Unfortunately I can’t make the “Oracle Code: London” event this year as I’m already confirmed for another conference on those dates. Apart from the Oracle Code events, I’m already confirmed for these two events.
Day 2 was a mixed day for me. I mentioned in the previous post my preparation for this conference had not been the best because of circumstances, and that started to get the better of me. I’ve said it before, public speaking is not natural for me. This was the first conference I had done since UKOUG Tech17. Having nearly a 4 month break and coming in without the normal prep was a bad idea, because it felt very much like I was back to square one, doing my first ever presentation. I spent quite a while talking to Chris Saxon in the morning, where I had pretty much decided to give up presenting blah, blah, blah…
My first session was “Using PL/SQL and ORDS to Develop RESTful Web Services for APEX? Why?”. Even though it is an APEX talk, I am speaking mostly about the organisation of applications, the use of API-first development and web services, but all in the context of APEX. I’m the first to admit I’m not a great APEX developer, but I do know a bit about PL/SQL and I think I am pretty good at organising applications. I think the talk went OK. That calmed my nerves somewhat for the next session, which was the one I was really worried about.
My second session was “Cool New Features for Developers in 18c and 12c”, which was mostly live demos, connected to an 18c database running on the Oracle Database Cloud Service. I had recorded the demos in case the internet connection dropped, but I think if it had it would have been game over really. The internet connection was fine, which was a relief. I couldn’t switch between the slides and the demos as seamlessly as I would have liked, but it wasn’t terrible. I had picked a selection of things that I think are cool from 12.1, 12.2 and 18c. Some things were cool because they are useful. Some things are cool for geek factor, even though I might not use them much. I had a couple of timing issues with the demos and I ran out of time, but overall it felt OK. There was a bit of banter with the crowd, which always helps me relax.
Update: Someone asked for the list, so here it is. I didn’t get to demo them all because of time. 🙂
From there it was off to the panel session I was meant to chair. So it turns out I’m bad on the panel, I’m bad in the audience and I’m bad as chair of a panel. I think the only way it’s going to work out is if I’m gagged or excluded. Dominic Giles got a grilling in part of the session, but he handled it admirably as always. As is always the case with panels, there’s a mixed bag of questions and a rather varied selection of answers… 🙂
From there it was a few goodbyes, and I hung around with Chris, before leaving for the airport. We got some food and as Chris left for his plane Neil and Martin turned up. I spent a few minutes chatting with them, then it was off to get my plane.
Some of the guys at the back of the plane were “a little rowdy”, but it was a quick flight and we got back OK. It was then a short taxi ride home and it was all over…
The OUG Ireland 2018 conference felt busier this year. I’m not sure how the numbers stack up, but a couple of people commented the same. Just a little reminder, if you are using one of the cheap airline companies, it’s probably cheaper to get to the OUG Ireland conference than it is to get to some of the UK conferences. Just sayin’. 🙂
Thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland for letting me come again. Thanks to the attendees and people who came to my sessions for helping me get through them. Thanks to the speakers also, especially those who did a bit of “counselling” for me. 🙂 This was a self-funded trip, but thanks as always to the Oracle ACE Program and Developer Champion Program for letting me fly the flag. See you all again next year.
When I originally posted about this event I was an attendee. Over the last week or so things have changed a lot. First I picked up a vacated speaker slot, then I was asked to chair a panel session, then I was asked if I could fill another speaker slot that had become free. Of the two presentations I agreed to give, one hadn’t been written yet and had live demos to prep. The other one was written, but needed some serious rehearsal. Needless to say, this last week has been a bit of a nightmare. My presenting skills are not natural, they’ve been learnt, and it takes me a lot of rehearsal to appear casual and relaxed. If you want to come and see if I manage to get through the demos without injury, my sessions are in the last three blocks on Friday. You can see the agenda here. 🙂
So day one began at silly o’clock with a taxi ride to the airport. It’s a really short flight to Dublin, so it feels more like a bus ride. When you are flying on CheapAir for pennies there really is no messing about. A lady had her full baggage allocation, but wanted to bring a giant box of tea bags with her, which was going to cost her £50 as a checked item. That was an interesting discussion/fight… The flight itself was really quick, and once at Dublin airport is was a short bus ride to the Gresham Hotel and the conference started…
First up was Dominic Giles with a keynote called “Towards Autonomous Data Management”. I’ve written about using the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service before (here). I’ve also written about my opinions of this type of service going forward (here). I’m looking forward to see how these services develop. As I’ve said before, this is the beginning of a journey, not the destination…
After coffee and some chit-chat it was off to see “Tell us Your Plans, ask us Your Questions” with the wife and Tony Cassidy. This was a question and answer session about Oracle Cloud Apps and I just wanted to keep my ear to the ground.
Next up was Neil Chandler with “JSON in Oracle”, followed by Chris Saxon with “18(ish) Things Developers Will Love About Oracle Database 18c”. I enjoyed both sessions, but I think people in one of my sessions tomorrow might feel some deja vu, because they collectively covered a lot of the stuff I am speaking about tomorrow. I’ve got some live demos (if my internet connection works), which will hopefully make it feel different. 🙂
From there I headed back to check in to my hotel and play catch-up on a couple of things, including checking out my demos again. 🙂
I popped over to the social event, to catch some people I hadn’t spoken to during the day. I was going to duck out of the ACE dinner as it had been a long day, but Brendan persuaded me I should go, and I was glad I did because it was announced that Kiran Tailor is the latest person to be made an Oracle ACE Director.
Kiran is a super-nice guy, so I was pleased this happened.
Once we had eaten, I walked the wife back to her hotel, and bought her an ice cream, then headed off to mine to crash. What a long day!
“There will be lots of people and companies who will happily take your money to learn the new tech, but that’s probably the subject of another post…”
Here is that post. 🙂
I see two distinct scenarios, and have two very different attitudes to them.
The Good
When something is new to the market, there is nobody that has the skills you need, but there are people/companies with a wealth of experience and a proven track record of picking up new skills and delivering good results.
I totally understand someone wanting to pay these types of people/companies to help them get to their goal. This is mutually beneficial as the customer gets to their goal in a shorter space of time than if they did it all themselves, and the person/company doing the investigation and work gets new skills and real world experience at the new tech.
The important point is both sides need to clearly understand this situation before work gets underway, as it might affect timescales and cost of the work.
The Bad and the Ugly
There are a lot of people and companies that are using their clients to improve their skills without the customer being aware of the relationship they are in. To me this is robbery. They have represented themselves as something they are not and that is a problem.
In some cases they might still deliver a reasonable product in a reasonable timescale, but in some cases not. 🙁 In some ways the result is not really the issue, it’s the deceit that is the problem. It’s usually really easy to spot, as the saying goes, you don’t have to know how to swim to recognise when someone is drowning.
Solution?
I’m surprised how many people don’t ask for reference customers, or if they do, they never follow up on them properly. You can tell a lot by what is said and what is not said if you are asking the right questions. If the person/company doesn’t have a track record of delivering the thing you are asking for, do you really want them?
I emphasised the thing you are asking for, because it is a really important point. A person/company might be awesome at some related stuff, which might not be exactly what you are looking for, but might fool you into thinking they know what they are doing. To use myself as an example, I know a bit about Oracle databases and WebLogic, but does that mean I’m the right person to work on OBIEE that uses Oracle databases and WebLogic? I can tell you the answer to that. It’s NO! If I were an expert at eBusiness Suite does that mean I’m the right person to work on Oracle Cloud Applications? I can tell you the answer to that too. It’s NO!
As I mentioned before, if both parties understand what they are getting into I totally understand why you would want to pay someone to learn some new stuff for you. If you as a customer don’t know this is what is happening, that’s a problem!
Every time a new database version is released a group of people, myself included, start pushing out content about it. I can guarantee you one thing about all these people. None of them are experts at Oracle 18c! There isn’t a single expert at 18c on the planet. Not even in Oracle. To be honest, I would say there are very few people who could really call themselves experts at 12cR2 at this point. Why? Because it takes time to get good at stuff and even 12cR2 hasn’t been out that long. It’s about 1 year since it was released for use on-prem (see announcement). Yes, it was around on cloud for a while before then, but most folks have had 12cR2 for 1 year and that’s it. Most people writing about 18c have had it for a few days tops. 🙂
So you’ve got one year of experience at 12cR2 right? I’m not so sure. You see you’re probably spending a lot of time working on 11gR2 and/or 12cR1 instances, as well as the odd 12cR2 instance that has made if to production. Humans are pretty lazy, so you are probably still doing a lot of stuff “the old way”.
I mentioned on a recent mailing list conversation, my approach to a new version is as follows.
I stop using the old version for my non-work environments. I’m 100% on the new version from day 1.
I try to move to the latest version as quickly as possible for work, with the necessary application testing of course.
I try to use the new version as “vanilla” as possible. Defaults for everything. I try not to bring my old habits with me to the new version.
I use all the new features (that I am licensed for), including all the automated features that are available. For example, when multitenant came out, after a small period of denial, I committed myself to it. My default stance was I will use it (lone-PDB for free) unless (A) a vendor doesn’t support it, or (B) I find an issue that means switching to it will be a problem for that project.
I’ve been doing this for a long time and this approach has served me well, but I still think it takes me a few years before I feel really confident with a new version.
I don’t think many of the good content producers throw around the term “expert” very often, but I think some of the people who follow can have unrealistic expectations when they look at content on the internet. Most people are writing about something new they are doing, so at the point they are writing it, they are far from being experts. If you’re lucky they will go back and revise that content when they learn more, but more often than not they don’t. As a result, you are often following the guidance of a first-time user. 🙂
So when you ask me to help you with your implementation of Data Guard between two 18c Exadata machines, you’ve got to realise how naive that question is. There will be lots of people and companies who will happily take your money to learn the new tech, but that’s probably the subject of another post… 🙂
I was looking through the list of deprecated and desupported features along with terminal releases in Oracle Database 18c and there were some surprises.
This won’t be a complete list, so I would advise you to check it out for yourself (starting here), because what is important for me may not be for you, and vice versa. In no particular order, and not taking it too seriously, here we go.
Deprecation of Oracle Multimedia : I guess we could see this coming. There was a comment by someone important in a previous OpenWorld briefing that sounded to me very much like, “But you store images on the file system!” I commented to a couple of people at the time, and even went to speak to some folks on a demo stand who weren’t best pleased, and here we are. Of course you can still store stuff in BLOBs and CLOBs, but it seems Oracle have given up on trying to do more than be a data bucket for multimedia stuff. Now this isn’t one of those, “we’ll deprecate it, but never remove it”, messages. The docs say it will not be present in 19c. Looking at the release docs, 19c is the equivalent of 12.2.0.3, so it will be removed during the lifespan of the 12.2 product. I know we are not meant to think of the old numbers anymore, but I think that is interesting.
Package DBMS_XMLQUERY is deprecated : I’m including this for the purposes of nostalgia. It’s a long time ago, but I think DBMS_XMLQUERY was the first XML-related package I used for generating XML in an Oracle database, although I had already done some XML parsing in 8i. It’s a good thing this is going, because it had a natural successor in DBMS_XMLGEN for a long time. Having it around only serves to confuse. Even so. 🙁
Terminal Release of Oracle Streams : Streams have been deprecated for a long time, but 18c is the terminal release for it. The doc says, “Oracle Streams will be desupported from Oracle Database 19c onwards”, so in the lifespan of the 12.2 patchsets it will disappear. As soon as it was deprecated Streams was dead to me, but I still hear people talking about using it.
STANDBY_ARCHIVE_DEST and UTL_FILE_DIR desupported : Oh the bad old days, how I miss them. Everyone had TB and Rickets, but you could leave your back door unlocked! Screw your 24X7 operations, I’m bouncing the database because I want to add a new path to the UTL_FILE_DIR initialisation parameter. I actually had someone ask me about this a few months ago. Out with the old. I’ll get my coat!
Returning JSON True or False Values using NUMBER is Desupported : Returning 1 and 0 instead of ‘true’ and ‘false’ when speaking about JSON sounds silly to me, so I’m all in favour of this. I guess it will be annoying for those that have just got to grips with doing JSON in Oracle and have to refactor their code already because they chose the wrong path.
Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows is Desupported : I only threw this one in because I know people lose their minds when some tool that is already long past its sell-by date is removed from the Windows implementation. Let’s start a Twitter campaign with #BringBackTheToolWeNeverUse and stick it to the man. 🙂
No time to worry about what they are getting rid of. There’s all the lovely new stuff you don’t understand yet. That’s really what you should be afraid of! 🙂
In a previous post I mentioned the release of 18c on Oracle Cloud and Engineered Systems. The only way you could get that on the Oracle Cloud at the time was if you were using an engineered system on the cloud. As a result us folks that don’t have pockets that deep were forced to get our 18c fix on LiveSQL.
You can now get Oracle Database 18c on the Oracle Database Cloud Service, the DBaaS offering, on Oracle Public Cloud (OPC), so you don’t have to have such deep pockets anymore. It also means you can probably get a free trial now.
I’ve fired one up and updated an old article (here) to have the latest screen shots.
Happy days!
Cheers
Tim…
PS. I’m not overly bothered about constantly updating screen shots for cloud service articles as they change so frequently, as do the names of the services from time to time. As long as the general message is OK, that’s good enough. If you try to stay on top of the quarterly roll out you would never get something new done. 🙂
