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OTN Yathra 2014 : The Journey Begins

It’s been a really tough lead up to this tour. I’ve already blogged about the panic over my visa and flights. Since that post my flights were cancelled, switched to some different flights, then switched back again. I only got the final confirmation on the Thursday night before leaving on the Sunday.

What with that and me stressing out about some stuff going on at work at the moment, I felt like cancelling so I could lock myself in my house for 2 weeks and not speak to anyone. I’m in definite need of a holiday!

Today started off with a last-minute shop for a new suitcase. I had forgotten mine was broken, so I rushed out and bought the first thing I saw. I got home, packed, then got a banging headache. I had a couple of hours before my taxi, so I went to bed to try and sleep it off.

The first flight was from Birmingham to Dubai at 20:30. Nothing too eventful there. I finally got to see “Gravity”, which was nice to look at, but not totally awe-inspiring like the trailers would have you believe. Unfortunately, no sleep during this flight.

After a 2 hour wait at Dubai, it was on to a 2 hour, plus change, flight to Delhi. I did a little bit of head-flopping during this flight, but nothing I would consider sleep.

It was my first time at Delhi airport, which feels spacious, bright and really clean. One of my flight combinations would have had me sitting there for 16 hours. I wouldn’t have fancied that, but spending a couple of hours there was fine. India does the “first port of entry” thing, so I had to get my bags, go through customs and check in for the internal flight. After a two hour wait at Delhi, it was a 1 hour flight to Amritsar. During the flight I asked the young man next to me about our destination. As we left the flight he was mobbed by admirers wanting photos with him. I said, “It seems you are really famous”, to which he replied, “I play cricket for India”. It turns out it was Harbhajan Singh. 🙂

It was a 2+ hour cab ride from Amritsar airport to Jalandhar. This was my first experience of driving in India. OMG! Lanes are irrelevant. The direction of the road is irrelevant. We were literally driving along a dual carriage way with cars and motorbikes coming towards us in our lane. All those photos you see of crazy things on the streets around the world are every day occurrences here. Multiple people on a single motorbike, including people holding children in bags etc. Few of the cars or lorries had working rear lights, so driving in the dark was an experience. Somehow, I managed to get to the hotel in one piece, but I think we did get hit by someone. The driver got out to check the back of the car, then carried on…

So that was about 16+ hours in transit after a full day in the UK. I’ve really got to learn how to sleep on these flights. The overnight things are killers…

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Yathra 2014

I’ve been a little quiet on the blog lately, mostly because I’ve been spending my time freaking out about the arrangements for the OTN Yathra 2014 tour of India. I had to apply for a visa, which in itself was not too bad, but I spent quite a long time without a passport, thanks to the courier not bothering to attempt a delivery. All that time I didn’t know if my visa application had been successful, so I wasn’t sure if I would have to submit it again. By the time that arrived, it was so late that booking the flights became interesting… At one point I wrote to Debra Lilley and said words to the effect of, I think this is just not meant to be!

Well tonight (Tuesday evening) I got my flights confirmed for my trip that I start on Sunday. 🙂

This is proving to be quite an expensive trip.

Visa: $130.00 – About £110 for the visa itself, and about £20 for the courier service.
Vaccinations: £250 – I feel like a human pincushion now. I had a bunch of boosters that were due, as well as stuff specifically for India.
Malaria Pills: £80 – We are in low risk areas (cities), but we are doing a couple of journeys between cities by bus, which travel through high-risk areas (countryside), so they advised me not to take any chances. I could have got the cheaper pills for about £8, but I decided to go for the ones with less side affects. I don’t see the point in travelling all that way to stand on a stage and feel like crap because of the anti-malaria pills. At least these should minimise the chances of that. If so, that’s worth a few extra quid.

For those that think this Oracle ACE thing is a free ride, you don’t get any of this money back!

I’ve still got stuff to get, like insect repellent. My pastey white skin seems to be very appetising to insects and I am not a stranger to infections when I do get bitten. Fingers crossed I can avoid the worst of it…

Getting to this point has been a bit of a trial. 🙂 Thanks to everyone who has helped. Murali put together a great pack to help the speakers plan the trip and Lillian and Vikki from the Oracle ACE Program have done a great job pushing through my last minute travel bookings!

Normally I’m doing the thanks when the events are over. 🙂

Let’s hope everything from now on goes a little smoother than it has up until now!

Cheers

Tim…

OUGN Vårseminar 2014

I’ve had some papers selected for the OUGN Vårseminar 2014 event in April, so I will be there representing OTN and the Oracle ACE Program. There is an impressive array of speakers lined up for this event already. Should be fun!

I’ve got a couple of months to practice my Captain Jack Sparrow impression. I wouldn’t want to look out of place on the boat!

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Yathra 2014 : See you there!

In November I wrote a post about my possible inclusion in the OTN Yathra 2014 tour. That has been confirmed now, so I’m representing OTN and the Oracle ACE Program at all the cities in the tour.

Jalandhar – 18th February
Noida – 20th February
Mumbai – 22nd February
Pune – 23rd February
Hyderabad – 25th February
Bangalore – 27th February
Chennai – 1st March

I’m a little bit scared by this trip. The OTN tours are good fun, but they are hard work. Doing seven conferences in 14 days seems like an awfully big task. I could have skipped some of the events to make my life easier, but that feels a little mean. At least when I get back from this tour I will have a week at work to rest before I go off to OUG Ireland… 🙂

So now I’ve got to get my visa sorted out…

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2014 : I’m going to be there. Are you?

Earlier in the week I got confirmation I have two papers selected for OUG Ireland 2014.

PL/SQL : Stop Making The Same Performance Mistakes
An Oracle DBA’s Guide to WebLogic Server

You can see the full agenda here.

I got on the net to check flight prices and Ryanair were doing a round trip for £13. The booking fee on the travel site I used was more then the flight costs, so the total flight costs came to £30. 🙂 Needless to say I booked them straight away, so I will be there representing OTN and the Oracle ACE Program.

In addition to presenting, myself and some of the other ninjas have been speaking with the conference organisers to get RAC Attack included in the event. That’s sorted now. At last count there were 6 RAC Attack Ninjas coming to the event, but others may be lurking around in stealth mode. 🙂 If you are interested in RAC, come and speak to us. We are happy to help people do a full RAC installation on their laptop, but if you don’t want to commit that much time, you can just do part of the installation, like the Grid Infrastructure, and finish it off at home. A lot of people just want to come and ask questions about RAC. That’s fine too! 🙂

As if that wasn’t enough, there are Master Classes with Tom Kyte, Joel Goodman and Uwe Hesse!

Registration is now open, so get yourself sorted. See you there! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG Tech13 : Monday

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I’m only attending Monday of UKOUG Tech13. One of my colleagues quit, so there is no DBA at work today while I’m out on a jolly. 🙂

My session was at 09:00, which meant getting up at 05:00 to get the train to Manchester. While I was on the train I did a final run-through of my presentation and surfed the net on the train WiFi. I left the house in the dark. It was still dark by the time I got to Manchester. The winter is so depressing!

My talk went pretty well. There were quite a lot of people there, but when you are presenting in an auditorium it looks really empty. 🙂 I think I got a bit excited because I finished early. That rarely happens to me, but it did leave room for an extended question and answer session, which was pretty cool. I was asked a variety of questions, some of which were really quite challenging. I came out and bumped into Jonathan Lewis, which gave me the perfect opportunity to discuss some of the issues with him. I think I will be adding a few points to my article to pick up on some of the themes raised by the questions. It’s always good when interactions with people open up new trains of thought. Thanks to everyone that came along, everyone who asked such good questions and everyone that said really nice things about the presentation on Twitter. 🙂

I kind-of missed the next session because I kept bumping into people and chatting. Meeting up with friends, new and old, is one of the best things about conferences for me. Amongst others, I had a quick chat with the previous Optimizer Lady (Maria Colgan) and said hello to the new Optimizer Lady (Tom Kyte). Tom has taken his new role to heart, turning up in a skirt and knee length boots!

Next up was “Self-Provisioning Pluggable Databases Using PL/SQL” by Brynn Llewellyn. I’ve been playing around with pluggable databases for a while now, but it’s still early days for me, so there were quite a few neat things that came out of this talk, including the use of DBMS_SQL to perform operations in the scope of a pluggable database and scheduler jobs of type SQL_script.

After that session I bumped into Melanie Caffrey and Martin Widlake and we chatted about the current state of software development in the age of “Coding-By-Google”, before I started to stuff myself with food.

The next session was “Introduction to the New Oracle Database In-Memory Option” by Maria Colgan. It all looks so simple and cool it can only be the result of witchcraft! It’s surprising how many long standing bits of the Oracle optimizer go into making the in-memory database work…

From there it was a quick trip across the road to watch Doug Burns speak about Database as a Service (DBaaS) at OakTable World UK 2013. This is a subject that I have a big interest in and one that I know very little about.

I did intended to go to another session, but I got chatting to Debra Lilley (who is not technical), Sten Vesterli, Lonneke Dikmans, Ronald Luttikhuizen and Simon Haslem instead.

From there is was a quick trek over to the station to start my journey home. I’m now just about to arrive in Birmingham.

Overall it’s been a really cool day. I got to present, see some great sessions and meet lots of cool people! Thanks to everyone involved in the organisation of UKOUG Tech13 and OakTable World UK 2013. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program, who didn’t have to pay for anything this time, but allow me to keep doing what I do. Thanks also to my current employer, who paid for my train ticket. 🙂

Back to work tomorrow, where I’ll be doing one of my fortnightly Tuesday presentations…

Cheers

Tim…

OTNYathra 2014 : India OTN Tour

Just a quick note to say the top-level approval for OTNYathra 2014 – India OTN Tour has been granted. Next, we’ve got to submit our individual travel approvals and see how that goes. If everything goes to plan, I will be representing the Oracle ACE Program on this tour in February, which visits the following locations.

Jalandhar – 18th February
Noida – 20th February
Mumbai – 22nd February
Pune – 23rd February
Hyderabad – 25th February
Bangalore – 27th February
Chennai – 1st March

Fingers crossed everything goes to plan. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

APAC OTN Tour 2013

Just a quick plug for an upcoming OTN tour, that I’m not on this year.

Auckland, New Zealand : 8th November (agenda)
Perth, Australia : 12th-13th November (agenda)
Tokyo, Japan : 13th-15th November
Beijing, China : 17th-18th November
Guangzou, China : 19th November

I attended the OTN Asia Pacific Tour in 2011, which included some of these locations. Hopefully I will get to do it again in the near future. 🙂

Like any conferences, these events are all about the attendees, so the more people that turn up and the more vocal the attendees, the better the events are.

I’ve seen the agendas for the Auckland and Perth events and they look cool. I hope everyone has a good time!

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – It’s a wrap!

So the OTN Nordic Tour 2013 is over. Here are the posts I put out during the tour.

I’ve already done a bunch of thank you messages in the individual posts, but I just want to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone involved once more.

Thanks to everyone at ORCAN, DOUG, OUGN, OTN and the Oracle ACE Program for helping to make this happen. Thanks to the other speakers for being involved and trying to help organise me. Big thanks go out to all the attendees that turned up to these events. I hope to see you all soon.

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Oslo

We got on the plane from Copenhagen to Oslo and met up with the OUGN folks for some food in the hotel. We spent a long time talking about non-Oracle stuff, like science and religion. It was fun.

The morning started with a long breakfast, which included me nearly throwing orange juice over Mike Dietrich and him succeeding in throwing tea over me. We both blamed the table, but in reality it was our secret desire for a food fight that caused it. 🙂

I went to Sten‘s session called “From Requirements to Tool Choice”, which as the name suggests, discusses which tools are a good fit for which types of development. He has some interesting statistics in the presentation, which are a good talking point. You might want to take a look at OraToolWatch, which he maintains.

My sessions were on Analytic Functions and WebLogic. I am incapable of keeping to any sort of schedule. Mike Dietrich came to warn me about leaving for the plane. I thought he was asking me to finish my presentation 15 minutes early, which for a 45 minute session is kinda difficult, so I brushed him off and carried on, only to find out at the end that I had overshot by 15 minutes. I’m now cringing as I write this because I must have looked like such a diva. Just so you know, it wasn’t me being a diva. It was me being a dumb-ass. After the session I spoke to Mike and it seems I had told him the wrong flight times, which was why he was especially concerned, thinking I might miss my plane. People should just shoot me with a tranquillizer dart when my time is up. Sorry to all those that missed out on their coffee break. 🙁

Once again, I went straight from my last presentation to the airport to catch my plane. This time it was for the flight home… I sat chatting to Lonneke and Sten for a while before I got my first plane. When I got to Amsterdam I had a 2+ hour stop-over. After about an hour, I sat down with a coffee and I heard, “Can passenger Hall travelling to Birmingham please board immediately at gate D6!” I ditched my coffee and ran like an idiot from D49 to D6. I started apologising to the staff, saying I must of got my times mixed up etc. They checked and it was another passenger called “Hall”, travelling to Birmingham on a different flight. I walked back to gate D49 feeling rather frazzled. 🙂

Big thanks to OUGN and the conference attendees to making me welcome. Thanks as always to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program for helping to make this happen.

Cheers

Tim…