Having got to OUG Ireland, here’s what happened…
The first session I got to see was Nikolay Kovachev from TechnoLogica speaking about “12c PDBs, Snapshots & Change Management”. Bulgaria in da house! The session started with an intro to ZFS (snapshots, copy-on-write (COW), clones), then a quick intro to the Oracle multitenant architecture. From there it was on to PDB snapshot cloning using ZFS. Because of the ZFS COW functionality, this is really quick. Similar cloning times to Clonedb. From there is was on to Cloud Control 12c Change Management, using the lifecycle management pack. After doing that, it was demo time, with a demo for everything covered in the session. Even with the power of modern day laptops, I am always nervous of live demos of Cloud Control. It’s resource eating beast… The ZFS and cloning demos worked fine, but there were some issues with the change management pack demo because of the amount of stuff running on a single laptop. It was a pity, but such are the joys, and pains, of live demos. I’ve been there myself several times. I definitely need to spend some time looking at the snapshot clones of PDBs in 12c.
My first sessions was “Pluggable Databases : What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” When I did this at Oracle Midlands #8 it was described as scary by a couple of people. I tried to lighten it a little this time, so I hope I didn’t scare anyone. 🙂
After my first talk it was off to lunch, where I got to meet up and chat with a bunch of people, which is really the best part of any conference. Can we have the soup in mugs next time please? 🙂
Next up was Marcin Przepiorowski from Delphix speaking about “How To Avoid Boring Work – Automation For DBAs”. When I tweeted this one of the replies asked if it was a Delphix sales pitch. One of the things I like about companies like Delphix, Dbvisit, Enkitec and Pythian is they send people out to conferences without forcing them to do the hard sell. Marcin is a Delphix employee, but this session wasn’t anything to do with Delphix. It started off with examples of using Cloud Control to automate tasks, then moved on to using Ansible. I’ve not used Ansible, but it looks pretty neat for automation of tasks across your whole server real estate. It’s on my to-do list.
My second session was “A Cure for Virtual Insanity: A vendor-neutral introduction to virtualization without the hype“. I was kind-of expecting nobody to turn up to this session as there was a whole bunch of great sessions on at the same time and it wasn’t directly about Oracle. As it turned out I was pleasantly surprised. I like doing this session. It’s quite light and fluffy, but allows me to dispel some of the FUD associated with virtualization.
Next up was the closing keynote by Maria Colgan. Apparently, the In-Memory Column Store is a software version of walking into a pub, standing on the bar and asking which of the blokes is suitable relationship material. I tried this once and couldn’t walk straight for days. 🙂 Maria also picked up her UKOUG lifetime achievement award for winning the best speaker prize three times. This means she can no longer be selected as best speaker, which makes it that much easier for the rest of us… 🙂
After the closing keynote it was drinks and nibbles then the event was over.
Thank you messages in the next post…
Cheers
Tim…
