Tag: ace

BGOUG Spring 2014 : Summary

I know I keep calling it the “spring” conference, but in my mind the two BGOUG conferences are always spring and autumn. This year the “spring” conference was a little late, hence my apparently strange blog titles. 🙂

I was initially planning to get a taxi from Sandanski to Sofia airport. Fortunately Sve and Mimi were driving back at the same time, so I got a lift with them, which was much better company.

The flight from Sofia to Munich went as planned. After a 110 minute layover in Munich, it was time for the last leg of the journey to Birmingham. Once again, so drama there.

So now I’m home and my 5th BGOUG conference is over. Once again, Melina and the BGOUG team did a great job. No offence to any other user group, but BGOUG is still my favourite conference of the year!

Thanks to everyone at BGOUG for making this run so smoothly. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for letting me “fly the flag” for the program. Your support is much appreciated! Thanks to all the other speakers. Your advice and support is always welcome. Of course, thanks to all the attendees who came to my sessions and made me feel so welcome. I look forward to seeing you all again next year.

I’ve shared a few photos on Google+.

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

BGOUG Spring 2014 – Day 2

The Day 1 evening festivities consisted of lots of food, followed by a group doing a display of traditional dances. Once they had finished it was up to me to teach the Bulgarians how their local dances should really be done. Needless to say I smashed it! 🙂

Day 2 started with a swim and breakfast. When I say swim, I really mean gentle floating, wishing I was still in bed.

The first session I went to was Joel Goodman‘s session on “RAC Global Resource Management”. Lot’s of good stuff! Joel is like a walking Oracle encyclopedia.

Next up was “Oracle 12c Automatic Data Optimization” by Joel Goodman. Nice feature. Once again, another thing added to my to-do list. I think the developers have done a really bad job of naming the views and some of the procedures for this feature. I would have abbreviated words and added underscores to stay under the object name size limit. The naming feels like “Peter and Jayne do programming”. Ugly, ugly, ugly! In terms of the feature itself, the main issue here is ILM doesn’t work with the multitenant option. I’m sure this will be fixed in future, but for now it is a big flaw. Even so, lots of potential here.

After lunch it was “Utilizing new CBO features after upgrade to 12c – Practical example” by Joze Senegacnik. I have to admit, I turned up late for this one. Very sorry mate! The part of this session I saw focussed on a specific customer upgrade from 11g to 12c.

I ducked out of the last session on the day and headed back to my room. During the day I had been asked a few questions I did not know the answer to, but I know other people who probably do, so I pinged out a few emails.

In the evening we took a quick sightseeing trip to Melnik. We had a walk through the town and did a quick tour of a famous winery.

From there is was back to the hotel to get some food, then bed.

I’ve got an early start this morning to begin my trip home. I’ll write a summary post when I get back.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2014 – Day 1

The morning started out with a family swim with the wife and daughter.

The first session I attended was “Auditing in Oracle Database” 12c by Maja Veselica. I haven’t spent any time looking at 12c auditing yet, so this was a great introduction. I think I’m going to need to spend some time on this stuff. It looks like there are quite a number of changes to auditing in Oracle 12c.

My first session came next. The room was quite full, which was nice. It’s good to see such a good turnout for PL/SQL. Together we are strong! 🙂

After lunch I went to watch “Understanding Oracle GoldenGate” by Svetoslav Gyurov. I’ve had GoldenGate on my to-do list since it was aquired by Oracle and I’ve still not got round to using it, so it was cool to see an introductory session on it. Sve can reach the top of the screen, even without a ladder. 🙂

Next up was “Do Oracle Cloud Applications stack up?” by the wife. You’ve gotta show some support or they just go on at you! This focussed on a customer story about how Fusion Apps on the Cloud was the correct choice. Many of the points raised were true of a variety of cloud solutions. Resistance is futile. We will all be water droplets in the cloud soon!

Next up was my introductory WebLogic session. I think it went down quite well. There were some nice messages/retweets on Twitter. 🙂

The final session of the day was “Real-World DataGuard” by Yavor Ivanov. The introduction part of the talk covered familiar ground for me, but as the session progressed there were a number of thing mentioned that were new for me. I’ve put another note in my to-do list to spend some more time of data guard, especially in 12c.

So I’m back in my room, writing up this blog post before the evening meal and dancing. I don’t have any presentations to give tomorrow, so I can relax and enjoy other people’s sessions.

As always, a great first day at the BGOUG conference!

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2014 – Day -1

The flight from Birmingham Airport to Frankfurt went to plan. The landing was quite possibly the smoothest one I had ever experienced. Very impressive. I got off the plane to find my connecting flight had been moved to another terminal. I was pretty worried by this as Frankfurt is a massive airport and I already had a short connection time. Luckily I made it. The flight to Sofia went without a hitch.

On arrival, I met up briefly with some of the other speakers before we were whisked away to Sandanski. It was a 3 hour drive, but I was chatting with the wife all the way, so it went quickly.

Once we got settled, we took a quick tour of the hotel spa. It was then I remembered I had no swimming gear. A quick shopping trip down the road and I had swimming shorts and some goggles. Then it was off to the pool, so I could float around and complain about the possibility of sunburn. 🙂

In the evening we met up with some of the other speakers and the BGOUG folks for dinner in a restaurant right next to the hotel. After that it was back to the room to get some much needed sleep. What with the 03:30 start, two flights, a 3 hour drive and a quick session in the pool I was completely knackered.

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2014 – The Journey Begins

I’m sitting at Birmingham airport, waiting to start my journey to Sandanski. I’ve got a flight to Frankfurt, a sprint to the flight for Sofia, then a 2-3 hour drive to Sandanski. It’s going to be a long day. 🙂

The airport is really busy. It seems lots of flights leave between 05:00-06:00 on a Thursday. One of the food places is playing plinky-plinky music and I’ve just had to listen to some racist a-holes spreading their uneducated garbage. Very annoying…

Can you tell I am tired and in a bad mood? 🙂

It’s going to be worth the hassle though. I’m going to be reunited with my wife and daughter. Unfortunately Dad can’t make it to this conference. We will all meet up at OOW this year, where I think we should recreate this family photo.

Cheers

Tim…

2014 OTN MENA Tour

Just a quick shout out to the 2014 OTN MENA Tour, which starts in a few days. The events are:

  • Bizerte, Tunisia, 26th May
  • Béja, Tunisia, 27th May
  • Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 29th May
  • Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 31st May
  • Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 1st June

This is the first time this tour is happening, so please show your support and register.

Good luck to all the folks who are taking part. Unfortunately I can’t be there, but I hope to take part in a future event…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Midlands : Event #3 Summary

I really enjoyed Oracle Midlands Event #3 last night. Christian Antognini spoke on “12c Adaptive Query Optimization” and “Row Chaining and Row Migration Internals”. I certainly learnt a lot, which is the whole point of this stuff!

After the event a few of us went across to a local pub and the geek talk continued. Cool++.

Thanks very much to Christian for coming all that way to speak to us. Thanks to those good people at Reg Gate for sponsoring the event. Thanks also to the Oracle ACE Program for letting Christian come to visit us. 🙂

The next event is on Monday 14th July. Hope to see you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle ACE Director Self-Evaluation

I’ve just filled in my Oracle ACE Director Self-Evaluation…

The way the tour dates worked this year, I got the LAOTN 2013, Nordic 2013 and Yathra 2014 tours in a single assessment year, plus all the one-off events. It looks crazy-busy… 🙂

Most of my events this year have been packed into the first half of the year, so I think next years assessment will look a little sparse by comparison…

Cheers

Tim…

 

OUGN : Summary

With the exception of a 5+ hour layover in Amsterdam, the trip home was pretty straight forward. I flew to Amsterdam with Lonneke Dikmans, Ronald Luttikhuizen and Roel Hartman. During my rather excessive layover, I played catchup with all the internet stuff I missed during the trip… 🙂

I must say OUGN 2014 was a pretty cool event all round! The speaker lineup was incredible. The location (on a boat) was fun. I’ve not done that for a while. In addition to the presentations, I got a lot of time to talk to people about technology, which is what I love doing, so that made me happy…

Big thanks to the organisers of the event for inviting me and paying the bill for the boat and hotel room! Thanks to all the speakers and attendees that managed to put up with me for a couple of days. On a boat, there is nowhere to run! Thanks also to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program. They didn’t fund this trip for me, but I’m still happy to be flying the flag on their behalf. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

 

OUGN : Day 2

Day 2 started really early. Having got to bed about 02:00, I was up at 05:30 and thinking about my 08:30 session. The previous evening’s conversation with Brynn was playing on my mind a little (in a good way), thinking how that conversation should/would affect my session. The session itself seemed to go well. I enjoyed it anyway. 🙂

From there it was more conversations with people, including a chat with Martin Bach, Martin Nash and one of the attendees (sorry, I forgot your name) about some Exadata issues he was having. I freely admit to knowing nothing about Exadata, but I do know about most of the technology stack that makes up Exadata (like ASM, RAC etc.). Since a number of the issues people have are not really “Exadata” issues, so much as “RAC” issues or “ASM” issues, it’s surprising how much you can get involved in these discussions, provided you don’t try to pretend to be something you are not!

After that I attempted to catch up on some sleep, which didn’t really work out, so then it was off to lunch.

After lunch it was time for an open database panel session. This is the first time they’ve done this sort of thing at this event, so I’m not sure what people expected, including us panalists. 🙂 I think this sort of thing needs to run for a few conferences to let people get a feel for it, before you make a decision about whether it is going to work or not going forward. You have to give it an opportunity to mature… 🙂

After that it was off to Martin Bach‘s session on Oracle 12c, features that didn’t make the top 10. There were some things I already knew about and some things that passed me by. Food for thought!

Next up was Martin Nash speaking about what an Oracle DBA should know about Linux administration. I was pretty confident I was going to be so ahead of the game here, but he mentioned a number of things I’ve not played with. I’ll probably end up downloading his slides and working through some stuff.

Then it was my WebLogic session. Marcus Eisele did a session called WebLogic 101 in the morning and after a quick discussion I decided that we were effectively giving the same talk. I’m always a little nervous about doing WebLogic talks, but this made me even more nervous. As it turned out, with the exception of one person, I got a different crowd to him, so it was fine.

After my last session of the conference, I inevitably did some more chatting and then went off to see “Oracle Cloud Oddessy“. From there it was dinner, chatting to Mike Dietricht in the bar, then off to bed to sleep through the overnight ride back to OSLO.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I think I got married to Debra Lilley by the ship’s captain…