Category: Oracle

You know you’ve travelled too much when…

You know you’ve travelled too much when…

  1. You are asleep in the bath while your taxi is waiting outside to take you to the airport.
  2. At the check in desk you can’t remember where you are going.
  3. You can’t find your flight on the departure board because you’ve forgotten it’s a connecting flight.
  4. The computer equipment in duty free looks tempting.

All of these have happened to me this morning… 🙂

I’m in the airport on my way to Bratislava (Slovakia) to teach a 2 day Oracle University course. In about an hour I have to get on to a flight to Zurich, then on the Vienna, then I have a taxi ride to Bratislava. As it happens, this is much quicker and about a quater of the price of flying to Bratislava from Birmingham…

It’s got to be about 12 years since I was was in Zurich. Pity I can’t have a look round to see how much it’s changed. I was in Vienna last year and I loved it, but once again, I won’t get to see any of it, except through the window of a taxi.

Please let me sleep on the plane…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’m in Bratislava now. No sleep yet. 🙂

BGOUG Day 2 and 3…

I started day 2 a little later than the previous two days. After two late nights it was pretty difficult to drag myself out of bed. The presentation seemed to go down well. I managed to talk a little slower this time. 🙂 I spent a some time after talking with some of the attendees, about some topics raised in the presentation, which is always good.

In the evening we went out to dinner were I was educated in the intricacies of the Bulgarian language as well as some of the marriage customs. You never know when this type of information will come in handy.

Day 3 started with a little surprise… Snow…

So I got to see summer and winter in one visit. Cool! 🙂

I would like to say a big thank you to Milena and the rest of the BGOUG team for inviting me and running such a great event. It was a lot of fun and felt more like a family get together (without the fights) than a conference. I’d also like to thank Sve and Maria who helped me every step of the way, acting as driver, translators, tour guides etc.

I’m in Frankfurt airport now on my way home. It will be nice to get back to normal for a week, before my OU course in Slovakia, but I’m sure this isn’t the last time I’ll visit Bulgaria.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Day 1

I got a message from John  Duncan the day before yesterday telling me I had goofed up with my FTP package. Turns out I had uploaded the correct package body, but still had the old package spec. I tried to correct this 5 minutes before we went out the restaurant and managed to lose every copy of the package spec. I frantically tryed to recreate it, but had to leave with that half done. 🙁

We went out the a traditional Bulgarian restaurant and stayed until a little after midnight. When I got back to the hotel I spent about an hour sorting out the FTP package and I think it’s now back in working order. There are two morals to this story:

  1. Don’t make changes to the website the day before you leave the country.
  2. Don’t try and fix stuff on the fly when you only have 5 minutes. It’s gonna end in tears. 🙂

So I guess I went to bed at about 01:00, which meant I felt pretty rough all day yesterday. We had an early start because we had to drive about 200 kilometres to the conference. My first presentation was after lunch. I think it went OK, but I still need to speak a little slower. 🙂

In the evening we had some food in the hotel restaurant, then the lights were dimmed and a DJ played a combination of traditional Bulgarian music and modern tracks. Lots of people got up to dance, but I was firmly planted to my seat. Eventually I was persauded to join in with a traditional dance, which was fun, if a little embaressing. Just as I thought I was getting the hang of it the music started to speed up, then I was lost again. A number of people said I did OK, but I think they were just being charitable. 🙂

So day 1 of the conference went well. It was a long day, but it was good fun.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Day -1

I’m now in the hotel in Sofia, the day before the Bulgarian Oracle User Group (BGOUG) Spring conference.

The flight from Birmingham to Dusseldorf took a little over an hour and ended with the smoothest landing I think I’ve ever experienced. Makes a change from the sort of the landings I’ve experienced recently, most of which felt like marginally controlled crashes. 🙂

The flight from Dusseldorf to Sofia was smooth until just before the landing. The plane started to rock just as we were going to touch down and I thought it was going to get messy, but the pilot pulled it out of the bag and it was a pretty good landing again. Two flights in a row with no problems. Looks like the trip home is going to be a nightmare to make up for it. 🙂

First impressions of Sofia are very good. The city looks very green from overhead, with lots of trees and parks. There are also some big and interesting looking buildings. I had just under 2 hours to take a look round before I had to get back to the hotel so I did a very quick pass of the city centre. I got some photos which I will post later if they look OK.

The city is swarming with police as there is a big energy summit on at the moment. Makes you feel extremely safe seeing lots of the police around. 🙂

I got a numpty tourist injury already. I was walking along looking at some building and didn’t notice the curb. I tripped and twisted my left ankle. Hopefully it amused the locals. 🙂

Off out for some food now…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Buy Sun Microsystems…

So Oracle have put in a bid for Sun… I suppose the next step is to release Exadata on their own hardware, but I’m sure HP have got some tight exclusivity contracts around this for a while at least.

I guess this purchase makes a lot of sense for Oracle due to their heavy investment in Java. Even though it’s Open Source, being the controlling force behind Java is good for them. The community gave Sun a rough ride over the control of Java. I wonder how they will treat Oracle.

If Oracle buy Red Hat, rather than just clone their product, they can have the full set now.

Can you imagine what OpenWorld will look like in the future? 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Comments locked due to the horrendous amount of spam targeted to this post.

CLOUG Day 2

The sessions I attended today were:

  • DB Time Based Performance Tuning – Graham Wood
  • A panel session about the Oracle ACE program. I was sitting in the audience for a while before I realized I should be on stage. You gotta laugh.
  • Creating a Technical Disaster Implementation Plan – Arjen Visser
  • Using Oracle Locator and Spatial with Application Express – Hans Forbrich
  • Advanced RMAN – Robert Freeman
  • My session 🙂

The whole event seemed to go down really well with the attendees and the speakers alike. This is the first CLOUG event of its kind in Chile and Francisco did a great job of getting it off the ground, so I would like to send a big thank you to him. Everyone I’ve spoken too is looking forward to the next event in Chile.

A special thank you also to Lillian Buziak from Oracle who paid all of her own expenses to be at this event to represent OTN on their stand and in the ACE panel session. If anyone at Oracle is listening, you really should reemburse her expenses.

So now I’ve got a day off before I have to suffer the 2 flights to get home.

Cheers

Tim…

CLOUG Day 1

Day 1 of the conference went really well. My presentation started a little late, so I missed out a few slides to try and get the timetable back on track. It was a bit unusual using a translation service for the first time. I speak quite fast so I think the translator needed a break once I was done. 🙂

I was on quite early, so I had the rest of the day to relax, chat to people and watch other presenters, including Dan Morgan, Robert Freeman, Hans Forbrich, Ben Prusinski and Graham Wood. The more I present, the more interesting I find watching other speakers. There are always lessons to learn.

In the evening we went out to dinner and I’m sure you will see a bunch of group photos appearing on people’s blogs over the next few days. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

CLOUG Day -1

It’s 10:50 am and I’m in my room in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Santiago, Chile. The CLOUG conference starts tomorrow and I’m feeling a bit nervous. My last presention was in Sweden (ORCAN) in December, but it seems like an eternity since then. 🙂

I’ve already got a whole bunch of stuff lined up this year. The current timetable looks like this:

13th-14th April: Chilean Oracle User Group (CLOUG)

24th-25th April: Bulgarian Oracle User Group (BGOUG)

27th-28th April: Oracle University 2-day workshop in Slovakia (still unconfirmed)

11th-12th May: Swedish Oracle User Group (ORCAN)

14th May: Oracle User Group Finland (OUGF)

21st-25th June: ODTUG in Monterey, California. This is combined with a visit to Oracle’s head office for a briefing, which should be interesting.

11th-15th October: Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco.

Things seem to be popping up all the time, so who knows what else will be in that list as the year progresses. The world tour continues. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…