Docker Birmingham – November 2019

Yesterday evening I went to the Docker Birmingham meetup, sponsored by Black Cat Technology Solutions.

This event was a single longer session by Matt Todd called “Make Data Science Great Again (Part 2)” I didn’t see part 1, but he gave a summary, so that wasn’t too much of a problem.

Matt started off by introducing the scientific method and discussed reducing variables when testing, so you know the impact of a change. The suggestion being that development and data science should be the same. What better way to reduce variables than to package up a data science lab to make sure everyone is working on the same thing, so there is no/less variability between researchers, and they can focus on their work, not piecing together the kit.

He then went on to discuss Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB), and how they can be used to more reliably package multi-container applications, guaranteeing dependencies to a level greater than that possible by using Docker Compose alone. As an example he demoed his Digital Scientists Lab, which is a CNAB bundle containing a bunch of common kit used by data scientists (Jupyter, Spark, Flink, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Nifi, Elastic Stack etc.), which he could in theory give to several people to run experiments. It’s just his playground, but it gives you an idea of what’s possible. Using Nifi to link stuff together looked cool!

I started to make a few mental connections when he discussed the relationship to experimental data, because I look after the infrastructure for a research publishing system, and being able to keep not only the published research, but also the experimental data and potentially a way to reproduce the research findings is pretty important. It keeps those academics honest, if you know what I mean. It’s funny how just a few links to something you know a little bit about, and other stuff starts falling into place.

It was all a bit mind-blowing, but in a good way. I’m still only scratching the surface of this stuff, but it’s really good to see what else is going on in this space. I’ve added a few more things to my list of things to play around with.

It’s a couple of months until the next event, but there’s a CNCF event next month, so watch out for that!

Thanks to the folks at Black Cat Technology Solutions for sponsoring and organising the event, and to the Matt Todd for doing a great session. See you soon!

Cheers

Tim…

OGB Appreciation Day 2019 : Itโ€™s a Wrap (#ThanksOGB)

Yesterday was the Oracle community OGB Appreciation Day 2019.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who took the time to join in. Here is the list of posts I saw in chronological order. If I missed you out, give me a shout and Iโ€™ll add you. ๐Ÿ™‚

Another happy โ€œBlog Birthdayโ€ celebration for Flora B., who first started blogging because of a previous appreciation day. It’s always good to see one of the children come home. ๐Ÿ™‚ 

Once again, thanks everyone for getting involved and of course #ThanksOGB

See you all next year!

Cheers

Timโ€ฆ

Oracle OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : It’s a Wrap!

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 are over, and here are a few thoughts…

The tech side of things was based almost exclusively at Moscone South this year. No walking around to different buildings and hotels. In part that was due to the Moscone rebuild, making it a much larger venue now, but I suspect the numbers were down a lot on previous years. It’s hard to know as wider corridors mean you are less packed in, so maybe it was an optical illusion…

The conference felt more like a tech event this year, and less like a marketing event. OpenWorld and Code One were a lot more joined up, and I would suggest this year it was actually a single conference. I’m sure the split branding will remain for political reasons, but it would make life a lot easier if it were one event with one session catalog.

The new branding for Oracle was interesting. I said in a previous post I liked it. Much softer than the old red stuff. Let’s see how people react to it, and let’s see if the company actually changes to be more customer focused. I wrote a post called Oracle: Tech Company or Service Company? a few years ago. Maybe Oracle are now catching up? We’ll see.

The VMware announcement was interesting. I expressed my opinion on this here. I just hope this isn’t short-lived and I hope sense prevails. Oracle need to build bridges now. It’s still possible. Remember when everybody hated Microsoft?

Obviously Oracle continued to push Cloud and the Autonomous brand, including the new Autonomous Linux and Autonomous JSON. If you’ve used SODA, you know what’s going on with Autonomous JSON. From my perspective, keep the autonomous services coming. The more automated the mundane stuff becomes, the better!

The continued involvement in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is interesting. The work on OLCNE I mentioned in a previous post is looking very useful.

For many database people, the big news items were:

  • 3 PDBs in 19c and desupport of non-CDB in 20c (discussed here)
  • Free Tier : At last, something more than the 30 second free trial. I hope people make use of this and give plenty of feedback to Oracle!

Overall, it was a cool, fun, weird, stressful, tiring week. Part of me thinks this might be my last OpenWorld, but I said that after my first one, and I’ve now been to 14…

The posts I put out during the event were as follows.

Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and the Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassadors Program for allowing me to come and play. ๐Ÿ™‚

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : The Journey Home

I got up at a reasonable time and got caught up with blog posts, then it was time to check out and get the BART to the airport. Bag drop was empty, because the rest of the planet was waiting at security. After what felt like an eternity I was through security and sat down and waited for my plane…

We boarded the flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam on time and didn’t have a significant wait for the departure slot, so the captain said we would arrive early. No luck with a spare seat on this flight. The guy next to me was about my size, but wasn’t making an effort to stay in his space. There was some serious man-spreading going on. I ended up spending most of the flight leaning into the aisle and pulling my arm across my body, so my left elbow feels knackered now. Doing that for 11 hours is not fun. I managed to watch the following films.

  • The Shape of Water – I love this film. I’ve seen it a load of times.
  • Rocketman – I wasn’t feeling this at the start. I’m not big on musicals, and I didn’t like the stuff when he was a kid. Once Taron Egerton started playing him it was cool. I kind-of forgot he wasn’t Elton John. If you can get past the start, it’s worth a go!
  • The Accountant – I liked it. Ben Affleck doing deadpan and expressionless is the perfect role for him.
  • John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum – I got up to the final sequence, so I’m not sure how it ends. Pretty much the same as the previous films, which I liked. Just crazy fight scenes with loads of guns.

There was one bit of the flight that was odd. The in-flight entertainment died, then we hit some turbulence. Queue me deciding it was linked and we were all going to die… Pretty soon the turbulence stopped, then after about 10 minutes the screens rebooted…

I had quite a long wait at Schiphol. About 3 hours. That was pretty dull, but what are you going to do?

The flight from Amsterdam to Birmingham was delayed by a few minutes, then the was the issue of people trying to board with 15 pieces of hand luggage and a donkey. I had my bag on my feet. Luckily it was only an hour flight.

II was originally planning to get the train home, but I was so tired I got a taxi. The driver was a nice guy and we had a chat about his kids and future plans, which is a lot nicer than listening to me drone on…

I’m now home and started doing the washing…

I’ll do a wrap-up post tomorrow, with some thoughts about the event…

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : Tuesday

I was originally expecting to start Tuesday with the Cloud Native hands-on-lab, but it clashed with some other non-conference stuff I had scheduled, so I had to drop out of that. I played catch-up on blog posts and upgraded VirtualBox right before my demo, then went out to a photo shoot. Yes, I’m a model…

I had to get some shots done for a magazine piece, so Oracle arranged for me to meet a photographer and I spent some time looking off into the distance in a contemplative manner. I was going to say, “proper executive stuff”, but I was in a T-shirt and combats, so I looked my normal scruffy self. I’ve asked him to photoshop the hell out of them. If I’m recognisable, I won’t be happy. ๐Ÿ™‚ I’m not normally at home in front of a camera, but it was surprisingly good fun. On Monday I spent 3 hours running crowd control for the photographer in the Groundbreakers Hub. On Tuesday I’m in front of the camera. I guess by Wednesday I’ll be running a production company…

From there I went straight to my “The 7 Deadly Sins of SQL” session. It covers things that are already on my website, but I’ll write a post specifically about it when I get home. I was surprised how many people showed up. It was a pretty full room. A few empty seats, but a few people standing at the back. The session clashed with the keynote, and a bunch of other sessions I would happily have attended if I wasn’t speaking, so I expected low numbers. Thanks to everyone who came. I hope you got something out of it.

I bumped into Don Sullivan from VMware and chatted to him about the impact of the Oracle & VMware announcement. Since the announcement of VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure I’ve already seen some people write, “Oracle is now supported on VMware”, which makes me mad, as it has been supported for a looooong time. Plenty of people run Oracle tech on VMware and never get any problems accessing support. I’m one of those people. If nothing else, the announcement from Oracle will finally kill the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) around this subject. The announcement does allow Oracle to take a piece of the pie as far a running VMware on the cloud, since VMware have already got all the other major players in the bag. I think this hybrid cloud approach will help many companies start their journey to the cloud, regardless of the cloud provider they pick to do it with.

From there I moved on to watch “The State of the Penguin” by Wim CoeKaerts, which is his yearly review of what’s happening in Linux and Virtualisation at Oracle.

If you’ve watched any of the announcements, I guess you know that Autonomous Linux was announced. I’m going to miss out a bunch of stuff for sure, but some interesting points coming out of this presentation were.

  • UEK6 is on the way, and will bring UEK to Oracle Linux 8 (OL8) for the first time.
  • The new Exadata X8M, which has the PMEM and RoCE stuff is shipping with KVM. The existing stuff and non-RoCE stuff is still shipping with the Xen hypervisor, but the future for Oracle’s visualisation thrust is KVM. If anyone is starting something new and thinking of picking the Xen-based OVM, you should probably not. ๐Ÿ™‚
  • For ages Ksplice has been available to folks running Oracle Linux in the Oracle Cloud, as the license is baked in. This is now also the case when running Oracle Linux in Azure.
  • The plan is to make much of the Autonomous Linux stuff available for on-prem customers too. Wim repeatedly stated, what you have on-prem is what they run in the Oracle Cloud, and what you run in Azure etc. Most of their work is on upstream Linux, rather than on their own proprietary stuff, so everyone benefits from Oracle’s OSS contributions.
  • They are working on some stuff to simplify the setup and management of Kubernetes. It will be open sourced and accept community contributions once it goes to GitHub.

After that session I headed down to the Groundbreaker Hub and just hung around chatting to people. I also did a 60 second Periscope, which is much scarier than a 45 minute presentation. ๐Ÿ™‚

This was the first evening I had free. I stuck by my guns and said no to every offer. I went back to my room and crashed! Tomorrow (Wednesday) is my last day at the conference, as I leave on Thursday morning…

When I get home I’ll probably write a series of posts about the Free Tier stuff. I’ve already written about many of the components included in the Free Tier offering individually (ADW, ATP, OCI Compute etc.), along with the supporting stuff (Compartments, Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs), Firewall stuff etc.), but it would be good to give it a consistent story for people who are fresh into Oracle Cloud, even if it’s just links to what I already have, with some updated screen shots. I’ll sign up with a new account and go through it all from scratch.

I’ve had a number of discussions about the new Oracle branding, which is a lot softer than the previous branding and almost devoid of red. It’s been mostly positive, but one comment that keeps coming up is something along the lines of, “The new branding is supposed to be more customer focused, but that’s not going to go very far if the attitude of “the business” doesn’t change!” I think you know what that means, and I have to agree. Most people don’t have an issue the tech side of Oracle, but do have a big problem trusting the business side of Oracle. Let’s hope this branding change is the beginning of a new era on the business side of things too!

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : Monday (Puppies and Free Tier)

I was tempted to call this “Day 1”, because it’s day 1 of the main conference, but I’ve already had two very full days with very little sleep.

The day started with a walk down to Moscone, where I got my first surprise.

This is my 14th visit to OpenWorld and I’ve never seen this road open during the conference. I’m sure this made the locals a lot happier, as there were less traffic issues, but it did restrict the flow of people somewhat. Having said that, the finished Moscone rebuild means things are a lot more centralised this year, so that wasn’t such a big deal for me.

I started off with a walk around the demo grounds, where I saw some familiar folks. Thank you Dbvisit for something familiar in sea of changes around the conference. ๐Ÿ™‚

I also saw Connor MacDonald drawing a crowd at one of the “theatres” in the demo grounds. You can barely see the people sitting, because of the people standing around…

I stalked bumped into Wim Coekaerts in the demo grounds and had a fanboy moment chat with him about the move from Xen to KVM that has been happening. I’ll no doubt be at some of the Oracle Linux stuff over the remainder of the conference.

I chatted to John Beresniewicz for a while, which is always a pleasure. I bumped into Richard Foote, and we went to get some food and check out where our rooms were for presentations during the week. With the Moscone rebuild, it’s worth finding your feet early. Eventually I had to leave him, as he was constantly mobbed by people mistaking him for David Bowie. We also saw this…

Gone are the days of scantily clad “promo girls”. Now you get people to your stand by having a pen full of puppies. Everyone standing around thinking, “Tech or puppies? Food or puppies? Autonomous something or puppies?” I guess you know what won… ๐Ÿ™‚ This was only one section of the pen. There were a lot of them, and I believe they were already adopted with good homes to go to, so I’ll forgive this exploitation. ๐Ÿ™‚ I assume based on the results, next year’s OpenWorld and Code One event will morph into a dog show. You gotta do what pulls in the punters. ๐Ÿ™‚

I booked in for a shift at the Groundbreakers Hub. I was meant to do 14:30 to 17:00, but I ended up starting early and finishing late, so most of my afternoon was playing at being a bouncer for the photographers doing head-shots for the speakers and members of the assorted community projects at the event. Really it was just an excuse to stand and chat to people. ๐Ÿ™‚

As a result of my shift, I missed the keynote, so I’ll have to catch the recording of that, but I already knew most of the announcements, as would anyone paying attention to the exhibits around the conference. These were on the monitors before the announcements.

Now I wonder what one of the announcements was??? ๐Ÿ™‚

Once my shift was over, I headed back to the hotel, then met up with some folks for dinner. I was once again the walking dead by that time, so I just slurred my way through the conversation. It was a good evening though! ๐Ÿ™‚

Tomorrow (today by the time I post this) is my first presentation…

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : ACE Director Briefing (including APEX 19.2 EA)

The ACE Director Briefing is under NDA, so I can’t talk about it. Most of the stuff mentioned will be known to the general public by the end of OpenWorld, so I’m not going to say anything here, as I don’t need the grief of saying something I shouldn’t. ๐Ÿ™‚

The announcements are nice, and I think some people will be pleasantly surprised, but if I’m honest, the main thing for me is meeting everyone, including the wife and kids, who I’ve not seen for ages. There are a lot of people I only get to meet at these briefings each year…

A thing that is definitely OK for us to talk about is APEX 19.2 EA, available at the following URL.

A number of features were discussed and demonstrated by Mike Hichwa and Joel Kallman, including a very impressive demo of the “Faceted Search” feature in APEX 19.2, which is just a few clicks away…

  • Navigate to “SQL Workshop”.
  • Use the “Object Browser”.
  • Click on table of interest.
  • Under the default “Table” tab, Click the “Create App” button.
  • On the subsequent screen, click the “Create App” button.
  • Accept the default app by clicking the “Create Application” button.
  • Click the “Run Application” button.
  • Click on the “{Table Name} Search” page.
  • Boom! You have Faceted Search.

And what you get out of the box looks like this…

Awesome! There is of course a Faceted Search page type for adding one to an existing application. APEX is a crazy good development tool these days!

After the briefing was done I went across to my Dad’s place to have a belated Birthday party. It was great to hook up again. Good food. Good company. It was a really nice end to the evening. Thanks Dad! I know he’s got a discoverer pass for OOW, so maybe we’ll get to see him around???

Cheers

Tim…

PS. As always, sleep continues to elude me, so I looks and feel like the walking dead! ๐Ÿ™‚

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : The Journey Begins

The day began at 03:00, or more accurately it began the previous morning, as I didn’t sleep overnight. Normal nervous can’t sleep stuff.

I got a taxi to the airport, which was easy at that time. The first flight from Birmingham to Amsterdam was a little late to get going, but we played catch-up in the air. I got to Amsterdam, and the next boarding gate was close, so no drama there. At the boarding gate I met Frits Hoogland and Sai Penumuru, so we had a chat before the next flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco.

I got really lucky because I was in an aisle seat, and the middle seat was free. It felt like poverty business class. ๐Ÿ™‚ The flight was long and boring, as you would expect, but I did get to watch the following.

  • Avengers: Endgame – It was a pretty good ride. I’m not sure it was deserving of all the hype, but it was good. There were a few scenes I loved. Seeing Valkarie on a flying horse was awesome. There was one scene where the most boring avenger did something I really liked.
  • Glass – I liked this, but if I’m honest I was expecting more, considering I loved both Unbreakable and Split.
  • Alita: Battle Angel – I’ve seen this several times, but I love it.

We landed in San Francisco on time, but there was a long wait at customs. We eventually got through and took the BART to the city centre. From there it was a quick walk to the hotel. I checked in and went to bed to get a little sleep. A bit later I got up to go to the Oracle Groundbreakers dinner, then it was an early night, trying to play catch-up on lost sleep.

Today is the Oracle ACE Directors briefing…

Cheers

Tim…

Update 1: I was just told off for not mentioning “the wife”, even though I didn’t see her yesterday. To get me out of the dog-house, this morning I saw Debra Lilley

Update 2: I was just told off for not mentioning “the daughter” and “the son”. At the Groundbreakers Dinner I got to meet with with my “problem child” daughter Heli, and my low maintenance son Gerald, who doesn’t tell me off if I don’t mention him… ๐Ÿ™‚

Oracle OpenWorld and Code One 2019

It’s nearly time for the madness to start again. This will be my 14th trip to San Francisco for OpenWorld, and however many it is since Java One and Code One got wrapped up into this…

  • Flights booked : โœ”
  • Hotel booked : โœ”
  • ESTA approved : โœ”
  • Irrational fear of flying and general anxiety : โœ”
  • 80 lbs weight loss : โŒ
  • Talk complete : โŒ
  • Denial : โœ”

At the moment the scheduled stuff looks like this.

Friday :

  • 03:00 UK time : Start the trip over to SF. I know I said I would never do this again, and I know what the consequences will be…
  • Evening SF time : Groundbreaker Ambassador Dinner

Saturday : Day : ACE Director Briefing

Sunday :

  • Day : Groundbreaker Ambassador Briefing
  • Evening : Oracle ACE Dinner

Tuesday :

Session ID: DEV1314
The Seven Deadly Sins of SQL
Date: 17th Sept 2019
Time: 11:30 – 12:15

Wednesday :

Session ID: DEV6013
Embracing Constant Technical Innovation in Our Daily Life
Date: 18th Sept 2019
Time: 16:00 – 16:45
Panel: Gustavo Gonzalez, Sven Bernhardt, Debra Lilley, Francisco Munoz Alvarez, Me

Thursday : Fly home.

Friday : Arrive home, have a post-conference breakdown and promise myself I’ll never do it again…

In addition to those I have to schedule in the following:

  • A shift on the Groundbreakers Hub, but I’m not sure what day or what demo yet. I’ll probably hang around there a lot anyway.
  • Meet a photographer to get some photos done. I’ve told them they’ve got to be tasteful and “only above the waist”.
  • Spend some time annoying everyone on the demo grounds. I know Kris and Jeff are desperate to see me. It’s the highlight of their year!
  • Stalk Wim Coekaerts, whilst maintaining an air of ambivalence, so as not to give the game away. Can anyone else hear Bette Midler singing “Wind Beneath My Wings”? No? Just me?

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff too, but I’ve not got through all my emails yet. Just looking at this is giving me the fear. So much for my year off conferences…

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2019 : It’s a wrap for me!

This is going to be a really short post, because the event was really short for me.

It was an early start, which meant a lack of sleep. As usual, this made me feel terrible. I never sleep well, so when something interferes with my already terrible routine I really can’t handle these days. The flight across was fine, and I got to the hotel at the correct time. Unfortunately, I had made a reservation for the wrong month. They had free rooms, so I paid for a room for about twice the price of the original room I booked. I got a shower and sat down to think. I then booked a new flight home for that evening.

I had a couple of DMs from concerned folks who had seen my tweets. Debra came across to chat to me, as she was flying out after lunch, and I had decided I was only turning up for my own session.

My session was a โ€œMultitenant : Whatโ€™s new in Oracle Database 18c & 12c Release 2โ€ at 15:10. I did the session and went back to my room to wait for my flight home. When the time came, I flew home. Everything was fine.

I’m sure the conference was great, because it always is. Sorry for not being present for most of it.

Cheers

Tim…