OTN APAC 2014 – Auckland – Day 1

So it was really day 2 of the conference, but it was day 1 for me, so that’s the way I’m naming it… 🙂 There were seven tracks available, but I’ll be speaking about what I saw…

First up was the keynote by Tim Ebbeck called 10 Rules of Transformational Leadership. I’m not the biggest fan of keynotes, but this one was pretty cool. To summarise:

1. Nothing beats being as good as you can be. Get off your ass and do it.
2. Expect less of other people’s leadership and expect more of your own. Be a self starter. Don’t rely on others to lead you.
3. You always have a choice. Make positive choices.
4. Manage and protect your personal brand. Do other people perceive you as you perceive yourself.
5. Life’s not fair. Get over it.
6. Settle for nothing less than you deserve.
7. Keep perspective. Never take things personally. Avoid it becoming about ego.
8. Do it differently and innovate.
9. Balance the game. You need a work/life balance.
10. Make up your own rules.

Pretty cool. I agree with everything, but he forgot to mention number “11. S.T.F.U. and R.T.F.M”. 🙂

Next up was DBA 101: Calling All New Database Administrators by Gustavo Rene Antunez. I’ve met Rene a few times, but I’ve never seen him present, so this was a great opportunity. It was a really nice introduction Oracle and the DBA job. His slides are really fun and informative at the same time. I really like his presentation style. I’ll definitely make the effort to see him present again in future.

My PL/SQL performance session seemed to go quite well. After presenting recently to groups of people where English was a second language, it was liberating to be able to speak quicker and in a more relaxed manner again.

After lunch I went to see Gustavo Rene Antunez speaking about Getting Started with Database as a Service with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. It’s a subject that I’m interested in, even though I have very little experience of it at the moment. I think the important point Rene made is you should be trying to reduce the number of offerings in the service catalog to a manageable level, so you can cope with 80% of your systems that represent the “standard stuff”. There is no point defining templates for the one-off things, since DBaaS probably isn’t the right place for that. Once again, one size does not fit all. Some interesting decisions to make in terms of management and governance…

Next up was Stuart Speers talking about Oracle database on AWS (Amazon Web Services). He started off talking about the pros and cons of RDS for Oracle, then moved on to a case study where they deployed conventional Oracle installation on AWS to support an APEX application for a customer. I’ve played with most of this AWS stuff to kick the tires, but that’s different to the experience of doing a production app on it. It was interesting to see the approach and architecture of the application in the context of AWS.

Next up was Jennie Vickers speaking about The Fear Factor – Getting Past Legal Concerns About the Cloud. She’s a lawyer, not a computer geek, so the idea behind this session was to help us identify problem areas that may need legal attention, not turn us into technology lawyers. This stuff is very scary and very interesting. She broke the identification of problem processes down to 8 key areas.

• Business or Consumer (B2B or B2U)? : There are different legal issues around this. It’s often easier to protect yourself from other businesses than from consumer rights? Some consumer law is not defined in your contract, but part of the statute. There is some cross referencing to do.
• Global or Local? : Legal jurisdictions are important. Are you bound by the law of your country, the country of your service provider or the country of the user.
• Goods, service, experience or community? What are you actually selling?
• Brands : Support not damage the brand. Your service shouldn’t compromise the values of the brand. Does the cloud affect your brand in a negative way?
• Online, physical or both for sales? Some countries treat internet sales differently to physical sales.
• Selling a technology product, or technology enabler? It makes a difference.
• What data? Does privacy even matter for the data you are putting into the cloud? Lots of data is irrelevant from a security perspective.
• Who owns the data? Does it belong to your business or your customers? It makes a difference.

Depending on your answers to these questions, you are going to have a different attitude to the cloud. It was pretty neat getting a talk about this from a lawyer, not a geek pretending to understand the law!

From there I went to my session on virtualisation. It’s a nice and fluffy session to end the day. 🙂

After the last session, there was a social gathering in the foyer for a bit of networking. I went and grabbed some with Chris Muir, before going back to the hotel to bed down for the night…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer. View all posts by Tim...