Tag: ace

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…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : ACE Director Briefing – Day 2

ace-directorI started the day with a jog around the lake. Believe it or not, I got lost a couple of times. We checked out of the hotel and headed off for the second day of the ACED Briefing. 🙂

Once again, it’s mostly under NDA, but the agenda for the day was as follows.

  • Tom Michelini and Jeff Welsch : BDaaS and IaaS Update.
  • Edwin Desouza : MySQL Update.
  • Wim Coekaerts : Linux and Virtualization Update.
  • Steven Feuerstein : Strengthening the Oracle Database Developer Community Together.
  • Roland Smart and Vikki Lira: Oracle ACE Program and OTN Update.
  • Andy Mendelsohn : Oracle Database Development Update
  • Oracle Database Development Update – the details. This was presented by a group of people whose names I forgot to note. Sorry. I missed the second half of this session because I went outside to chat to some of the guys presenting the first half…
  • David Peake : APEX Update.

After refreshments, it was a coach ride to the Hilton San Francisco, where we will be based for the main Oracle OpenWorld conference.

Just before I left I noticed WebLogic 12c (12.2.1.0) and Oracle Forms and Reports Services (12.2.1.0). That was a little surprising, since the timeline for the Forms release is not what were were told the day before! Sigh. Good news though. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : ACE Director Briefing – Day 1

ace-directorThe day started at 03:00 local time. I was in denial for about 60 minutes before I threw in the towel and got up. A couple of new release blog posts (VirtualBox 5.0.8 and MySQL 5.7) later, it was off to the gym again. I told you, it’s the new me…

After the gym I spent ages chatting to people in the foyer, whilst still stinking of gym and drinking coffee++. After getting cleaned up, I met up with a bunch of folks at 08:00 to walk across to head office for the first day of the ACE Director Briefing.

As usual, this couple of days is all under NDA, so we can’t talk about specifics, for fear of leaking some of the big announcements for OOW 2015, or because we are being told future direction. As a result, the following is really an idea of the agenda, where that doesn’t imply the content of an announcement… 🙂

  • Vikki did some quick introductions and basically told us to behave. 🙂
  • Jeremy Ashley and co. : Spoke about Cloud User Experience. Jeremy’s UX team has a hand in the design of many Oracle products. I have a lot of time for the work they do, and I can think of a few Oracle products I wish they had more involvement in. 🙂
  • Thomas Kurian : Gave an executive address. I’m saying nothing more about this, for fear of getting “disappeared”. Lots of interesting things coming. Something for everyone. 🙂
  • Vikas Anand, Kaj Van De Loo, Greg Stachnick and Kuldip Oberoi : Cloud update, with each person speaking about their respective parts of the cloud.
  • Interjeet Singh : Oracle Fusion Middleware update. This was quite a “vibrant” session during the question and answer part. 🙂
  • Mike Lehman : This session focused on WebLogic.
  • Shay Shmeltzer and Joe Huang: Oracle Development Tools and Mobile Platform Update.

After the sessions were over, we had some refreshments, then headed back to the hotel. A few of the folks went out to eat, but I just headed to bed.

For a generalist like me, today contained lots of interesting and sometimes confusing stuff. Tomorrow is more focussed on Linux and database stuff, so it is like a fun day for me. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : The Journey Begins

The day started at 05:30, which was not much different to normal, so that was good. A quick taxi ride to the airport was followed by a 1 hour sleep on the floor next to the departure gate. It’s wonderful having no shame. 🙂

The first flight from Birmingham to Frankfurt was about 80 minutes and it was fairly straight forward. I had a 2 hour layover before the next flight, so there was no real drama there. I ended up boarding as the last person in the last boarding group. 🙂 I tried to buy a business upgrade, but it was going to cost $2500, so screw that.

The United flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco was about 11.5 hours and a little annoying.

  • The plane interior was a really old refit. It was pretty terrible compared almost every other airline I’ve been on in the last few years.
  • The “entertainment system” was one of those old shared screen things, not a personal system, so you had to watch the same thing as everyone else.
  • The shared screen froze for a few seconds every 5 minutes or so, which kind of ruins your suspended disbelief.
  • My special meal was “missing” again. I mean, come on!

It’s hard to believe it’s 2015 when you are on a United plane. 🙂 Luckily, the staff were really nice. There was one lady doing her last flight after 46 years of service. Awesome!

We landed a little late. Getting though US customs was actually pretty quick, which makes a change. I took the hotel shuttle with Osama, Gurcan, Simon, Cary and Arup, who all converged from different flights.

After getting to the hotel, I dumped my stuff and went to the gym. It’s the new me. 🙂 After getting changed, I went down to the bar for a few minutes to say hello to some people, then headed off to bed by about 22:00 local time.

Allowing for the time difference, I think that’s about 24 hours from bed to bed. 🙂 Tomorrow is the first day of the ACE Director Briefing!

Cheers

Tim…

SANGAM15 – See you there!

I mentioned my Oracle OpenWorld 2015 trip in a previous post. Yesterday evening I picked up my passport with my lovely new India visa in it!

The talks are written. The flights are booked. The hotel is booked. I have a visa. So that’s me sorted for SANGAM15 in November! 🙂

It’s going to be a rather hectic few days. I fly out, do the 2 day conference, then fly straight home. It looks like I will be in aeroplanes and airports longer than I will actually be in India. 🙂

If you are coming along to the conference, be sure to come and say hello. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : It’s a Wrap!

ace-director

I just realised I didn’t write a closing post for the OTN Tour of Latin America 2015, so here goes.

Here are the links to all the posts I wrote during the two weeks that related to the main body of the tour.

Here are the links to the posts I wrote during the little trip to Machu Picchu.

Overall it was a really fun tour. Ignoring my illness at Machu Picchu, I think I coped a lot better with it than I have the previous couple of tours, which was good news.

Big thanks to the organisers and attendees at all the events. I hope to see you all again soon! Thanks also to the ACE Program for giving me the opportunity to fly the flag! I must also say a thank you to my fellow speakers for putting up with me for all that time. I know I can be hard work, so you are all deserving of an “I survived a tour with Tim”, badge, if one existed. 🙂

Sorry for the delay in writing this post! See you soon!

Cheers

Tim…