Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)…
Anyway, the southern leg of the tour shapes up like this.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. See you soon!
After the Peru leg, the wife and I will be going off to see Machu Picchu.
Cheers
Tim…
Oracle Midlands Event #9 is now confirmed with another great lineup!
Thanks to Red Stack Technology for sponsoring the event, allowing it to remain free!
Put the date in your diary. See you there!
Cheers
Tim…
I just noticed Neil Chandler‘s blog post about the Call For Papers for UKOUG Tech15.
I’ve just submitted my sessions for this year. It’s in my home town, so life will be easy this year. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I’ve just found out I’ve got a paper selected for the UKOUG System Event on May 20th. Check out my badge. 🙂
I was a spectator at last year’s event. At first glance you might think much of the content is not directly related to my job, since I’m not a system administrator, virtual infrastructure administrator and I don’t use any Oracle engineered systems, appliances or storage products. Having said all that, it’s hard to be a DBA these days without having a finger in several pies. Most of the information discussed at these events is relevant, even if you are not using the exact same kit or doing the exact same job as the speaker.
Hope to see you there.
Cheers
Tim…
After saying a quick goodbye to everyone, I got in a taxi and headed for the airport. I was a little on the early side, but as I’ve said before, it’s better to be early than late where airports are concerned. I wanted do have a Guinness in the bar in the airport, like I did with Patrick Hurley last year, but the queue was too long, so I settled for an authentic Irish diet coke instead. The flight home was a little less “eventful” than the flight out. I arrived in Birmingham at about 23:00 and after a taxi ride home, was in bed by 00:00. So all in all it was a 20 hour day! 🙂
Dublin is seriously easy for me to get to. It is cheaper (£27 return) and easier (40 mins) for me to get to Dublin than it is to get to London. I did spot one of my fellow Oracle Midlands folks there, who had also flown in for the day to check out the conference. It’s definitely worth considering the trip! This event is now one of my staples for the year!
Thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland and UKOUG for getting the event up and running. Thanks to all the attendees and speakers for turning up. Without you it would not happen. Even though this was a self-funded event for me, I would still like to thank the Oracle ACE Program for letting me fly the flag!
See you all next year!
Cheers
Tim…
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…
The day started early, about 1 hour before my alarm in fact. I got up, lay in the bath for a while drinking a can of Monster and considering the day ahead, got out of the bath, puked, then got my shit together ready for the taxi. I’ve been ill this week. That combined with sleep deprivation, nerves and the Monster kinda turned my stomach.
The taxi ride to the airport was really good. The driver was a really cool bloke and I enjoyed talking to him.
I arrived at the airport with a couple of hours to spare. It’s a bit silly for such a short flight when I have to check in online and I only have a laptop as baggage, but I would rather be early than late for my £27 flight to Dublin. 🙂
We got seated in the plane and were told we had a 60 minute delay. One guy started to freak out. It was like an episode of the Jeremy Kyle show. I was waiting for someone to come in with the DNA results, to prove he was not the father of the baby etc. No punches were thrown…
We ended up taking off about 50 minutes late. My first session was after 12:00, so I wasn’t too worried. The girls next to me used the time to do their make-up. Apparently it takes about 40 minutes to achieve “the natural look”. The combination of that, the selfies and the giggling about stuff on Snapchat made me feel very old!
On arrival it was a quick taxi ride to Croke Park, then OUG Ireland started for me.
Cheers
Tim…
The morning didn’t start well. I woke up several times in the night feeling pretty bad. The combination of a cold, general lack of sleep and too much beer was not great. I don’t drink very often, so it doesn’t take much to make me feel bad. 🙂
I went down for breakfast with a few of the folks, then went back to bed and spent the next few hours switching between sleep and being sick. Luckily, everything seemed to calm down just before I had to get the taxi to the airport.
Check-in and security was quick and efficient. I found my departure gate, then got some food and a drink (non-alcoholic), which made me feel a lot better. The plane was pretty full, but was able to do a little work, which makes the journey much more bearable.
It was another fairly quick connection in Frankfurt, before getting on the plane home. I arrived at Birmingham airport in time for rush hour, which was not the best, but them’s the breaks…
The Riga Dev Day event was good fun. Riga is a really nice looking city and the people were friendly. As an English speaker, I had no problem at all from a communication perspective, which makes the whole process so much simpler and less stressful. 🙂
I mentioned in a previous post, the conference is a mixed discipline event, so you get to chat with a range of people from different backgrounds. I think it’s really important to break out of the bubble from time to time, so that you can get a feel for what the rest of the world is up to. For any of the other speakers reading this, you should give this Riga event a try. I think you’ll like it.
Thanks to the folks from LVOUG for inviting me to the event and making me feel welcome. Thanks to the attendees and speakers who I spoke to during the event. I hope to meet you all again! Big thanks for the Oracle ACE Program for getting me across to the event and allowing me to fly the flag.
Cheers
Tim…
The event was held at a cinema in a shopping mall. We even got a free popcorn ticket. Awesome! I missed the starting keynote, which was a pity because everyone said it was really cool. So my day went as follows.
Krasimir Tsonev : Using Node.js for everything or what it is to write a book about it
I went to this session because I wanted to be with the “cool kids”. 🙂 I ended up chatting to Kasimir during lunch and in the evening. He’s from Bulgaria, so I was able to use my extensive Bulgarian vocabulary on him. 🙂 I’m never going to be one of the cool kids, but it’s good to get some context about different technologies. What is it? What does it do? What is it good at? What is it bad at? Where should I avoid it? It was good to get a feel for this from someone who is really using it, not just writing about it like it’s the Emperors new clothes.
Heli “Hell-Squirrel” Helskyaho : 9 use cases for Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeller
Back in the day we used to spend a lot of time on database design. I remember spending hours in Oracle Designer. Nowadays database design seems to have fallen by the wayside, which is a pity because good design is important if you want good performance and you want your application to stand the test of time. Adding in new functionality on top of a badly designed database is a nightmare. Extending a good design is usually much simpler.
In this session my daughter gave an overview of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeller. For those familiar with Oracle Designer, there is enough similarity to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. The session included 9 ways to use the tool, including importing from previous tools like Erwin and Oracle Developer.
Me : PL/SQL : Stop making the same performance mistakes
Next up was my PL/SQL performance session. I had some problems with the screen at the start, so I was just about to launch into a no-slides, no-demos version of the talk, then they realised my adapter was faulty and everything was working again. My bad! The talk went well and I managed to finish on time. A number of people had questions, which took me through the break and right up to the next session. Happy days. 🙂
Roel Hartman : The best of both worlds : Going hybrid with your mobile APEX Oracle Application
This session showed how to use Apache Cordova to create an APEX application that acts like a native app, allowing it to interact with information from the phone, such as contacts or compass etc. It’s a really neat solution to allow you to bridge the gap between mobile web apps and native apps, allowing you to stick with your preferred development tool, in this case APEX… I feel like a native developer now. 🙂
Robin Moffatt : No Silver Bullets – OBIEE Performance in the Real World
I’m not an OBIEE guy, but I wanted to see Robin present and I loved it. If Cary Millsap did a presentation on OBIEE performance, it would be pretty much like this session. Robin referenced Cary’s “Thinking Clearly About Performance” paper at the start of the session and that really set the scene. He’s a confident, no-nonsense presenter, which I really like. Well worth going to watch, even if OBIEE is not your thing, because the approach he speaks about it pretty much universal for identifying and fixing the actual problem, rather than relying on Voodoo.
Me : A Oracle DBA’s guide to WebLogic server
I was then up again for the last session of the track. This time it was my introductory WebLogic session. It really was the end of the day and I think everyone, including me felt like it. 🙂
The Evening
After the last session, we took a taxi back to the hotel to drop off our stuff, then headed out to the closing party at a bar in the old town. I had a couple of pints and watched the band, which I believe was made up of some of the techies from one of the local companies. I really enjoyed it! After the band came some comedians, which I didn’t really hear as I was standing at the other side of the room talking geek with Robin Moffatt. When the festivities were over we headed back to the hotel and sat in the bar chatting for a couple of hours, then it was off to bed.
It was a long day, but a really enjoyable one. The conference was great fun and all the people I interacted with were really enthusiastic! I’ll write some more about the event in my closing post.
Cheers
Tim…
My first flight was 06:20, so I had to leave the house at 04:00, which meant getting up at about 03:00. Yuck!
The first flight was about 90 minutes from Birmingham to Frankfurt, with the smoothest landing I can ever remember in a plane the size of an A320. I was meant to have a 65 minute changeover before the flight from Frankfurt to Riga. A one hour changeover at Frankfurt is too short, but the alternative was to wait for about 6 hours. As soon as I got off the plane I did a quick march to the departure gate and arrived just as boarding was meant to start. The following plane was late getting in, so I got a 10 minute break before getting on the plane. The flight to Riga was pretty straight forward, taking a bit under 2 hours. Both planes had lots of empty seats, so I was able to get my laptop out and have a play.
At 16:00 we had a tour of the old town. It started with a quick bus tour and then we walked through some of the old town, with a tour guide telling us about a few of the key places. I really like the look of Riga. I took a few photos, which will be available here when I get to upload them.
From the tour, we went out to dinner, where we met up with some of the people who arrived too late to make the tour. This is a multi-discipline conference, so it was really cool speaking to people from different backgrounds, which helps you see how your pieces fit into the bigger picture…
From dinner it was back to the hotel and bed. It was a really long day, so I was desperate to get to bed. The conference starts tomorrow…
Cheers
Tim…
