Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group – November 2019

Last night I went to the Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group. It was co-organised by Urfaan Azhar and Lee Thatcher from Pure Technology Group, and Adrian Newton from my company.

This event was focused on Microsoft Teams, which is the MS version of Slack. If you don’t know what Slack is, you probably need to come out from under that rock…

First up was Matt Fooks speaking about “Microsoft Teams, the death of email!” We use Teams at work, but I’m a bit of a noob at it and I don’t get involved in any of the administration side of things. The session started with an overview of what Teams does and how it is organised. We spent some time speaking about culture related stuff, which may well be a bigger factor than the tech side of things with regards to transitioning from email to Teams (or Slack) as the primary communication channel. In addition to security and organisational stuff, there was a discussion of integration and applications available from Teams. The first session ended with Urfaan Azhar discussing some of the recent innovations in Teams, covered here.

After food and drinks it was Kevin McDonnell with “Using Bots in Azure/Teams for Automation”. Following the theme of the event, this was a remote presentation over Teams. 🙂 An interesting point raised at the start was how social functionality can help drive adoption and engagement in the company. As an example he showed a daily challenge bot, which allowed people to guess the location of today’s Bing image. It’s not “work”, but it got people engaged in the product and communicating. Amongst other things, there was a quick demo of Power Automate, the new name for Flow, which now has RPA functionality in preview. There was also a demo of Bot Framework Composer, which looks like a pretty easy way to generate the basics of a bot from a simple designer. There was also a mention of Virtual Agents for creating conversational bots (chat bots), which looked pretty cool.

As I’ve said before, I’m not involved in the administration of M365, Azure and Teams, but this is all about context and possibilities for me. My company has some of these products, so it’s good to know what they can do, and maybe take advantage of some of them from some of the stuff I do have a hand in.

Thanks to everyone who turned up to support the event, the speakers, and the sponsor Pure Technology Group. See you at the next event.

Cheers

Tim…

Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group – October 2019

On Tuesday evening I went to the second event of the Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group. It was co-organised by Urfaan Azhar and Lee Thatcher from Pure Technology Group, and Adrian Newton from my company.

First up was Matt Fooks speaking about security in M365 and Azure. He did an overview and demos of a number of security features, giving an idea of their scope, how easy/hard they were to configure and importantly what licenses they were covered by. Some of this was a bit over my head, but for me it’s about understanding possibilities and what’s available, even if I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it. Other people in the company do that stuff. At one point I leaned over to one of my colleagues and said, “Could we use that for…”, and he came back with, “Yeah. We’ve done a POC with that. Look!”, then showing me an example of it working with one of our services. 🙂

After food and drinks it was Urfaan Azhar speaking about Azure pricing, and working through an example with the Azure Pricing Calculator. I’ve been using AWS for a few years, so when I have questions I tend to use AWS terminology, which I’m sure can be annoying, but I’ve not learned the new language yet. As I expected, it’s “the same but different”. 🙂

Both guys were keen to point out that just doing a lift & shift from on-prem to cloud using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) isn’t what you should be aiming for. The real value comes from using platforms. My feelings exactly! If I just put what I have now into the cloud, it’s just other people’s servers. I’m more interested in what I can offload to give me more time to do other things, and to stop me screwing up on the daily because I’m to busy to do “the basics”…

Thanks to everyone who turned up to support the event, the speakers, and the sponsor Pure Technology Group. See you at next month’s event.

Cheers

Tim…

Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group – Launch

Last night I went to the launch of a new meetup called Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group. It was co-organised by Urfaan Azhar and Lee Thatcher from Pure Technology Group, and Adrian Newton and Mark Smith from my company.

Some of you may have noticed this isn’t about Oracle. Yes we have a big Oracle Cloud Apps thing and a bunch of Oracle on-prem stuff, but we also have a lot of Microsoft stuff here, including loads of mailboxes on Office 365 etc. As a result, Azure is also becoming a big thing for us.

I’ve used Azure a bit for some Oracle trials, with the articles on the site, and I did a WebLogic on Azure talk some years back, but this is pretty far out of my lane, so I was really there to show some support to our folks and trying to learn some stuff. 🙂

The turnout was really good. I think there were about 40 people in total, with about 6 coming from our company. For the first event I was kind-of expecting more of “us”, and less of “not us”, so the fact so many “not us” turned up was awesome! Getting a couple of Microsoft Most Valuable Professisonal (MVP) speakers for the launch event was cool.

After some introductions from Urfan and Lee, the first speaker was Ed Baker with an “Introduction to Microsoft 365”. The purpose of this session was for Ed to give an overview of the M365 stack and try to gauge what we were interested in, to see how the meetup should move forward in future. Ed is an Enterprise Mobility MVP and is clearly comfortable in front of an audience.

After food (Pizza and Indian) and drinks it was time for Gareth Jones with “An Introduction to Microsoft Azure”. Gareth talked about the way Microsoft deliver the Azure services, including the setup of their data centres. Once again, this was about gauging the interest for the different aspects of Azure. Gareth is an Azure MVP, and just like Ed was very happy in front of a crowd.

It was a really good start for the new meetup. Big thanks to Urfaan, Lee, Adrian and Mark for getting this going. Thanks to Ed and Gareth for taking the time to come and speak to us. Thanks to everyone who turned up to support the event, as well as the sponsor Pure Technology Group. I look forward to the next event, to see how this moves forward!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Midlands Event #8 : Summary

Last night was Oracle Midlands Event #8 sponsored by Redgate.

There was a problem with the projector, but fortunately there were a couple of large TV screens, so it didn’t have to be a complete no-slide zone. Neither of the talks relied on displaying lots of code, so I don’t think this caused a big problem.

First up was Chris Saxon speaking about Edition-Based Redefinition. I’ve done talks on this subject, so I was interested to see how Chris approached it. The talk started with an explanation of the problems associated with deploying new versions of PL/SQL code to production, then moved on to possible solutions available prior to 11gR2. Once that ground work had been established, he moved on to explain how EBR can be used to make the process more robust, focussing on some specific pieces of the EBR functionality. I preferred his approach to the subject than my own, so I was taking a bunch of notes about his presentation style. There is always something to learn. I thought it was a really good session and Chris handled the subject (and the projector issue) really well. His recent move to Steven Feuerstein’s advocacy/evangelist team at Oracle means I should get to see him speaking some more in the future, which will be cool.

After the food break, it was my session on “Pluggable Databases – What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” It was the first time I’ve done this session in front of a crowd, which is always a bit nervy. It seemed to go down pretty well. Here is the feedback from those who filled in the evaluations.

  • “Good presentation”
  • “Good presentation, dynamic material & delivery”
  • “A lot of content, probably requires a part 2”
  • “Scary!!!”
  • “Good information and entertaining delivery style”
  • “Excellent – superb topic & presentation skills”
  • “Very good talk. Much information gained”
  • “Brilliant & scary!”
  • “Informative, passionate & useful”
  • “Brilliant”
  • “Really good insight/information. Real world understanding which makes a real difference. As always brilliant!”
  • “Not bad for a beginner”
  • “Really enjoyed & challenging subject matter”
  • “Fantastic!”
  • “Good”

The, “Not bad for a beginner”, comment made me LOL when I read it. There are a couple of people I’m putting in the frame for that one. 🙂

It wasn’t my intention to make the Mulitenant option seem really scary. I thought I was doing a sales pitch for it, not scaring people off. Maybe I need to re-frame things a little… 🙂

Thanks to Mike for getting the event sorted and thanks to Redgate for the sponsorship. Thanks to Chris for coming along. Hopefully we can get him back again in the future. Big thanks to everyone who turned up to the event last night. Let’s keep this train rolling!

Cheers

Tim…

Riga Dev Day and Oracle Midlands Event #7

There are a couple of things on the radar for the coming week and unfortunately for me they are both on the same day.

In Birmingham, UK it is Oracle Midlands Event #7 (OM7) on Thursday 22nd of January. This will be the first Oracle Midlands event I’ve missed since it started. I’m a big fan of what Mike is doing with Oracle Midlands and I appreciate the sponsorship from Redgate that means it is a free event. Please remember to get off your post-Christmas asses and attend the event. It will only keep happening if you make the effort to turn up! So far the attendance and been good, but it only takes a couple of events with small numbers to let it fizzle out an die. Please keep showing your support!

On the same day it is Riga Dev Day 2015 in Latvia. It will be my first time in Latvia, so that will be fun. I think the daughter (Hell-Squirrel) has been before, so she’ll be able to look after me. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Midlands Event #6 : Summary

OraclePressBearLast night was the Oracle Midlands Event #6 with Bjoern Rost.

Let’s start with the important stuff! I am now the proud owner of an Oracle Press bear! I didn’t technically win it, but one of the people who did donated it to me. This was the right thing to do for two reasons. (1) I wanted it more than him and (2) it is his fault I am in my current job, rather than living the good life. Thanks Dave!

Bjoern’s first session was on SQL Plan Management, which I think is an awesome feature when used in the correct context. For most DBAs, consistency is the primary goal, not ultra performance. SQL Plan Management gives you the ability to lock down your execution plans to give you more consistent results. I’ve used this during upgrade and patching cycles and it really works well. I see even more need for this as we move into the new world order of everything being optimized 75,000 times before we get the final good plan. 🙂

After some food, Bjoern was back with 12c New Features for DBAs and Developers. This was a quick tour through some of the cool bits of 12c. I like the way Bjoern presents. He’s very honest about features he’s not used much yet, which makes a change from people acting like they know everything, only to crumble under questioning. It also makes the talks very amusing, as well as being informative. Having spent so long with him on the APAC Tour, it was surprising that I hadn’t seen him present either of these talks before.

After the event a few of us ventured over to the German market, which was actually closed by the time we got there. 🙂 Instead, we went into a local pub and discussed life, the universe and everything until far too late.

When it was time to leave, I gave Bjoern a lift round Birmingham city centre, looking for a taxi rank. Eventually, he got out of my car at some traffic lights and got into the taxi behind me. 🙂 In my defence, there is loads of building work around the city centre, so roads are closed and the taxi ranks have moved… I also gave Dave (my bear supplier) a lift home…

Thanks to RedGate for sponsoring the event, allowing it remain free.  Thanks to Mike Dirden for organising the event. Thanks to Bjoern Rost for coming to entertain us and to the Oracle ACE Program for getting him across to us. Thanks to Oracle Press for my bear. Thanks also to the attendees, without whom this would not happen. Please keep spreading the word. :)

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The next event is in January. I’ll write a post about it once it is up on the website…

Oracle Midlands : Event #4 – Summary

What a cracking Oracle Midlands event!

The evening started with a session on “Designing Efficient SQL” by Jonathan Lewis. The first few slides prompted this tweet.

jl

When someone asks me a question about SQL tuning my heart sinks. It’s part of my job and I can do it, but I find it really hard to communicate what I’m doing. Jonathan’s explanation during this session was probably the best one I’ve ever heard. Rather than trying to explain a million and one optimizer features, it’s very much focussed on a “What are you actually trying to achieve?” approach. It should be mandatory viewing for all Oracle folks.

After the break, where I stuffed myself with samosas, it was on to the lightning talks (10 mins each).

  • Breaking Exadata – Jonathan Lewis, JL Computer Consultancy : This focused on a couple of situations where the horsepower of Exadata doesn’t come to the rescue, like large hash joins that flood to disk and decompressions in the storage cells being abandoned and the compressed blocks being sent back to the compute nodes to be decompressed. If I ever get to use an Exadata…
  • How to rename a 500gb schema in 10 minutes – Richard Harrison, EON : Why can’t we have a rename user/schema command? Richard showed a quick way to use transportable tablespaces to rename a schema. Neat!
  • Oracle Big Data Appliance – What’s in the box? – Salih Oztop, Business AnalytiX : The title says it all really. I thought it was a really good introduction to the BDA. I’ve been to 1 hour talks on this subject that didn’t convey as much information as he managed to fit into 10 minutes. Also, a hint at a cool new feature about to be announced…
  • Installing RAC: Things to sort out with your systems and network admins – Patrick Hurley, Scale Abilities : Patrick is a cool guy and he upped his cool rating further by brandishing a light sabre as a pointer during his talk! His session was a list of gotchas he’s encountered while installing RAC. Some of them I’ve encountered myself. Some not. Good stuff.
  • Is the optimiser too smart now? – Martin Widlake, ORA600 : I could hear a voice, but I couldn’t see anyone over the podium. 🙂 The question was, has it got to a point where it is too complicated for normal folks and beginners to stand a chance at understanding it, or should we now be treating it like a black box? My own feeling is that 12c might be the turning point where I really have to say I don’t understand it any more. It feels a bit sad, but maybe it is inevitable…

I though the lightning talks worked really well. It felt like a whole conference packed into one hour. 🙂

The event was free, thanks to the sponsorship by those kind people at Red Gate. The Oracle Press teddy bears made another appearance, but I didn’t win one. 🙁

Big thanks to Mike for organising it and to all the speakers for doing a great job. The next event will be up on the website soon. Please show your support! These things live or die based on your participation…

Cheers

Tim…