Tag: LAOTN

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : UYOUG, Uruguay – Day 1

After 15 hours of sleep I still managed to feel tired. 🙂 I went for breakfast at 6:30, then started to feel a little weird, so I took some headache pills and headed back to bed for a hour before meeting up with Debra and Mike to head down to the venue for the first day of the UYOUG leg of the tour…

The order of events went like this:

  • Pablo Ciccarelo started with an introduction OTN and the ACE program, which was in Spanish, so I ducked out of it. 🙂
  • Mike Dietrich speaking about “How Oracle Single/Multitenant will change a DBA’s life”.
  • Me with “Pluggable Databases : What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” There was some crossover with Mike’s session, but we both emphasised different things, which is interesting in itself. 🙂
  • Debra Lilley with “PaaS4SaaS”. The talk focused on a POC for using PaaS to extend the functionality of Fusion Apps, which is a SaaS product.
  • Me with “Oracle Database Consolidation : It’s not all about Oracle database 12c”. I think this is the least technical talk I’ve ever done and that makes me rather nervous. Technical content and demos are a reassuring safety blanket for me, so having them taken away feels a bit like being naked in public (why am I now thinking of Bjoern?). The session is a beginner session, so I hope people didn’t come expecting something more than I delivered. See, I’m paranoid already!
  • Mike Dietrich on “Simple Minimal Downtime Migration to Oracle 12c using Full Transportable Export/Import”. I think I’ve used every feature discussed in this session, but I’ve never used them all together in this manner. I think I may go back to the drawing board for one of the migrations I’ve got coming up in the next few months.
  • Debra Lilley with “Are cloud apps really ready?”. There was some similarity between the message Debra was putting out here and some of the stuff I spoke about in my final talk.
  • Me with “It’s raining data! Oracle Databases in the Cloud”. This was also not a heavy technical session, but because so few people have experience of running databases in the cloud at the moment, I think it has a wider appeal, so I’m not so paranoid about the limited technical content.

So that was the first day of the UYOUG conference done. Tomorrow is an easy day for me. I’ve got a panel session in the middle of the day, then I’m done. 🙂

Thanks to everyone who came to my sessions. I hope you found them useful.

Having slept through yesterday’s social event, I will be going out to get some food tonight. They eat really late here, so by the time we get some food I’ll probably be thinking about bed. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : The Journey Begins – Arrival at Montevideo, Uruguay

ace-directorAfter the quick flight to Montevideo, I was met by Edelweiss and Nelson. A couple of minutes later Mike Dietrich arrived. You know, that guy that pretends to understand upgrades! We drove over to the hotel, arriving at about 11:00. Check in was not until 15:00, so I had to wait a few minutes for them to prep my room. The others were going out to get some food, but I had a hot date with my bed. I got to my room, showered and hit the hay.

I was meant to meet up with the others at about 19:00 to get some food, but I slept through. In fact, I slept until about 04:00 the next day, which was about 15 hours. I think that may be a record… I’m feeling a bit punch-drunk now, but I’m sure once I start moving things will be fine…

Today is the first day of the tour proper. Fingers crossed…

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : The Journey Begins – Buenos Aires Airport

ace-directorThe flight from Paris to Buenos Aires was long, but relatively uneventful. One little patch of turbulence, then plain sailing.

For the main meal they didn’t have me down as vegetarian. I don’t know why I bother ordering special meals because the vast majority of the times I don’t get them. Interestingly, they did have a vegetarian breakfast for me, probably fixed one up after the dinner issue, but they gave it to the lady 2 seats away from me. She had seen the issue with the dinner and passed it across to me. In big letters on the tray it said 27J, which was my seat number, so I’m not quite sure why it was so difficult. I honestly think a lot of people look at me and think, “There is no way he is that fat and a vegetarian!”, so they give it to someone who looks suitably skinny… 🙂

I watched Insurgent, which was OK, then started to watch Fast & Furious 7, but couldn’t get into it on such a small screen. Amazingly, I did manage to catch small snatches of sleep, which was very welcome, interspersed with the obligatory periods of standing at the back of the plane pretending there aren’t loads of hours of sitting left.

So now I’m in Buenos Aires airport waiting to get back on to the same plane to fly the last 25 mins to Montevideo. I will be back in Buenos Aires in a couple of days, but I will be arriving by ferry next time! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 (Southern Leg)

ace-directorI put out a brief video a few days ago (re-uploaded today to fix typos) about my participation in the OTN Tour of Latin America (2015). I’ll be on the southern leg this year. Sorry to those countries who make up the northern leg. I will be back soon I hope.

Anyway, the southern leg of the tour shapes up like this.

  • 3/4 August Uruguay UYOUG
  • 5/6 August Argentina AROUG
  • 8 August Brazil GUOB
  • 10 August Chile CLOUG
  • 12 August Peru PEOUG

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. See you soon!

After the Peru leg, the wife and I will be going off to see Machu Picchu.

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : It’s a wrap!

After fluking a business class flight out to Latin America, I wasn’t looking forward to a cattle-class ride home, but when I got to Sao Paulo airport I got a free upgrade to business class. 🙂 A number of things did not go well during my outbound journey with AirFrance and I was extremely critical on my customer satisfaction survey. I can only imagine this was the reason for my upgrade on the way back, but maybe I just got lucky…

I had an aisle seat, which is a must for me. Just before we took off, the steward asked me if I would swap with a child so it could be near to it’s mother. I foolishly said yes, and ended up in a middle seat. When I am in a window or middle seat, even a business class one, I feel trapped and spend my whole time wondering how I can get out of the seat without disturbing the people around me. Normally I get out at the first opportunity and just stand up for the rest of the flight. I managed to sit down for some of the flight, but spent a long time standing, so I didn’t get any sleep. It was a bit of a waste of a business class seat really. Also, no vegetarian food again…

Sunday/Monday ended up being one very long day for me. I left for Sao Paulo airport about midday on Sunday. I flew home via Paris over night, landing at Birmingham at about 11:00 on Monday morning. I got a taxi home, scrubbed the smell of aeroplane of myself, then went in to work. A little after 17:00 I went to the gym with one of my work buddies, then went home in a daze. I still feel slightly other-worldly now, due to the jet lag… 🙂

Here are the blog posts I wrote during the tour:

I feel like the tour was a big success. All the organisers and attendees I spoke to seemed really pleased with how things went. I’ve also received a lot of positive comments through email and social media, which is no doubt going to make my head swell. 🙂

The sessions I presented during the tour were based on these articles:

The titles of the presentations don’t match the article names exactly, but the content covered is the same. I would rather point attendees at a follow-up article as my slides are quite brief because I use lots of demos.

A number of people have asked me to comment on the safety/security aspects of visiting some of the countries in Latin America, as the security warnings from Oracle Travel would have you believe you will be shot the minute you leave the plane. As with any city in the world, if you rock up dressed and acting like a tourist, you are likely to draw the wrong type of attention. Provided you take sensible precautions things are going to be fine. As some of the guys (Alex and Dana) know, I am cautious to the point of paranoia. 🙂 Having now done both the northern and southern leg of the OTN Latin America Tour I can say that I would have no worries about revisiting any of those countries again. On the other hand, there are places in my home city I would not consider visiting. 🙂

I’ve done a lot of thank you messages in the individual posts, but I would just like to take this opportunity to thank some people again.

  • Thank you to the organizers of the events for inviting me and making me feel very welcome. It takes a lot of effort to organize any event, but the level of support provided for us overseas speakers is fantastic.
  • Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for actually getting me to these events. Without them I would not be able to take part in these events. I am very grateful for everything I’ve experienced over the last 7 years.
  • A big thank you to my fellow speakers who put up with me for so long. Thanks for all the advice and support. I constantly try to improve myself and a big part of that is the advice I get from fellow speakers.
  • I guess the biggest thank you must go to all those people that attended my sessions. If you ladies and gentlemen did not actually come to these events, people like me wouldn’t be able to show off and pretend we are important for a few days before returning to our regular jobs. 🙂

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I will get a chance to return next year!

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Rusty Schmidt noticed I had missed out the word “no” from the second-to-last sentence on the paragraph about safety/security, which made the sentence read like I would be worried about visiting these countries again. It was a typo. I would be happy to visit these countries again and hopefully will soon. I’ve corrected the typo. Sorry. 🙂

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : GOUB…

The journey from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Sao Paulo, Brazil was quite straight forward. Just a 3 hour flight and I found myself in Brazil. I got one of the official taxis from the airport to the hotel, but if I told you the price you would think I had booked a private helicopter ride! Brazil is very expensive. 🙂

I dumped all my stuff in the hotel and took a walk around the shopping mall next door. Wow! This place is really expensive! If I lived here I would be skinny because I couldn’t afford to eat. 🙂

The morning of the conference started with a bit of a panic. I came back from breakfast, started up all my stuff ready for my talk and my VM was missing! Gone! Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! I have no idea how I managed to delete it. Out came the external hard drive and I recovered the VM using time machine. About 20 minutes later I had a VM again. Phew!

About 40 minutes later I was doing my first GUOB presentation to about 200 people, with my working VM. 🙂 The presentation seemed to go well. I got a lot of questions during the following coffee break, as well as photos with some of the attendees. Proper rockstar stuff. 🙂

I attended a few presentations, including Dana Singleterry‘s session on ADF 12c, which looks pretty cool, and Mike Dietrich‘s session on upgrading to 12c, which gave me a couple of ideas about things I need to add to my article about 12c upgrades.

My second session was followed by a coffee break, which allowed me to extend the question and answer session with the audience. People seemed happy at the end of the session, so I think I did OK. 🙂

It seems lots of people have questions they want to ask, but not in front of the room, so I spent a lot of time answering questions between sessions. I can’t emphasise enough how important networking time is at a conference. I love chatting to people about technology, so the question and answer stuff is really good fun for me.

In the evening we went out to a Brazilian barbecue restaurant. There was loads of veggie stuff to eat, so I stuffed myself, whilst watching everyone else devouring a heard of cows. They like their meat in Latin America!

I got back just in time to see Soulja Boy arrive at the hotel. How the mighty have fallen. There were only about 20 fans there to meet him and he was travelling in the hotel minibus. He’s really small! He looks like a skinny little 10 year old, so I guess the hotel minibus felt like a giant tour bus to him. 🙂

I was only in Brazil long enough to present at the conference, so I didn’t get any shots of the city. You can see a few photos of the conference here, as well as a few pictures I’ve downloaded from twitter.

So that is the last event of the LA OTN Tour (Southern Leg) complete. I’ll be checking out of the hotel in a few minutes and starting the long trip home.

Thanks to everyone at GUOB for inviting me to the event and thank you to the Oracle ACE Program for making it possible for me to take part in the event.

I’ll write a wrapping up post about the tour once I get back home.

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : ArOUG Day 2…

I was determined to get on a bus tour of Buenos Aires this morning. The plan was to do this yesterday, then spend this morning revisiting a few parts of the city in a bit more detail. Unfortunately, my inability to follow basic directions scuppered that plan… 🙂

So this morning I got myself to the tour bus and rode the loop of the city, taking photos as I went. You will see lots of blurred images and lots of pictures containing parts of the bus, but I don’t care because they are still good memories. 🙂

I got back from the tour bus, had a quick shower, then walked to the conference venue to do my last presentation of the ArOUG event. Everything went smoothly and people seemed really happy with it. I got to speak to more of the attendees, which is always fun, and pose for a bunch of photos with people. Everyone in Latin America has such nice skin tones, then there is me looking like casper the friendly ghost next to them. I think I will get a fake tan before I come next time. 🙂

After saying goodbyes to a few people, a few of us went out to a local bar to toast the end of another event. Alex would be proud of me, as I drank a pint of the local equivalent on Guinness, while eating chips (fries) with a cocktail stick. What a great idea! No sticky fingers. 🙂

I’m now back at the hotel and I leave for Sa0 Paulo, Brazil tomorrow. That’s four out of five events done. It hardly seems real…

Thanks to everyone in Buenos Aires and the ArOUG that looked after me and made me feel welcome during my stay. I hope to see you again soon. Also thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for making this happen.

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : ArOUG Day 1…

I arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina late last night. The ferry ride from Montevideo took about 3 hours.

This morning I got a taxi to the ArOUG conference venue and did my first presentation of the conference. I was originally scheduled to do both my presentations today, then have tomorrow off, but Alex Gorbachev needs to leave earlier tomorrow, so I’ve swapped slots with him and my second presentation is now tomorrow afternoon.

Feeling adventurous, I decided to walk back from the conference venue. The directions seemed pretty straight forward, but I managed to get myself lost. I walked around for quite a while, thinking I must be close to the hotel, but not managing to find it. I eventually decided the only way to get back was to get a taxi. As I walked to find one, I noticed I was standing next to my hotel. Bonus!

The plan was to spend the afternoon on a city tour bus, but unfortunately I got lost on the way to the pickup point and I just walked around for a few hours until I found myself again, standing next to the hotel. 🙂

After reading a bunch of security messages from Oracle I felt quite nervous of taking photos and making myself look even more like a tourist, so I didn’t take many photos. If I can get on the bus tour tomorrow, and not get lost again, I will take loads.

In the evening went out to a barbecue-style place to eat. Everyone ate a little bit of salad and fish to start, then guys brought a procession of different meat out on large skewers, more like swords really, then it was a meat-fest for the rest of the night. I’m a vegetarian, so I kept eating the veggie stuff while I watched a herd of assorted animals get devoured. Everyone was very happy and full by the end of it. Even so, Alex still managed to eat some food from a street vendor on during the walk back to the hotel. I have no idea where he puts it all! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : UYOUG…

The trip from Lima to Montevideo took quite a long time. First I flew back to Santiago, then from there to Montevideo, Uruguay. The drive from the airport to the hotel was pretty cool. It was dark, but we were driving along the coast and the city was all lit up. We arrived quite late, so we dropped off our stuff at the hotel and went out to eat.

The next day was the UYOUG conference. I did three presentations at this event. My laptop died during my first session, so I had to fill while waiting for it to restart. The second session went without any problems. I managed to mangle my DB before the third session and I didn’t have enough time to recover it as I only noticed as my session started. Fortunately I have an article associated with each presentation, so I used the examples in the article to demonstrate how the features worked. It always pays to be prepared! 🙂

After my last session I went back to the hotel to get my bags, then it was a quick dash to the ferry port to get the ferry to Buenos Aires.

One bit of culture I did manage to encounter was Mate. When I was walking to the conference venue I noticed lots of people walking with what looked like bongs in their hands, which seemed a bit strange. Later I found out these were used for drinking Mate. I got a chance to try it. It tastes like a mixture of tea and tobacco and has a slightly smokey taste. It was quite an interesting taste, but not like anything I’ve tried before.

So I was in Montevideo for less than 24 hours, which was a shame as the people were great and the city looked interesting. Hopefully I will get a chance to visit again and take a proper look at the city next time.

Thanks to the organisers of the UYOUG conference for inviting me, and of course the ACE Program for getting me to the event!

I’m now in Buenos Aires for the 4th leg of the tour…

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : Day off in Lima, Peru

I actually got a day off from travelling and presenting yesterday. I would have loved to see Macchu Picchu, but that would take more time than I had available, so instead I went to see Pachacamac, which is about 30 minutes from the city. It is a really big site, about 10 hectares. It must have looked amazing in its heyday. One part of the site is a cemetery, where they estimate there are 40,000 mummies. What with that and the whole human sacrifice thing, it was kind-of freaky. I shall have to get some more information about it and scare my nephews with the story. 🙂

I took quite a lot of photos, but they don’t really do the site justice.

After the tour I took my second visit to Wong (a supermarket), to embarrass myself by trying to buy food without knowing the language. The people in Peru are really friendly, so I hope they find my cluelessness amusing, rather than annoying.

After stuffing myself with bread, fruit and Inca Kola, I spent a few minutes in the hotel gym. I think I probably burnt off about one tenth of the calories I ate. 🙂

IncaKola

This morning was a very early start. My alarm went off at 03:45. I was showered, packed and out of the hotel by 04:30. The trip back to the airport was not as much fun as the trip from it. The roads were very quiet, so there were no Fast & Furious moments to write about. 🙂

The hotel told me to be at the airport 3 hours before the flight. Although the place was really busy when I arrived, I got through check-in, security and immigration control really quickly, so as I write this, I have about 2 hours until my flight. The journey is a 3-4 hour flight back to Santiago, Chile, followed by a 2+ hour flight to Montevideo, Uruguay.

Cheers

Tim…