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OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 : Costa Rica

laotn16 I left my air conditioned room and the heat hit me. It’s winter here in Costa Rica, and I think it was only 23 degrees, but it was so humid it felt like the mid 30s. Breakfast, then a taxi to the venue and the Costa Rica leg of the OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 began.

There was an introduction to the event, then an introduction to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program by Pablo Ciccarello. From there the conference split into six tracks, so I’ll talk about what I did.

We were assigned a student as a helper for the day. Mine was Ray, who was a fantastic and had awesome English! 🙂

Ray - Costa Rica

My first session was “It’s raining data! Oracle databases in the cloud.” I had a full room, which was nice, and I got some questions, which is always good. I was happy with the way the session went, so I hope everyone else was too. 🙂

After a short break it was Kamran Agayev with “Oracle 11gR2 RAC Best Practices. ‘What happens if …’ scenarios Oracle 11gR2 RAC”. As the name suggests, Kamran ran through a number of scenarios you might come across on a live system, using videos to demonstrate some of them. I think this method works really well. It’s hard to do live demos of Clusterware and RAC because some operations take a long time to complete. Having a video demo makes life easy as you can speed up bits where necessary, and you don’t have to worry about running lots of VMs on your laptop at once.

Next up was Alex Zaballa with “DBA Commands and Concepts That Every Developer Should Know”. His session started with an explanation of eDB360 and sqld360, which are pretty cool tools. From there he worked through a list of useful features that people may have missed. He included live demos for some of the features. 🙂

After lunch, I had back-to-back sessions to close the day, punctuated by really heavy rain, so it wasn’t just raining data! 🙂

Pluggable Databases – What they will break and why you should use them anyway!
Improving the Performance of PL/SQL Function Calls from SQL

Both sessions went really well. Full rooms again and people seemed happy with them, which is good. 🙂 People were a little shy about asking questions in front of the group, but were much less shy 1:1 after the sessions. I got asked one question about result caching I didn’t know the answer to, so I will investigate that and add it to my article once I know. It’s always good to be asked something you don’t know the answer to. It keeps you on your toes. 🙂

After the wrap-up session, the conference was over. The event went really smoothly, with good control over the schedule timings and the addition of the helpers was a really nice touch.

Once the event was over we went straight to dinner. Driving in Costa Rica during the rush hour is an experience, most of which does not involve moving. 🙂 It took about an hour to move 5km. It would be quicker to walk, but it was raining. As it was, we got a bit of a city tour and were schooled in the use of Waze. Watching the drivers crowd-sourcing information on traffic jams and clear routes is really interesting. We all arrived at the restaurant at about the same time, where we had great food, great conversation, with great people.

All round a fantastic day! Thanks very much ORAUG-CRC for inviting me and making the whole experience so enjoyable.

Next stop Mexico!

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 : Panama to Costa Rica

I had a broken nights sleep. My luggage turned up at midnight. At about 03:00 I did a blog post. Then at 05:00 I officially woke up to get ready for the taxi at 06:00. 🙂

There were no dramas at the airport. Debra and I got through bag drop and security with plenty of time, so we got some breakfast and chilled until the flight.

The boarding was a little chaotic, mostly because people heard one piece of hand luggage and one personal item, and understood that to mean four pieces of hand luggage and a donkey. Needless to say, the overhead lockers were short on space. 🙂

It was a 55 minute flight, with a rollercoaster landing. I actually got my luggage back this time as well, which was nice. 🙂 Another quick taxi ride and we were at the hotel.

I did a couple of hours of work, then headed off to the gym, which was great. The hotel gym is a small Golds Gym, so I was able to do proper weights. It was super hot, which made training really hard, but when I finished I did some stretching and it was awesome. I can’t remember the last time I’ve stretched in that temperature. I was super flexible.

I think I’m going to head off to the pool for a bit, then chill for the rest of the day.

The Costa Rica conferences starts tomorrow. See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 : Birmingham to Panama

Where do I start with this day?

I arrived at Birmingham Airport about 2 hours and 20 minutes early. I was then presented with a huge queue to get to the queue for the bag drop. To be fair to the people at the desk, they seemed relatively efficient, but there were 2 floating staff who were chatting to each other and laughing, rather than handling the queue. There needed to be:

A specific “bag drop only” queue, which most people would have breezed through.
A “special cases” queue for those families that turn up with 45 cases and wonder why they can’t take them.
A “check in” queue, where people who have not already checked in can go.

Something simple like that would have meant the queue moved much quicker and the floating staff could have organised that easily if they could be bothered and weren’t morons. Of course, that couldn’t happen because we are talking about the Air France / KLM gate, so you know it’s going to be terrible. I sent a few tweets to both KLM and BHX that contained lots of expletives. Sorry if that offended anyone, but tough!

Eventually I got through the “queue to the queue” for bag drop, then I joined the “queue for the queue” for security. Yes, there was a queue to get to the place you normally queue! Once again, an obvious case for sorting your staff out. They know when they will be busy in advance, so they should staff accordingly.

I finally got to the boarding gate and could see the plane, but they were unloading for ages. Turns out there were a team of Para-Olympic athletes on the plane and the ground staff did not anticipate how long it would take to get them and their wheelchairs off. Once again, bad planning. We took off 40 minutes late, which was a worry since I had a very short connection at Amsterdam for the next flight. Just before we landed they announced some people had missed their connections, but mine was still possible if I legged it. Fortunately for me, the next flight was delayed also, so I made it!

I sat on the flight from Amsterdam to Panama, sighed with relief, then got a massive headache. I thought I was going to have one of my puking episodes, but I managed to down some paracetamol and sleep for a bout 10 minutes, which was enough to take the edge off.

I arrived in Panama, but my luggage didn’t. After a queue to deal with my lost luggage, I queued for about 40 minutes to get through the bag check, without my bags.

After a death-race taxi ride to the hotel and the travel was over. At that point, if I had the option to got straight home I would have done. The flights themselves were fine, as were the flight staff. It was the chaos on the ground that was the problem, which left me feeling like I never want to fly again. It was a terrible day!

I met up with Debra so she could watch me eat cheese and talk me down. Then it was bed and the hope that I would never remember this day!

Tomorrow is ORAUG PTY, the first event of the OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 (Northern Leg).

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The video is dedicated to Mark Rittman, who loves my travel videos, describing them as “boring” and saying, “nothing happens in them”, which is of course the whole point of doing them. 🙂

OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 : It’s Nearly Here

ace-director In a couple of days I will be setting off for this years OTN Tour of Latin America 2016 (Northern Leg). For me, the tour consists of the following locations:

Panama City, Panama: 01-Aug-2016
San Jose, Costa Rica: 03-Aug-2016
Mexico City, Mexico: 05-Aug-2016
Guatemala City, Guatemala: 08-Aug-2016
Pereira, Colombia: 11, 12-Aug-2016

I’ve had a last minute panic over hotels, but the main thing is I have flights. 🙂

If you’re coming to the events, it will be great to see you!

Cheers

Tim…

OGh Oracle DBA and SQL Celebration Day 2016

The OGh Oracle DBA and SQL Celebration Day was the last stop on my trip and it went super-quick! The morning started with a keynote by Dad. He managed to resist the urge to talk about me for 60 minutes, which was good. It gets really embarrassing when he keeps telling everyone I’ve eclipsed his accomplishments in every way possible!

After the keynote is was speaking about efficient PL/SQL calls from SQL. I lost the ability to type, but I think the session went OK. There is a playlist of videos about this stuff here. 🙂

My plan was to move on to see Alex Nuijten speaking about the Model Clause (in Dutch), but I bumped into Mark Rittman and we chatted for the next hour. Whoops.

There was a long lunch break, which worked out really well as people were all networking. One of the important points of any event is the networking and sometimes organisers try to cram too many sessions into the day, which makes networking impossible. I think they got it right here.

After lunch was Mark Rittman with a session called, “Using Oracle Big Data SQL to add Hadoop + NoSQL to your Oracle Data warehouse”. The main message here was for “some workloads”, SQL is still the best interface to the data, even if that data is in Hadoop or NoSQL databases. Of course, for some workloads, the opposite it true.

Next up was Marco Gralike with “Getting Started with JSON in the Database”. I was interested to see if there was anything I had missed while I had been looking into this stuff. Marco gave a shout out to my YouTube videos on JSON (here), which was nice. 🙂

From there it was the last block of the day and I was presenting about analytic functions. Mark warned me not to call them “Analytics”, because “Analytic Functions” are not the same as “Analytics”. 🙂 I think I’ll start calling them just “Analytics” to wind him up. 🙂 The session felt like it went OK. 🙂 I suggested people take a look at the videos Connor McDonald has been doing on the subject (here).

With the last session over people started to filter away. We hung around for a while chatting, then a few of us went out to get some food at a restaurant across the street. Before I knew it, the event was over…

Thanks to the folks from OGh for organising the event and inviting me. Thanks to the other speakers and attendees for making the event possible. Also thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for allowing me to fly the flag. 🙂

See you all again soon.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. My video of the event is a little embarrassing as I didn’t get to film too much and what I did film was even shakier than usual. Ah well, I tried my best. 🙂

AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon – Day 2

Day 2 of AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon started with me playing catch-up on some blogging, then the conference proper started.

The first session I went to was Jeremy Ashley presenting “General Session – Oracle Applications User Experience: Trends and Strategy”. I wrote loads of notes on this, because I find it really interesting. I’m not going to post them here because I will make some mistakes and look like a fool. I’ve seen a number of sessions by the UX team over the years and each time I do, it seems to click a little more. I’m starting to think SQL*Plus may not be the ultimate in UI or UX, but I’m not 100% sure…

Next up was Björn Rost doing a “Quick Guide to Open Source SQL Tuning Tools (Quickie)”. This was a short session talking about some tools I know and use (rlWrap, SQLcl, MOATS, Snapper, SQL Developer) and something that was new to me TUNAs360.

After that was my session about running Oracle databases in the cloud.

I then took a break do some work, upgrading Tomcat and deploying a new application, before heading off to the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge results.

I would like to say we were robbed, but we really weren’t. 🙂 Second place went to the AMIS team who did a conference organisation application. First place went to the “Team No Borders” with an application to help control air pollution in Mexico City. I think that was a popular choice amongst a number of people I spoke to before the awards. Well done guys!

Before I knew it, the conference was over! Thanks to everyone at AMIS for putting together a great event. It went so smoothly, it’s hard to believe it was the first one. Thanks also to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program for organising the Cloud Developer Challenge. It was good fun! Thanks to all the attendees and speakers. I hope to see you again soon!

Cheers

Tim…

AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon – Day 1

We had already been at the venue the day before for the beginning of the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge, but today was the first day of AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon. The day started at about 07:00, with a short minibus trip to the venue.

The first session I attended was “Get your money’s worth out of your Database” by Patrick Barel. He presented a whole bunch of database features that developers need to be using to make the most of their Oracle databases, including a bunch of 12c features. I like these kind of sessions. Much of what we end up doing at conferences is giving people pointers to what we think is interesting.

Next I went to “Smart Offices Are the Future of Work, Powered by the Internet of Things” by Noel Portugal. This started with some talk about designing for mobility, because people are connected all the time. It then moved on to the internet of things, where he discussed how small, cheap electronics can bridge the gap between the physical world and the internet, using examples like Amazon Dash, gesture controls, voice controls like Amazon Echo etc. The UX team are regularly using a lot of this stuff for their own office, kind-of making it the office of the present, not the future.

At this point, our team got together to carry on working on the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge, which took a big chunk of the day…

Later I headed off to see Jonathan Lewis present a session called “Just Don’t Do It”. As the name suggests, this session was focussed on improving performance by avoiding unnecessary work. The session was made up of examples from the OTN forums and consulting jobs where SQL was doing loads of unnecessary work. Often reframing the question allowed the statement to be rewritten to reduce the amount of work necessary to achieve the same goal. Neat!

From there it was back to the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge. All the groups got together to do the pitch for their solutions. With such a short timescale and the complexity of some of the services, most groups had hit some roadblocks, but everyone produced something. Debra actually did the pitch for two groups, but she did an exceptional job for ours. As I mentioned in a previous post, our team didn’t actually include people who do development outside of the database, and the challenge focussed on the non-DB side of things, which left us in a rather awkward position. By substituting comedy for content, Debra managed to make our pitch sound a lot better than it was. She also demoed our mobile app on her phone, and conveniently forgot to mention it was written in APEX. Your can see the home page below. 🙂

otn-cloud-dev-app

From there is was on to the evening event. Lots of food. Lots of drinks for those that do. There was also a covers band called The Originals who took request for literally anything. Pretty impressive. A few of us old folks ducked out a little early and headed back to the hotel and our beds.

That was Day 1 over. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Cloud Developer Challenge 2016

cloud The Oracle ACE Program decided to tag an extra day on to the front of the AMIS 25 Beyond the Horizon conference for the “OTN Cloud Developer Challenge”. The idea was for teams of ACEs to get together and build applications using Oracle Cloud services. It was originally called a cloud hackathon, but got renamed to something that didn’t contain the word “hack”. 🙂

My team was made up of Debra, Heli, Gurcan and Osama (who couldn’t make it due to visa issues 🙁 ). The plan was to create a schema in a cloud database. Expose the tables as REST services using ORDS. These REST services would then be consumed to produce a mobile application using some of the mobile technologies on the Oracle cloud. Unfortunately, we were a group made up of database people, so the last bit of the puzzle proved rather tricky/impossible for us. 🙂 So that we could produce a POC, we cheated and used APEX to push out some screens. The work for this continued the following day. 🙂

Towards the end of the day we broke away from the challenge and joined the AMIS 25 Beyond the Horizon introductory drinks. At about 21:00 I headed back to the hotel, did some washing, then crashed out for the night.

Cheers

Tim…

Paris to the Netherlands

airplane-flying-through-clouds-small Getting to bed at 01:00 and having to wake up at 04:30 is not ideal, but it was worth it.

The alarm went off at 04:30, I had a quick shower, checked out of the hotel and took the shuttle across to terminal 2 in Charles de Gaulle airport. Despite the early hour, there were a lot of people around. I grabbed a coffee and caught up with my blog posts. By the time I had done that, it was time to board the short flight to Amsterdam.

We boarded on time, but unfortunately the flight was delayed by about 50 minutes, so a 50 minute flight became a 100 minute plane ride. 🙁

From Schiphol airport it was a train ride to Leiden. I actually got on the wrong train initially, so I had to get off at the first stop and turn around. 🙂 Once in Leiden it was a taxi ride to the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge. I ended up arriving about 3 hours late, but it was a free-format type of day, so being late wasn’t a major problem. I’ll write a separate post on that event.

At the end of the day I headed back to the hotel, did some washing and went bed to try and catch up on some sleep.

You can see video of the trip and my hotel here.

Cheers

Tim…

Paris Province Oracle Meetup

The reason for me being in Paris was to speak at the Paris Province Oracle Meetup. Breaking my journey to the Netherlands with a quick trip to Paris was a really easy way to connect with more people.

The Paris meetup is very similar to those found in other cities around the world, including Oracle Midlands in my home town. We all gathered at about 19:00 in the AVNET office in Paris and I did two talks with a short break between them. The first talk was about pluggable databases and the second one was about running Oracle databases in the cloud.

I like these local meetups. They feel a lot less formal and more personal than some (but not all) conferences. It just feels more natural to me. I really enjoyed doing the talks and the crowd seemed to respond well to them, which was nice. I’ll definitely be back again, if they will have me. Maybe next time I will get to do some sightseeing in Paris too. 🙂

The meetup finished at about 21:45 and Stew Aston took me out to get some food. We chatted for ages about life, the Universe and Oracle. 🙂 Once the food was over, he gave me a lift back to my hotel and by the time I got into bed it was about 01:00.

Big thanks for Yves for inviting me across to the event, and thank you to everyone who came out to support the event. Without you it can’t happen. Also thanks go out to the Oracle ACE Program for continuing to let me fly the flag. 🙂

So that’s paris done in less than 24 hours. Next stop the Netherlands!

Cheers

Tim…