 1

Yesterday started by me waking up at silly o’clock. The joys of international travel. At least I can see on twitter that I’m not alone. 🙂

ACE Director Meeting – Day 1

Since we are not allowed to talk about the content of the meeting, I’m only going to mention the opening talk by Thomas Kurian who gave an overview of the big announcements at OpenWorld this year.

Now you people out there know how cynical I am at times and how underwhelmed I’ve been about some of the previous years big announcements. Well this year I’m blown away. I’m genuinely excited about the events this year. I’ve read some of the press speculation and quite frankly they have all underestimated this years OpenWorld by several orders of magnitude. The press are going to be hit by a barrage of new stuff right across the company. I defy anyone who truly understands enterprise computing to not be impressed by the breadth and scale of the announcements this year.

The thing I liked most about Thomas Kurian’s talk was the passion he delivered it with. I’m not talking about that crazy Ballmer on crack football coach fake crap. I’m talking real passion for the products and the direction of the company.

From my own perspective, I think Oracle taking over Sun was the best thing that could ever have happened to Sun. I know a lot of the Sun fanboys would disagree, but let’s be real. Sun was terminally ill. They had lots of good people, lots of good technology, but were incapable of giving it any direction at all. They were a mess. The only way they were going to survive was by getting some vision. Enter uncle Larry. I must admit to not understanding Oracle’s motives for the Sun deal, but this year it’s all starting to make sense to me. I look forward to seeing the press frenzy.

The evening was quite sedate. Just some food in the bar then bed. I woke up again at silly o’clock this morning. Once again, lots of ACEDs on twitter obviously suffering the same timezone issues. The early rise allowed me to get myself up to date and do some Yoga, which was great after a day of travelling and a day of sitting in meetings.

The downside of doing Yoga in a hotel room is they tend to have a lot of mirrors. In my head I know I look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club, but there was this fat, hairy guy staring back at me in various contorted positions. Quite off putting. 🙂

Next stop, round 2 of the ACE Directors meeting…

Cheers

Tim…

NZOUG 2010 Day 1…

The day started in the normal way. First, an introduction by Francisco, the new president of NZOUG, then some keynotes, then on to the presentations…

One of the difficult things about being a speaker at so many conferences is you often struggle to see something on the agenda you have not already seen several times around the world (nice problem to have). As a result I side-stepped Dan Morgan’s first presentation because I had already seen it (or most of it) at OpenWorld. I’m sure it went down well because Dan is a natural speaker.

My first session of the day was Robert Freeman‘s. A quick romp through the Oracle features that have been around for ages, but you probably don’t know exist. You will struggle to find a nicer guy than Robert, so it’s always good to see him present. I kinda like this sort of presentation because because Oracle has such a lot of functionality, it’s easy to miss things. Robert has turned “to the dark side” and is now an Oracle employee. Come on Oracle. Stop poaching our ACEs. 🙂

I spent a lot of time during the day chatting to people (there’s a surprise). Plenty of familiar faces along with some new ones.

My session was the last time slot for the day. I’m doing a two-part session on PL/SQL presentation layers. I had a good turnout. It felt like it went well. I guess the real test will be how many people turn up for the second part, although I’ve just noticed I clash with Robert Freeman on my second slot, so when nobody turns up I can massage my ego by telling myself I was amazing, but Robert is famous. 🙂

In the evening we went over for the social event at the Skyline Skyrides. It was great fun going on the luge again. I learnt two lessons last year.

  1. You have to brake on the corners, or you die.
  2. You don’t enter the “carry a cup of water to the bottom” game unless you want to be ridiculed the whole evening for having a wet ass.

I remained alive and dry, so all was good.

After the luge rides came the dinner. Lots of food, lots of drinking (for those that do), comedian, party games and very little in the way of speeches. I think the NZ sponsors have got it right. Essentially it was, “Thanks for coming. Have a good night. Cheers”. Perfect. 🙂

This morning I’ve got a “Learn about the Oracle ACE Programme” session, followed by the second part of my PL/SQL presentation layers session. Then later in the afternoon I’ve got a “Meet the Experts” session. I’m interested to see what experts they’ve got for me to meet. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

CLOUG Day 1

Day 1 of the conference went really well. My presentation started a little late, so I missed out a few slides to try and get the timetable back on track. It was a bit unusual using a translation service for the first time. I speak quite fast so I think the translator needed a break once I was done. 🙂

I was on quite early, so I had the rest of the day to relax, chat to people and watch other presenters, including Dan Morgan, Robert Freeman, Hans Forbrich, Ben Prusinski and Graham Wood. The more I present, the more interesting I find watching other speakers. There are always lessons to learn.

In the evening we went out to dinner and I’m sure you will see a bunch of group photos appearing on people’s blogs over the next few days. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…