Tag: Tokyo

OTN APAC 2014 : Tokyo – Day 2

db tech showcase tokyo 2014Day 2 of the English speaking track of the Tokyo event began with:

  • Tom Kyte : Oracle Optimizer : What’s new in the Oracle Database 12c?
  • Mike Dietrich : Hitchhiker’s Guide to Oracle Database Upgrades

After Mike’s session we went out for lunch at a Tempura place. I had vegetable tempura. Very nice!

Tom took great pleasure in saying things like, “You’re only saying that because you get those cheques from Oracle every month…”, after everything I said. 🙂 For those that don’t understand the joke, read these blog posts (Fanboy, Oracle Bitch, Follow Up).

The afternoon sessions were:

Presenting so late on the second day was really tough. I just wanted to climb into bed and sleep. I had to miss a couple of slides out as I ran out of time, but it’s all backed by an article, so people can fill in the gaps later if they are interested.

After the event we went out to eat and few brave souls went out to Karaoke.

I’d like to extend a big thank you everyone involved in the setup of the event, especially Noriko, who went out of her way to make everything as simple as possible for us. I look forward to seeing you all again.

Tomorrow is an early start for the flight to Beijing, so I’ll probably post an update once I land and get into the hotel there.

Cheers

Tim…

OTN APAC 2014 : Tokyo – Day 1

Day 1 of the Tokyo event started with a taxi ride over to the conference venue. The traffic was not as bad as I expected, based on the stuff you see on TV. Does that mean TV has been lying to me all this time? Who’da thunk it? 🙂

db tech showcase tokyo 2014The event has 1 (mostly) English speaking track and 3 Japanese tracks, which cover a whole bunch of technologies including RDBMS engines, NoSQL engines, Hadoop and hardware. It’s a general database tech event, hence the name db tech showcase 2014 – Tokyo.

On the English track, first up was was Craig Shallahamer talking about “Memory Structure Control: How it works (latches & mutexes)”, followed by Bjoern Rost taking about “Oracle Hard Partitioning Technologies”.

At lunch we went out to a noodle bar which was pretty interesting. You pick your food from the menu on the wall outside, buy the relevant ticket from a vending machine, then walk into the restaurant, present the ticket and eat. 🙂

After lunch it was Francisco Munoz Alvarez speaking about “Everyone talks about DR – But why so few implement it”, followed by me doing the first of my two PL/SQL performance sessions. After a short break it was Bjoern, this time with “Setting up RAC properly to avoid application downtime”. After that the rest of the track was made up of Japanese speakers, so we kind-of ditched. 🙂

After the event we headed out for some food and networking. We got some drinks and food, then played bingo. I was hoping one of our group would win the bike or TV, which would have been funny, but we didn’t. Craig won a Chromecast though! After the bingo we were given glow-sticks and had a show by a girl group called Symphony-5, who had impossibly high voices and were very kawaii. Many of the attendees were very formal during the day, but the drinks and the show loosened everyone up, which gave us a chance to speak to a number of people, which was really cool! It was a really fun evening!

We popped back to the hotel to dump our stuff, then went across to a tall government building to get a night-time view across the city. I took photos, but I’m not sure how good they were yet. You can see what I’ve got here.

Cheers

Tim…