UKOUG Tech15 : Wednesday

ukoug-tech15-speakerToday was a full day at UKOUG Tech15. Yay!

Zahid Anwar rescued my laptop charger, and left it at the Version 1 stand for me to pick up. Thanks guys!

My first session was at 10:00, which was called Pluggable Databases: What They Will Break & Why You Should Use Them Anyway! I like giving this presentation and the crowd seemed to respond really well to it. Maybe I’ve converted a few people? Quote of the day must go to Jonathan Lewis who said,

“I enjoyed your presentation, but I don’t know why.”

I am being very selective with that quote, because it made me laugh. 🙂 Actually, Jonathan was very complementary, as were a number of the other speakers that were present. I know it’s not about trying to impress other speakers, but it is really nice when you get a good response from them as well as the audience. 🙂 The questions ran into the break, including three questions that I didn’t know the answer to. They are on my list of things to find out.

From there I just bounced around catching up with friends, both old and new, answering questions, speaking to people in the exhibition hall and filming a couple of segments for OTN.

At about 15:00 I got a major energy slump and was considering going home, but Noel Portugal persuaded me to go to his session on Internet of Things (IoT). As I was walking to it I bumped into Lars Ulveseth who made a comment about the weather, which confused me a little. When I quizzed him, he explained it was a reference to my session called It’s raining data! Oracle databases in the cloud, which he was just heading to. I told him I wasn’t presenting that, so he pointed me to the agenda and sure enough, I was down to present it at 15:30. Talk about shocked and surprised! After changing my underwear, it was off to do my last presentation of UKOUG Tech15! 🙂

Even though I got to the session on time and did the talk, I am still incredibly freaked out by it all. I keep thinking, what if I had gone home? What if I had not bumped into Lars? What if it had been earlier in the day and I had missed it? I am still mortified now thinking how easily I could have missed it. 🙁 On reflection, I remember being accepted for 3 sessions, but in my head they were all database sessions. When I looked through the database track, only two were present, so I though the other one must have got pulled. It turns out this session was marked as virtualization, not database, so I never saw it on the grid. If you look on my UKOUG Tech15 : See you there! post from the other day, you’ll notice I didn’t mention it. 🙁 Anyway, all’s well that ends well!

Thanks to the hardcore crowd that sat through the last session of the day, when the rest of the people had gone home or headed off to the German market to do Christmas shopping! 🙂 I got some questions during and after the session, and the people I spoke to afterwards seemed pleased with what I presented. It’s really a collection of my observations while trying out AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud.

One of the guys in the crowd was also working at a UK University in a similar role to me, using a bunch of similar tech and higher education (HE) software, so we spent about an hour chatting once the session was over, then walked to the station together. It was a really nice example of the networking that is possible at these events. Hopefully we will be able to help each other out in future!

So that’s my last conference for the year, and apart from me being a dumb-ass and nearly missing a session, it was a really great day. Thanks to UKOUG for giving me the opportunity to speak three times this year. 🙂 Thanks to everyone that came to my sessions, asked me questions, and tolerated me talking the hind legs off a donkey! 🙂 Thanks also to the Oracle ACE Program for allow me to keep flying the flag, even in my home town. 🙂

Tomorrow morning I’m doing a talk to the students at Birmingham City University, then it’s back to my job and normal life for the rest of the year. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG Tech15 : Monday

ukoug-tech15-speakerAs mentioned the other day, my first day at UKOUG Tech15 was a rather brief affair. I just popped in during an extended lunch break to present, then it was straight back to work.

I met a couple of people (Sve and Debra) on the way in, but pretty much had to go straight to my session. There were a few people (Connor, Niall, Martin, BrendanNeil, Iain and Dave) lurking around who I tried to persuade, with varying degrees of success, not to stay. 🙂

The session was called Oracle Database Consolidation: It’s Not All About Oracle Database 12c! and was born out of my frustration about the one-size-fits-all attitude some people have about consolidation. Depending on who you speak to, consolidation is only about [Virtualization | Containers| Exadata | PDBs] (pick one), when in fact you always end up using a combination of approaches, including some old, tried and tested, methods. It was an overview session, which always makes me nervous for a couple of reasons. First, I find overview sessions really scary to present because you can’t hide behind geek talk. Second, I’m always worried people will come along expecting something more technical, even though you’ve said it is an overview session. I started off the session by reminding people it was an overview session and made it clear I would not be offended if they wanted to leave. 🙂

A couple of nights ago I had a dream Connor was in the front row and I totally blanked at the start of the session. That didn’t quite come to pass. Connor was about 3 rows back and although I was a little shaky at the start, I didn’t blank completely. 🙂

I think the session went OK. I did what I said I would do. I just hope the audience got what they expected…

After the session, I got to speak briefly to Zahid Anwar, and said a quick hello to Frits and Oyvind on the way out, but it was pretty much a dash out and back to work. So much so that I left my Apple laptop charger in Hall 5 after my session. If anyone found it, please let me know. 🙂

So that was my first brief visit to UKOUG Tech15. I’m not in on Tuesday as a bunch of other people from work are going, so I’m left behind to hold the fort. I will be in all day Wednesday (I hope), so I look forward to catching up with people properly. If you see me walking round the conference and you have a question or just want to say hello, don’t be shy. I love talking about Oracle stuff and I would rather spend the time talking with you than sitting in someone else’s session, that I’ve probably seen 6 times already this year. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG Tech15 : See you there.

ukoug-tech15-speakerUKOUG Tech15 Super Sunday is underway. The Sunday event always coincides with my nephew’s Birthday celebration, so I never get to attend. You’ve got to get your priorities straight. 🙂

This year I’ll be presenting two sessions:

  • Monday 12:20 – 13:10 : Oracle Database Consolidation: It’s Not All About Oracle Database 12c! This is an overview session, suitable for beginners and management types.
  • Wednesday 10:00 – 10:50 : Pluggable Databases: What They Will Break & Why You Should Use Them Anyway! For all those folks thinking about moving to 12c soon, this might help you decide which way to go. 🙂 Monday is a fleeting visit for me. I’ll be doing my session, then I’ve got to go straight back to work. I’m not in on Tuesday, but I should be in all day Wednesday, I hope.

Having a conference in your home town sounds like a good thing, but I find it harder to deal with. When you are away from home it is easy to throw yourself into conference mode and turn off real life. When you live close to the conference, you have to switch in and out of conference mode constantly. Normal life is a distraction from the conference experience. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : It’s a Wrap

I’m back home from Oracle OpenWorld 2015. My overall feeling for this year was evolution, not revolution. We got newer versions of some products, like APEX, WebLogic, SOA Suite and Oracle Forms, just before the conference. We got previews of new versions of products, like Oracle Database 12cR2 during the conference, which we might get next year.

Of course, there was a heavy emphasis on cloud, but the difference between this year and previous years was some of the product are now generally available (GA), so it’s possible to trial or buy them. In previous years, you could only use some of the cloud products if you were “special”.

Not surprisingly, Oracle are trying to ease the migration from on premise to cloud with hybrid options, like their private cloud offering. I expect this is pretty much the way OpenWorld will be for the next few years until the cloud vision is complete, or something else comes along.

Many thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for getting me across to San Francisco again. Thanks for the invites to the EMEA group presentation and the Oracle SQL Panel session. Both were good fun. Also, a big thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with me during the week. It is this aspect of any conference that I enjoy the most.

Here is a list of posts during the trip.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: You can see a random video of some footage from OOW15 here.

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : The Journey Home

I was awake at 04:30, about 15 minutes before my alarm and wake-up call. That reduced the levels of panic normally associated with such an early start. I dropped off my key-card with the guy on the hotel check-out and got into the waiting car and off I went.

I think this was the first time I’ve ever left San Francisco via the domestic terminal. Getting the bags checked in and doing security was pretty straight forward, so I sat down with about 90 minutes spare before the flight.

The flight to Newark was event free, but the guy on the arrival gate at Newark was a complete dick. As we walked through, he said, “Welcome to Boston”, which I can only assume was meant to be a joke. Yeah. Great joke. Idiot!

When I originally booked the flight I had a choice of a 1, 2 or 3 hour layover. Having had a couple of bad experiences at Newark before, I opted for the 3 hour layover. As it turned out, our arrival gate was right next door to the departure gate, so I found myself wishing I had picked the 1 hour layover. Of course, the later planes may not have been so conveniently located, so better safe than sorry.

The flight time from Newark to Birmingham was mercifully short. So short in fact we had to wait for a gate to become free to disembark on the Birmingham end.

After a quick taxi ride, I was home…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : Wednesday

Wednesday started early. I was invited over to breakfast with the Dbvisit crew, which was a great start to the day. I met Arjen years ago and the Dbvisit team have continued to be good people ever since. It’s always good when I get to meet up with them!

After breakfast I headed over to the OTN Lounge and just parked there for a big chunk of the day. Having the lounge in the main concourse of Moscone South is great as there is a constant flow of people to meet, but it does mean that someone like me who likes to chat will get stuck there for hours. 🙂 Every time I meant to leave, someone interesting would come along. As a result I missed all the sessions I was meant to go to. 🙂

At about 16:00 I walked over to the “Optimizing SQL for Performance and Maintainability” session. The panel was made up of Mohamed Zait, John Clarke, Connor Mcdonald and me, with Gerard Laker keeping the show running. The quality of the other panelists and the fact I was the only non-Oracle person made it a little daunting. Looking out on the audience didn’t help much either, as there was a who’s who of people you really don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of. 🙂 I think collectively, we handled the questions pretty well, but I left the hard ones to the clever people. 🙂 I like to think I represented the average-Joe DBA/Developer. Connor and I hung around for a while after the session to continue answering questions.

From there, it was across to the Bloggers Meetup, which was a great opportunity to hook up with all the people I had not already seen during the week so far. I got to have a good chat with Robyn Sands, who said some nice things about my comments during the panel session, which was a relief. Not surprisingly, I also got to film a few more “.com” clips. 🙂

As people started to leave for the Appreciation Event, I planned to head back to the hotel to crash, but I was easily persuaded to go for a curry with Jeff Smith, Scott Spendolini, Mike Hichwa, Kris Rice, Colm Divilly and Todd Trichler.

After that, it was back to the hotel to reflect on another rather random, but enjoyable, day…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : Tuesday

The day started in the normal way, with a quick blog post about the previous day and a visit to the gym.

The original plan for the day was to hit the demo grounds again. I popped into OakTable World for the quick chat with a few folks and ended up staying for quite while. I watched some of the Ted-style talks, specifically Tim Gorman, Jonathan Lewis and Martin Klier. I then got chatting to some folks outside, before heading back in to see Gwen Shapira do a session on Kafka.

Whilst I was there I got to film a few “.com” clips for my videos, with funniest setup being Tanel Poder. He saw me filming some other folks and just launched in, not knowing what was going on and struck a pose. It took a bit of prompting before he realised he had to say something. You’ve got to love the enthusiasm. 🙂

GrahamWoodI got to admire Connor’s t-shirt and most importantly, I got to meet up with my dad!

From there I headed off to the demo grounds, where I inevitably ended up at the SQL Developer stand, speaking to Kris Rice and who turns up but Connor McDonald. 🙂

From the demo grounds I went to grab some food with Connor, then I headed back to the hotel to crash out.

It was a good day, which goes to prove my point, you’ve just got to go with the flow when you are at OOW. Plans are good, but don’t worry if they don’t work out.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : Monday

Monday started with a trip to the gym, where I met Scott Spendolini. At the end on the session, we were sitting on bikes next to each other chatting, whilst peddling at an incredibly slow rate. After getting cleaned up, we headed over to Lori’s Diner and ate more calories than be burned at the gym. 🙂

From there we headed down to the conference. I spent some time chatting to folks at the OTN Lounge, where I met one of my former colleagues Ian MacDonald. He had just come out of an Oracle Forms 12c session and I had a bunch of questions to ask also, so we headed down to the demo grounds to find the Oracle Forms stand, where then spent ages talking to Michael Ferrante about life, the universe and everything Forms related. 🙂

As I mentioned the other day, the installation and configuration of Forms and Reports has changed in 12c. During my first run through I noticed the Web Tier that links everything together was present in the domain, but not configured during the process. I was curious if I had done something wrong, if it was expected behaviour or if it was an implied statement of direction. I guess the web tier is surplus to requirements for many people if they are fronting their infrastructure with a reverse proxy or a load balancer. It turned out to be expected behaviour, and we discussed the configuration of the web tier, which is very simple. Just amend a couple of files and copy them to the “moduleconf” directory under the OHS instance. Happy days.

We also got a demo of the installation of the Forms Builder on Windows, which no longer needs a WebLogic installation, making it a much smaller footprint for developer machines. Our developers still use Forms 10g Builder. We then take the finished forms, move them to the server and recompile to 11gR2. It’s a pain, but simpler than putting Forms Builder 11gR2 on their PCs. If we can move to 12c Forms, they should be able to use the latest builder again. 🙂

From there I moved on to the SQL Developer demo stand, where I got to speak to Kris Rice and Jeff Smith, who are always good value. While I was there Jagjeet Singh, Sanjay Kumar and Baljeet Bhasin came up to say hello to me, which was really nice. Of course, I filmed them doing a group “.com”… 🙂

After that it I did a tour of the exhibition stands looking for things of interest. I used the GoPro to film a walk around some of the exhibition. I’ll see if I can make a little montage out of that…

Next, I went back to the OTN Lounge and spoke to a whole bunch of people, and filmed a load of “.com” cameos for forthcoming YouTube videos. 🙂

Then it was the weary walk back to the hotel, where I crashed for the night.

I think tomorrow may well be another demo grounds day…

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : User Group Sunday

My wake up times are getting gradually later and later. That’s a good thing for now, but will make the journey home harder. 🙂

The day started with a bit of work on those articles I mentioned yesterday, with the inevitable trip to Lori’s Diner for breakfast of course.

I headed off to the gym, which felt super-hard. I’m trying to get some cardio in every day, in addition to the weights. I enjoy lifting weights, but if you are fat it just makes you look bigger, so in clothes you look even fatter. I despise cardio, but it is a necessary evil. I’ve been pretty good on the exercise front since I’ve been away. Not so good on the eating front though… 🙂

During the day we had the EMEA User Group Community session called “More Than Another 12 on Oracle Database 12c”. I was one of the 16 speakers, which included:

We each got 7 minutes for our particular topic and a buzzer went off when your time was up, so there was no over-running. 🙂 Some were much quicker than others, but that’s all good. We had a 2 hour block and we finished at about 1 hour and 45 minutes, so we I think we did pretty well.

I really like this format. If there is a topic you are not into, you are only 7 minutes away from the next speaker. It also forces you to be extremely specific and direct your talk. You can get a lot done in 7 minutes if you need to. I’ve uploaded a video of my section of the talk.

I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as the speakers. Please send your feedback, so we know if we should do this sort of thing again next year…

After the session, I chatted to a few people, including Gilbert Standen. You may have seen me tweet about some of the Oracle RAC on Ubuntu stuff he does. It’s pretty interesting and far more geeky than the stuff I do. 🙂 He gave me a t-shirt and swag, which I’ll hopefully remember to wear at my session on Wednesday. 🙂

After chatting to a few folks, I hooked up with Jonathan Lewis and we went off to Ghirardelli to eat ice cream and chat about the stuff that had happened so far this year at San Francisco. I didn’t realise he was an ice cream fiend. 🙂

After that, we headed back to the OTN lounge for the group photo, but found we were too late, so when you are looking at it, imagine were are there too. 🙂 Then it was back to the hotel to dump our stuff before heading to the Oracle ACE dinner.

This years ACE dinner was really nice, although semi-clad dancing girls, contortionists and silks performers were conspicuous by their absence. 🙂 Jokes aside, what made it nice was it was great for mingling. Everyone was on their feet, moving round the room chatting to each other. As well as all the usual suspects, I got to speak to a bunch of people from the OTN tours I’ve been on. It’s always good to reconnect and talk about the next visit. 🙂 I also got to speak to Liron Amitzi about his recent move to Vancouver, which is a pretty interesting life change! You also get to meet some people in person for the first time. I was really happy to finally meet Mahir M. Quluzade in person. I feel like I already know him, but now we have met. 🙂

At about 22:00 we got on the bus and headed back to the hotel, where I completely zonked out!

All in all, it was a good day!

This morning is the start of the main OOW15 conference and I’m already knackered. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : ACE Director Briefing : Final Thoughts

ace-directorSo it’s the day after the 2 day ACE Director Briefing and I’ll try to lay out my feelings about what I heard. I can’t of course mention details.

First off, the briefing itself was great. Many thanks to the team running the ACE program for putting this all together and persuading all the speakers to come. The same goes to the speakers, that give up their time at one of the busiest periods of the year. Despite what you may feel, your presence is much appreciated. 🙂

For those that have never attended one, the ACE Director Briefing is pretty much a private 2 day conference (mostly under NDA) which can be a little intense, especially when it comes before a 5 day conference. The content covers a whole range of the Oracle product stack, which is great for a generalist like me, but can be a little hard to cope with for those ACEs that specialise more. My advice to those people is, use it to pick up the buzzwords and identify the ACEs and Oracle staff that work in those areas. You never know when you will need some information and knowing the go-to kids is a quick and “safe” way to get it. You don’t have to know everything, just where to find it. 🙂

I guess my overall feeling this year is one of frustration, but for a number of reasons.

  • I am undoubtedly a generalist, so I have a finger in many pies, so to speak. As a result of that, I can’t be “amazing” at any of them. The classic Jack of all trades, master of none. When you are hit hard with a bunch of sessions from different areas, it makes you realise how rubbish you are at many of them, and that’s kind-of frustrating. It’s nice to sit at home and kid yourself you are awesome, but an event like this brings you back down to earth with a bump. Ego can be a terrible thing. 🙂
  • I feel like some teams at Oracle are completely divorced from reality. I am on the coal face. I speak with people on a daily basis who are struggling with some of the these products, for a variety of reasons. I don’t want to get all bitchy about this (I do really), but it feels like the classic “them and us” situation you always see between I.T. and their users, but in this case, us DBAs and developers are the users. There are some teams at Oracle who are fantastic at engaging with their community. I’m thinking APEX and Linux to name but a few, but there are others who… Well… Not so much… I feel the constant negative press about Oracle’s shady sales tactics are hurting Oracle at business level. What they really don’t need is people like me who have been rabid advocates of the technology for 20 years thinking, “Ahh f**k it! Time for something new!”, which is exactly how I felt at times during these two days.
  • It feels like some areas of Oracle are running scared, or at the very least, totally directionless, at the moment. I guess in this day and age, with a new “cool kid on the block” every 5 minutes, you’ve got to hedge your bets somewhat, but it gives me an uneasy feeling. Weakness elicits either a nurturing or attack response. I guess it says a lot about me, but in this case weakness triggers my attack mechanism. I want Oracle to be strong and fearless, not another one of those tech companies who bounce around aimlessly before falling into obscurity.
  • Jetlag.

I was very vocal during these two days. I’m pretty sure some speakers felt I gave them a hard time. Some of that is obviously born out of this frustration. I would like to apologise to any of the speakers who felt I was picking on them. I wasn’t. I just want this stuff to work so badly. I want people to say, “Wow. That’s f**kin’ amazing!” I want people to like Oracle. I want Oracle to be successful. This is totally selfish, because I want my knowledge and skills to remain relevant. It is in my interest that Oracle stay top of the pile.

Anyway, enough this emotional nonsense!

Over the next few days, you are going to see a large number of announcements. Many are quite obvious. There are normal release cycles you can predict. You know every other word is going to be cloud. 🙂 Having said that, try and look through the marketing and you will find some really cool stuff underneath. I think when the dust settles, a lot of people will find a lot to be happy about. I hope I’m one of them!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This is not a rallying cry. This is just a tired, fat, old man venting. Nothing to see here. Please move along…