Tag: ace

I slept for about 12 hours last night, which was really good news!

I met up with Frank in the hotel lobby, we checked out and took a taxi to the hotel for the NZOUG event in Wellington. Some quick hellos and a couple of coffees, then it was time to start. It was a three track event, so I will only be talking about the sessions I attended.

My “Pluggable Databases – What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” session was in the first block. The room was busy and I felt quite hyper so I probably sounded a little excitable. 🙂 I think it went well though.

Next up was Arup Nanda with “Case Study of Cross Platform Large Database Migration Using RMAN with Arup Nanda”. The session started with a summary of potential methods to perform platform migrations, then dived into the method he used to convert a system when moving to Exadata. He used a combination of Incrementally Updated Image Copy Backups, RMAN convert and Transportable Tablespaces.

The next session was “A Manly Man’s Guide to Open Source Tuning Tools” by Bjoern Rost. I’m not entirely sure who the “Manly Man” was… 🙂 I saw a variant of this session at the AMIS event earlier in the year. He spoke about (rlWrap, SQLcl, MOATS, MOATS 2.0, Snapper, SQL Developer, EDB360, TUNAs360).

I was up next with my cloud database session called “It’s raining data! Oracle databases in the cloud“. After lunch I was up again with “Improving the Performance of PL/SQL Function Calls from SQL“. Both these sessions felt like they went really quickly. I had fun during the sessions, so I hope everyone enjoyed it. I got some questions at the end, which is usually a good sign.

From there I moved on to “Docker in the Oracle Universe” by Frank Munz. I know virtually nothing about Docker, so this session was pitched perfectly for me. 🙂

The last session I went to was Anton Els with “The Oracle Database 12c Controlfile – A valuable source of information!” Anton was showing the link between the information in the controlfile and datafile headers and how they affected the recovery process. I learned a couple of things which I can now speak about like I always knew them. 🙂

And almost as soon as it started, it was over… 🙂

Thanks to everyone at NZOUG for inviting me and making my short stay fun. Thanks to everyone who came to my sessions. Thanks also to the ACE Program for making this happen for me.

After the event Frank and I went to get some food at The Crab Shack, who fortunately also do vegetarian stuff too, then it was off to the airport for the trip to Auckland…

Cheers

I got to Birmingham Airport about 2.5 hours early, so I had no drama at the bag check or security. I’ve mentioned a couple of times I’ve been really nervous about this journey. As I waited the nerves started to take their toll and I puked before I got on the plane.

The flight to Dubai was unusually uncomfortable. I think part of that was because I was already really tired before getting on the plane. The more tired I get the more fidgety I get and it just feeds off itself. I didn’t sleep, but I did a little head nodding. I was wearing an Oracle T-shirt and an air steward asked me if I worked for Oracle. Rather than explain everything I just said yes, then sat there feeling annoyed for telling such a stupid lie.

I arrived at Dubai airport and as expected the upgrade didn’t include lounge access. I headed over to the C gates and waited for my flight. Dubai airport is all about shopping and there is very little provision for seating. This is especially true of the area around the C gates. For such a modern airport, the seating arrangements are pretty crappy. I was planning to sleep on the floor, but at the last minute I got a touch of shame and decided to wait until I got onto the plane. Oh yes, I puked again too…

Priority boarding and business class seats rule! I was the first person on the plane and I think I was first person to puke in the plane toilets on that trip. I changed into the joggers and a different T-shirt and managed to get some sleep, but not as much as I wanted.

The flight to Auckland was pretty good. I slept through the first lot of food. When I woke up I got some fruit and some nuts. By the time breakfast came I couldn’t be bothered to eat. The stewardess was freaked out about how little I had eaten during the flight. It’s not like it’s going to kill me. 🙂

I wasn’t issued a ticket to Wellington and I was told to check that my bags were sent straight through. My baggage tag said they would be, but the Emirates staff weren’t sure. I got to Auckland and the “first port of entry” thing meant my bags weren’t really checked through to Wellington. I picked them up and bumped into Frank Munz. We were on the same flight to Wellington, so we checked out bags and he signed me into the Air New Zealand (Star Alliance) lounge. 🙂

The flight to Wellington was really quick. Less than an hour. We picked up our bags and got a taxi to the hotel. I had planned to meet up with Frank to grab some food, but I fell asleep and woke up at midnight, local time. I was then awake for about 2 hours, then slept again for 4 hours until my alarm.

So that’s the trip from Brimingham > Dubai > Auckland > Wellington complete.

Cheers

Tim…

In a couple of hours I’ll be taking a taxi to the airport to start my journey to Wellington, New Zealand. The actual departure time is 21:20. The flight to Dubai takes about 7 hours usually, so if I’m true to form and can’t sleep sitting upright in economy, I’m going to be pretty miserable by the time I get to Dubai. I’ve then got 3 hours in Dubai airport, where I don’t think I qualify for lounge access, despite my upgrade for the next flight.

From Dubai it’s a 16 hour flight to Auckland, which I was really dreading until I got an option to upgrade to business class. If I can lie down I can sleep anywhere. On several occasions I’ve slept on tiled floors at airports with no problem. If I’m sitting upright, or with that slight tilt you get with an economy seat, I just don’t sleep. The best I get is some head nodding. It cost me a lot of money to upgrade this flight, but 16 hours is a long time to be in an economy seat if you can’t sleep. Having a business class seat should allow me to sleep, so even if I get on the plane in a bad mood, I should be able to sort myself out during this flight. The current plan is to try to sleep half and work half of the time. Let’s see how that works out. 🙂

When I get to Auckland it is a 2 hour wait before getting on a 1 hour flight to Wellington. I’m hoping by this time I will have had a lot of sleep and will feel OK for the conferences in Wellington and Auckland over the next couple of days.

Total flight time will be approximately 24+ hours, with total elapsed time from leaving home to arriving at the hotel being about 32+ hours. I feel a little sick just thinking about it…

I normally write blog posts about travelling as I go, but depending on how this one works out and how tired I am, I might drop offline for a couple of days, so I thought I would put something out preemptively to start the ball rolling. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…