Tag: ace

BGOUG Spring 2017 : Day Off?

On my last visit to Bulgaria I got chatting to Todor Grigorov and I agreed to come and speak to his team at DXC the next time I was in Bulgaria. Once I knew my sessions had been accepted for this conference I dropped him a line and said I was still up for it if he was interested, and so a plan was hatched. That’s why I arrived in Bulgaria a day early for a “day off”. 🙂

At 08:30 Todor picked me up and took me to the DXC office, we all sat in a room and just started to talk. Rather than doing presentations, the idea was for this to be a day long informal question and answer session. This sort of thing can be quite daunting, especially when some of the people asking questions are better at this stuff than me, but it’s good to challenge yourself. The questions ranged from specific to general, and I gave answers ranging from technical to opinion. There were a couple of storage related questions I dodged with the line, “Email me your question and I’ll send it on to someone who will be able to answer it!” 🙂

There was one storage question from Krasimir Kovachki that confused the hell out me. I thought he said “Team Provisioning” and I guess I must have looked like a rabbit in the headlights. A bit later was speaking to him and it dawned on me he had said “Thin Provisioning”, at which point his question made so much more sense and we had a discussion about that. That made me laugh. 🙂

At lunch time we went out to get some food and guess who appeared on the TV behind us? That’s Krasimir next to me. By the way, this photo was taken by another Krasimir. 🙂

After lunch we got some drinks and went to sit in a park to continue the question and answer session in a less formal environment. I also got to try some boza and banitsa. 🙂

It was a really fun day and it was nice to meet the ladies and gents that make up the team at DXC. Thanks for making me feel so welcome!

At about 16:00 Todor drove me to take a quick look at The Bells Monument, and waited for me to ring the UK bell before telling me adults weren’t supposed to ring them. 🙂 From there it was a quick trip over to the Hilton to meet up with Bryn Llewellyn and Roger MacNicol for our ride across to the RIU Pravets Resort, ready for the first day of the BGOUG Spring 2017 conference the following day.

I got into my room, unpacked my stuff and it was then I noticed I didn’t have my laptop charger. Panic! I rang the hotel in Sofia, who had found it in my room, and said “someone” would be picking it up for me. I sent a panic email to Milena and Todor and we arranged for Todor to pick it up on his way to the conference the next day. Phew!

That did leave me with no juice in the laptop, hence this blog post is coming out a day late and some work stuff has backed up. 🙂

In the evening we walked round to the golf course on the other side of the lake and had some food. It was a really nice end to a very busy day!

The next post will be about Day 1 of the conference (today). 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG Spring 2017 : The Journey Begins

Waking up at 03:00 is stupid! When I wake at this sort of hour I tend to feel kind-of sick unless I’m distracted. Fortunately the taxi driver was pretty cool, which helped me forget about how miserable I felt. 🙂

You never know what you are going to get at the airport. Last time the queues were massive, but fortunately I had fluked a business class ticket so I walked straight past them. This time the security was empty, so I walked straight through, even with my economy ticket. That’s great, but you start to kid yourself you could have come an hour later and slept some more. 🙂

The first flight of the day was from Birmingham to Amsterdam. The plane had a lot of free space, so boarding was quick. We left on time and the flight took about 40 minutes.

A connection time of a little over a hour can sometimes be a problem in Amsterdam. It’s a big airport and if you catch the gates wrong, it can be a bit of a panic to get to your connection. This time my departure gate was next to the arrival gate.

I wrote a lengthy bitch about the airport and the lead up to the next flight, but it was because I was tired and emotional. Actually it was fine.

The next flight went well. It took about 2.5 hours to get form Amsterdam to Sofia and ended with possibly the best landing I’ve ever experienced.

I was met at the airport by Todor Grigorov, who took me to my hotel. I’ll be spending tomorrow with him and his team at DXC Technology doing a free form Q&A. It’s like a job interview with 40+ people on the panel, and no job at the end of it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG and OGh just around the corner!

Just a quick heads-up about a couple of events happening in the near future.

First we have the BGOUG Spring event in Pravets, Bulgaria. Having missed a couple of years before the last event, I’m trying to make up by doing two events in six months. 🙂

About a week after I get back from Bulgaria I’m off to the Netherlands for the OGh Tech Experience 2017 at Rijtuigenloods. This should be like the best bits of the AMIS and OGh events from last year rolled into one!

If you are coming to one (or both) of the events, I’ll see you there. If not, why not? 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Prague – The Journey Home

I had to be at the airport for 12:15, which meant I got a lie in and I actually slept a bit, which was nice. 🙂

When I woke up I got some breakfast, edited a couple of short Oracle Code videos and caught up with my blog posts. After that was done I went through all the work emails I’ve missed over the last week, just so I don’t have that unpleasant job to do when I get back to work on Tuesday. Once that was done a went back to bed for an hour before check-out. I know it’s sad, but I’ve had so little sleep the previous two days I felt dead.

It was a quick taxi ride to the airport and I barely broke my stride walking through security, which meant I was two hours early for the flight. Better early than late! 🙂

Because I fluked a business class ticket on the way out I had a baggage allowance of two cases and two pieces of hand luggage, of which I used two pieces of hand luggage. The journey back was economy, so I had an allowance of one piece of hand luggage. Why do companies sell return tickets with different baggage allowances? Luckily I didn’t have much, so I could cram it into the once bag.

As soon as they announced boarding, most people ignored the queue and barged to the front. The flight from Prague to Frankfurt took about an hour. As soon as I got off I checked the gate for the next flight and it had been moved to the other terminal, so I stomped off in a bit of a panic, but made it in plenty of time.

As it happened, boarding was delayed for the second flight because one of the trolley dollies was late. Once again, as soon as boarding was announced a bunch of people jumped the queue. I will not tell you what I was wishing would happen to the queue jumpers… The second flight took at 75 minutes, which wasn’t so bad.

After a quick taxi ride home, Oracle Code : Prague was complete! I did all my thank you messages in the last post, but once again thanks to everyone involved for making the event go so well. See you soon!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Prague

I was a little late getting to the event. My hotel was only a mile away from the conference venue, but it was a mile up hill. 🙂 I missed the start of the first keynote, but I had already seen it in London, so I didn’t feel too guilty. 🙂

When I walked into the keynote it was packed. If you followed the event on Twitter you will know the turnout was great. Well done Prague for coming out in force to support the event!

First up was Adam Bien with “Enterprise Java.next: A Slideless Keynote”, but as I said, I missed it this time around. You can see my description from the London event.

The second keynote was “Building Modern Applications Using APIs, Microservices, and Chatbots” by Siddhartha Agarwal, Jakub Nesetril. This was a standing room only thing again, so I had a little wander around the venue and got back to see the chatbot demonstration, which I watched from the from the corridor. Pretty neat.

Next I went to see Peter Nagy with “Deploying Cloud-Native Applications: VMs, Containers, or Functions”. This was a really interesting and I wrote down a lot of notes. I had a quick chat with him at the end about Docker and learned some new stuff.

From there I went to see Chris Saxon with “SQL Magic! Tricks to Show SQL Features You’ve Probably Never Used”. He got a big crowd, which was good to see for a SQL presentation at an event like this.

After that I went to see “Explore the Basics of Setting up Your First Secure Private Docker Registry” by Mike Raab. Being a Docker noob, some of this went over my head, but every bit of information helps ease the transition into playing with Docker. 🙂 He mentioned using Let’s Encrypt certificates, which I saw a few people scribble a note about.

Before the next session I live-streamed a small bit on Periscope for the @OracleDevs Channel, which you can watch on Twitter or Periscope. If you watch it on Twitter you’ll see half of my head. If you watch it on Periscope you will see it all. 🙂

After that it was my session called “Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON“. The crowd were very quiet during the session, so it was kind-of hard to know how well it went, but I had some people come to speak to me at the end, so hopefully it was fine. 🙂

I missed the last block of the day because I was too busy chatting to a couple of guys (Ramil and Artjom) and about DBA stuff. We continued chatting during the party at the end of the event, and were joined by one of their colleagues (sorry dude, I missed your name) and Frank Nimphius. I think we were the last to leave. 🙂

It was a really enjoyable day. Thanks to everyone from #OracleCode for letting me come to the event. Thanks also to the Oracle ACE Program for continuing to let me fly the flag. Big thanks to all the speakers and attendees that made this such a successful event. I hope to see you all again!

So that’s my second and last #OracleCode event this year. I hope the rest of the cities go well. Remember, it’s free so turn up and support them if you want more events like this in the future!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : Prague – The Journey Begins

Another stupidly early start, so another night of no sleep, worrying about missing my flight. 🙂

I was up at 04:00 to get a taxi into the airport. The queues were massive, but for some reason I had a business ticket for the outward leg, so I could use the express lane and walk straight past the hordes of people and into the lounge. Happy days.

The first flight was Birmingham to Munich, which took about 90 minutes. I had enough time between flights to head to the lounge and eat “free” peanuts. The flight from Munich to Prague was delayed, but I bumped into Frank Nimphius, who is in his medium-floppy hair phase at the moment, and we chatted about the previous Oracle Code events, while he casually flicked his hair. 🙂

The flight to Prague took about 50 minutes. I had arranged a pick-up from the hotel shuttle, so there was a man with a sign waiting to pick us up, which was nice.

After a few minutes and I was in the hotel in Prague with an afternoon to spare. I know I should go and have a look round, but sleep feels so much more important at this point!

The Oracle Code : Prague event is tomorrow, so I hope to see you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Code : London

As usual with early starts, I had a terrible nights sleep, worrying I would sleep through my alarm. 🙂 I’ve been quite nervous about this event ever since I found out I got accepted. I’m pretty comfortable in front of your typical Oracle crowd, but having no idea about the makeup of this audience freaked me out. My feeling was if the crowd was made up of Oracle techies looking to find out about different stuff I should fit in OK. If it was a bunch of non-Oracle people looking to see what Oracle was offering in this space my session would not go down well at all. Time would tell…

I got a taxi to the station, grabbed a coffee and got on the train. I had a seat with a table and a power socket. For ÂŁ5 I got 24 hours of internet, which made the journey far more productive. When I got to Euston Station it was a quick tube ride to Moorgate Station, then a walk round the corner to CodeNode London. After registration and a few quick hellos it was down to business.

First up was Adam Bien with “Enterprise Java.next: A Slideless Keynote”. The session was a live demo of using Java EE to code microservices that are built and deployed using Docker. Live demos of anything to do with Docker are always fun to watch as things happen so quickly. 🙂

Next up was Deepak Patil with “Harnessing the Power of Cloud to Develop Next Gen Killer Apps”. This session was a description of the infrastructure that underpins Oracle Cloud, with a guest spot by Mark Shuttleworth of Cononical. I asked the question on Twitter whether this meant Oracle would start to support their products on Ubuntu. I did not get an answer. 🙂

After that session the conference was split into multiple tracks and I went to see Jeff Richmond with “Move Data Between Apache Hadoop and Oracle Database for Customer 360 Analytics”. This session covered quite a bit of ground in a single session, including talk of Oracle Big Data SQL and a bunch of Oracle Cloud Services.

Next I went to see Davide Fiorentino with “A Practical Guide to Docker and Service Deployments”. As the name suggests, this was an overview session about Docker, giving an idea of how and why you would use it.

After lunch it was me with “Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON“. As I said earlier I was really nervous about this because I didn’t know if I would be a good fit for the audience, or even if anyone would show up. The room was really busy and a quick straw poll at the start alleviated my nerves. There was a strong contingent of existing Oracle developers in the room, who were looking for “what comes next”, and my session seemed to go down pretty well. That was a really welcome surprise. 🙂

[silly aside] I keep mentioning we are doing an Oracle Cloud Apps implementation at work and I am nothing to do with the project. For anyone that doubts this, one of the questions at the end of my session was by someone who is working on that project, who I don’t know. 🙂 When I finished, two guys came up and introduced themselves. Turns out they are working on our on-prem WebCentre Content implementation. You gotta laugh! I’m sure our paths will cross how we have been introduced.[/silly aside]

Next up was Lucas Jellema with “Event Bus as Backbone for Decoupled Microservice Choreography”. I really liked the ground work Lucas put in before he launched into the demos. The term “microservice” is often used in a rather random manner, with many people describing what they are doing as microservices, when they really aren’t. Lucas did a top-notch job of describing what a microservice is and some of the basic “rules” which it should probably conform to. He then did a rather ambitious demo made up of a bunch of microservices running on his laptop and the cloud, all interacting with each other using an event bus in each location that were being synced, and it worked. I should have expected nothing less. 🙂

I missed the next session as I was chatting to a few people, including some of those guys that I “almost” work with. 🙂

Next up was Dan Mcghan with “Making RESTful Web Services the Easy Way with Node.js”. This was how the cool kids do what I do with PL/SQL and ORDS. 🙂 The combination of Node.js and the Oracle Driver for Node seems like a pretty good combo for this type of thing.

That was the last session of the day for me. We all piled downstairs for pizza, drinks and more chatting. Pretty soon it was time to leave. 🙂

Big thanks to the organisers of Oracle Code for letting me come to play. Not only was it fun to present, but I got to see and learn a lot of really useful stuff! Thanks also to the Oracle ACE Program for letting me fly the flag. I gave you a shout out in my session! Thanks to all the attendees that came to support the event, and to everyone that came to my session and came and chatted to me during the day. These events can’t happen unless you turn up! 🙂

The journey was pretty straight forward. Round the corner to Moorgate, tube to Euston, train to Birmingham and taxi home! Happy days!

It all happens again in Prague next Friday! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

The Oracle ACE Program : My 11 Year Anniversary

It’s that time of year again! On 1st April 2006 I got an email telling me I was an Oracle ACE and they’ve not managed to get rid of me yet. 🙂

This years anniversaries will look like this.

  • 22 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
  • 17 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or Current name: 31 August 2001)
  • 12 years blogging in June. (15 June 2005)
  • 11 years on the Oracle ACE Program. (01 April 2006)
  • 2 years making videos, with some very lazy periods. (6 July 2015)

Oh man I feel old! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m hoping to see a post from Thomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar) who got his Microsoft MVP on the same day several years ago and is hopefully still and MVP.

OUG Ireland 2017 : It’s a Wrap

I guess four blog posts and 3 videos over a two day period is a little excessive, but this is the closing post to make it five. 🙂

Here are the posts I put out during the event. I’ve added in some videos I finished editing today.

This is the first time I’ve stayed over at the event and I think it made a big difference. When I’ve done it in a single day it adds quite a lot of pressure. From the minute you wake up until the minute you get back home there is a nagging doubt about the logistics of the day. I still had to get there in time for my talks, but I was not constantly checking the time for when I had to fly home and it made me feel much more relaxed. I’ll try to do it this way in future.

Big thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland and UKOUG for inviting me and making it a great day. I’ll see you next year! Thanks also to the attendees and speakers who had to put up with me for two days this year. Sorry you didn’t get to have a day off. 🙂 This is one of the conferences I where I pay my own expenses, but I would still like to thank the Oracle ACE Program for continuing to allow me to fly the flag!

See you all next time!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : The Journey Home

I left the hotel bar with Martin, Chris and Neil and after an abortive attempt to get an airbus, we got a taxi to the airport.

I was convinced Dublin Airport was one of the few airports that don’t want you to unpack your laptops from your bag so I didn’t and my bag got flagged. I have no idea where I got that idea from, but I felt like a dick. 🙂

We then went to get some food and wait for our respective flights, whilst discussing our favourite movies…

When it was my time to board I said my goodbyes and headed to the boarding gate…

All three seats in my row were full and all three of us were of a “fuller figure”, but fortunately the row across the aisle was free so I got to “upgrade” from a middle seat to my own row. Happy days!

The flight home was about 45 minutes, then it was a taxi ride home to complete the journey. Wrap-up post to follow!

Cheers

Tim…