Tag: aced

UKOUG System Event : I’ve got a paper selected.

I’ve just found out I’ve got a paper selected for the UKOUG System Event on May 20th. Check out my badge. 🙂

I was a spectator at last year’s event. At first glance you might think much of the content is not directly related to my job, since I’m not a system administrator, virtual infrastructure administrator and I don’t use any Oracle engineered systems, appliances or storage products. Having said all that, it’s hard to be a DBA these days without having a finger in several pies. Most of the information discussed at these events is relevant, even if you are not using the exact same kit or doing the exact same job as the speaker.

Hope to see you there.

Cheers

Tim…

Birmingham City University (BCU) Talk #2

As mentioned in a previous post, when I was at Birmingham City University (BCU) speaking at the UKOUG Next Gen event, one of the lecturers saw me and subsequently asked if I would come in and do some technical talks for the students. I did the first about a month ago. Yesterday I had the morning off work to pop across to do another talk.

This talk was on virtualization. It’s based on the slides for my “Cure for Virtual Insanity” session, but I frame the subject a little differently and skip some of the content. I like doing this talk. It’s not too heavy and it gives an introduction into virtualization, which links into the current batch of DBaaS cloud offerings. I think it’s good for people to understand some of the building blocks their “magic” cloud services are built on. 🙂

I feel like the talk went well and I got some questions, so people must have been paying attention. 🙂

Afterwards I chatted with the guys about the session and more generally about how to move this guest speaker thing forward. If everything goes to plan I will be doing 4-6 of these sessions per year. I think it’s great how they are looking for feedback from external people and companies to help develop their students. It’s not like the antiquated approach lecturers used when I was at university. 🙂

Onwards and upwards…

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2015 : The Journey Home

After saying a quick goodbye to everyone, I got in a taxi and headed for the airport. I was a little on the early side, but as I’ve said before, it’s better to be early than late where airports are concerned. I wanted do have a Guinness in the bar in the airport, like I did with Patrick Hurley last year, but the queue was too long, so I settled for an authentic Irish diet coke instead. The flight home was a little less “eventful” than the flight out. I arrived in Birmingham at about 23:00 and after a taxi ride home, was in bed by 00:00. So all in all it was a 20 hour day! 🙂

Dublin is seriously easy for me to get to. It is cheaper (£27 return) and easier (40 mins) for me to get to Dublin than it is to get to London. I did spot one of my fellow Oracle Midlands folks there, who had also flown in for the day to check out the conference. It’s definitely worth considering the trip! This event is now one of my staples for the year!

Thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland and UKOUG for getting the event up and running. Thanks to all the attendees and speakers for turning up. Without you it would not happen. Even though this was a self-funded event for me, I would still like to thank the Oracle ACE Program for letting me fly the flag!

See you all next year!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2015 : The Event

Having got to OUG Ireland, here’s what happened…

The first session I got to see was Nikolay Kovachev from TechnoLogica speaking about “12c PDBs, Snapshots & Change Management”. Bulgaria in da house! The session started with an intro to ZFS (snapshots, copy-on-write (COW), clones), then a quick intro to the Oracle multitenant architecture. From there it was on to PDB snapshot cloning using ZFS. Because of the ZFS COW functionality, this is really quick. Similar cloning times to Clonedb. From there is was on to Cloud Control 12c Change Management, using the lifecycle management pack. After doing that, it was demo time, with a demo for everything covered in the session. Even with the power of modern day laptops, I am always nervous of live demos of Cloud Control. It’s resource eating beast… The ZFS and cloning demos worked fine, but there were some issues with the change management pack demo because of the amount of stuff running on a single laptop. It was a pity, but such are the joys, and pains, of live demos. I’ve been there myself several times. I definitely need to spend some time looking at the snapshot clones of PDBs in 12c.

My first sessions was “Pluggable Databases : What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” When I did this at Oracle Midlands #8 it was described as scary by a couple of people. I tried to lighten it a little this time, so I hope I didn’t scare anyone. 🙂

After my first talk it was off to lunch, where I got to meet up and chat with a bunch of people, which is really the best part of any conference. Can we have the soup in mugs next time please? 🙂

Next up was Marcin Przepiorowski from Delphix  speaking about “How To Avoid Boring Work – Automation For DBAs”. When I tweeted this one of the replies asked if it was a Delphix sales pitch. One of the things I like about companies like Delphix, Dbvisit, Enkitec and Pythian is they send people out to conferences without forcing them to do the hard sell. Marcin is a Delphix employee, but this session wasn’t anything to do with Delphix. It started off with examples of using Cloud Control to automate tasks, then moved on to using Ansible. I’ve not used Ansible, but it looks pretty neat for automation of tasks across your whole server real estate. It’s on my to-do list.

My second session was “A Cure for Virtual Insanity: A vendor-neutral introduction to virtualization without the hype“. I was kind-of expecting nobody to turn up to this session as there was a whole bunch of great sessions on at the same time and it wasn’t directly about Oracle. As it turned out I was pleasantly surprised. I like doing this session. It’s quite light and fluffy, but allows me to dispel some of the FUD associated with virtualization.

Next up was the closing keynote by Maria Colgan. Apparently, the In-Memory Column Store is a software version of walking into a pub, standing on the bar and asking which of the blokes is suitable relationship material. I tried this once and couldn’t walk straight for days. 🙂 Maria also picked up her UKOUG lifetime achievement award for winning the best speaker prize three times. This means she can no longer be selected as best speaker, which makes it that much easier for the rest of us… 🙂

After the closing keynote it was drinks and nibbles then the event was over.

Thank you messages in the next post…

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2015 : The Journey Begins

The day started early, about 1 hour before my alarm in fact. I got up, lay in the bath for a while drinking a can of Monster and considering the day ahead, got out of the bath, puked, then got my shit together ready for the taxi. I’ve been ill this week. That combined with sleep deprivation, nerves and the Monster kinda turned my stomach.

The taxi ride to the airport was really good. The driver was a really cool bloke and I enjoyed talking to him.

I arrived at the airport with a couple of hours to spare. It’s a bit silly for such a short flight when I have to check in online and I only have a laptop as baggage, but I would rather be early than late for my £27 flight to Dublin. 🙂

We got seated in the plane and were told we had a 60 minute delay. One guy started to freak out. It was like an episode of the Jeremy Kyle show. I was waiting for someone to come in with the DNA results, to prove he was not the father of the baby etc. No punches were thrown…

We ended up taking off about 50 minutes late. My first session was after 12:00, so I wasn’t too worried. The girls next to me used the time to do their make-up. Apparently it takes about 40 minutes to achieve “the natural look”. The combination of that, the selfies and the giggling about stuff on Snapchat made me feel very old!

On arrival it was a quick taxi ride to Croke Park, then OUG Ireland started for me.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Midlands Event #8 : Summary

Last night was Oracle Midlands Event #8 sponsored by Redgate.

There was a problem with the projector, but fortunately there were a couple of large TV screens, so it didn’t have to be a complete no-slide zone. Neither of the talks relied on displaying lots of code, so I don’t think this caused a big problem.

First up was Chris Saxon speaking about Edition-Based Redefinition. I’ve done talks on this subject, so I was interested to see how Chris approached it. The talk started with an explanation of the problems associated with deploying new versions of PL/SQL code to production, then moved on to possible solutions available prior to 11gR2. Once that ground work had been established, he moved on to explain how EBR can be used to make the process more robust, focussing on some specific pieces of the EBR functionality. I preferred his approach to the subject than my own, so I was taking a bunch of notes about his presentation style. There is always something to learn. I thought it was a really good session and Chris handled the subject (and the projector issue) really well. His recent move to Steven Feuerstein’s advocacy/evangelist team at Oracle means I should get to see him speaking some more in the future, which will be cool.

After the food break, it was my session on “Pluggable Databases – What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” It was the first time I’ve done this session in front of a crowd, which is always a bit nervy. It seemed to go down pretty well. Here is the feedback from those who filled in the evaluations.

  • “Good presentation”
  • “Good presentation, dynamic material & delivery”
  • “A lot of content, probably requires a part 2”
  • “Scary!!!”
  • “Good information and entertaining delivery style”
  • “Excellent – superb topic & presentation skills”
  • “Very good talk. Much information gained”
  • “Brilliant & scary!”
  • “Informative, passionate & useful”
  • “Brilliant”
  • “Really good insight/information. Real world understanding which makes a real difference. As always brilliant!”
  • “Not bad for a beginner”
  • “Really enjoyed & challenging subject matter”
  • “Fantastic!”
  • “Good”

The, “Not bad for a beginner”, comment made me LOL when I read it. There are a couple of people I’m putting in the frame for that one. 🙂

It wasn’t my intention to make the Mulitenant option seem really scary. I thought I was doing a sales pitch for it, not scaring people off. Maybe I need to re-frame things a little… 🙂

Thanks to Mike for getting the event sorted and thanks to Redgate for the sponsorship. Thanks to Chris for coming along. Hopefully we can get him back again in the future. Big thanks to everyone who turned up to the event last night. Let’s keep this train rolling!

Cheers

Tim…

Birmingham City University (BCU) Talk

Last year I spoke at the UKOUG Next Gen event at Birmingham City University (BCU). One of the lecturers, Stuart Hutchison, from BCU saw me speaking and asked if I was interested in coming to speak to the students about Oracle. He’s trying to get a handful of external speakers to come in during the year and speak on a range of subjects to give the students a feel for what’s going on out in the world. Life was pretty hectic towards the end of last year so it took quite a while to actually get something sorted out. On Monday I went to BCU and did my first talk to the students.

I was quite nervous in the lead up to the session. I’m used to a dealing with an Oracle technology crowd, but I didn’t really know what to expect from the students. I spent some time talking to Stuart to try and get a feel for what he wanted. He sent me some of their Oracle course material and labs, which helped me to pitch my stuff at the right level and stopped me treading on his toes. 🙂 The students are currently in the middle of an Oracle security module, so I spoke about SQL injection, data redaction and transparent data encryption (TDE). The idea was to touch on a few subjects and leave plenty of time for questions.

I think it went pretty well, but I’ve got some room for improvement. 🙂 Despite it being an Oracle talk, it is quite a different crowd, which needs a different approach. I’ll be going back in about a month to do another session before the exam season kicks off, so that should give me some time to work on my approach a bit.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do some of these sessions every year. I’m interested to see how this helps me develop as a speaker. Let’s see how it goes. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Riga Dev Day 2015 : The Journey Home

The morning didn’t start well. I woke up several times in the night feeling pretty bad. The combination of a cold, general lack of sleep and too much beer was not great. I don’t drink very often, so it doesn’t take much to make me feel bad. 🙂

I went down for breakfast with a few of the folks, then went back to bed and spent the next few hours switching between sleep and being sick. Luckily, everything seemed to calm down just before I had to get the taxi to the airport.

Check-in and security was quick and efficient. I found my departure gate, then got some food and a drink (non-alcoholic), which made me feel a lot better. The plane was pretty full, but was able to do a little work, which makes the journey much more bearable.

It was another fairly quick connection in Frankfurt, before getting on the plane home. I arrived at Birmingham airport in time for rush hour, which was not the best, but them’s the breaks…

The Riga Dev Day event was good fun. Riga is a really nice looking city and the people were friendly. As an English speaker, I had no problem at all from a communication perspective, which makes the whole process so much simpler and less stressful. 🙂

I mentioned in a previous post, the conference is a mixed discipline event, so you get to chat with a range of people from different backgrounds. I think it’s really important to break out of the bubble from time to time, so that you can get a feel for what the rest of the world is up to. For any of the other speakers reading this, you should give this Riga event a try. I think you’ll like it.

Thanks to the folks from LVOUG for inviting me to the event and making me feel welcome. Thanks to the attendees and speakers who I spoke to during the event. I hope to meet you all again! Big thanks for the Oracle ACE Program for getting me across to the event and allowing me to fly the flag.

Cheers

Tim…

Riga Dev Day 2015 : The Main Event

The event was held at a cinema in a shopping mall. We even got a free popcorn ticket. Awesome! I missed the starting keynote, which was a pity because everyone said it was really cool. So my day went as follows.

Krasimir Tsonev : Using Node.js for everything or what it is to write a book about it

I went to this session because I wanted to be with the “cool kids”. 🙂 I ended up chatting to Kasimir during lunch and in the evening. He’s from Bulgaria, so I was able to use my extensive Bulgarian vocabulary on him. 🙂 I’m never going to be one of the cool kids, but it’s good to get some context about different technologies. What is it? What does it do? What is it good at? What is it bad at? Where should I avoid it? It was good to get a feel for this from someone who is really using it, not just writing about it like it’s the Emperors new clothes.

Heli “Hell-Squirrel” Helskyaho : 9 use cases for Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeller

Back in the day we used to spend a lot of time on database design. I remember spending hours in Oracle Designer. Nowadays database design seems to have fallen by the wayside, which is a pity because good design is important if you want good performance and you want your application to stand the test of time. Adding in new functionality on top of a badly designed database is a nightmare. Extending a good design is usually much simpler.

In this session my daughter gave an overview of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeller. For those familiar with Oracle Designer, there is enough similarity to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. The session included 9 ways to use the tool, including importing from previous tools like Erwin and Oracle Developer.

Me : PL/SQL : Stop making the same performance mistakes

Next up was my PL/SQL performance session. I had some problems with the screen at the start, so I was just about to launch into a no-slides, no-demos version of the talk, then they realised my adapter was faulty and everything was working again. My bad! The talk went well and I managed to finish on time. A number of people had questions, which took me through the break and right up to the next session. Happy days. 🙂

Roel Hartman : The best of both worlds : Going hybrid with your mobile APEX Oracle Application

This session showed how to use Apache Cordova to create an APEX application that acts like a native app, allowing it to interact with information from the phone, such as contacts or compass etc. It’s a really neat solution to allow you to bridge the gap between mobile web apps and native apps, allowing you to stick with your preferred development tool, in this case APEX… I feel like a native developer now. 🙂

Robin Moffatt : No Silver Bullets – OBIEE Performance in the Real World

I’m not an OBIEE guy, but I wanted to see Robin present and I loved it. If Cary Millsap did a presentation on OBIEE performance, it would be pretty much like this session. Robin referenced Cary’s “Thinking Clearly About Performance” paper at the start of the session and that really set the scene. He’s a confident, no-nonsense presenter, which I really like. Well worth going to watch, even if OBIEE is not your thing, because the approach he speaks about it pretty much universal for identifying and fixing the actual problem, rather than relying on Voodoo.

Me : A Oracle DBA’s guide to WebLogic server

I was then up again for the last session of the track. This time it was my introductory WebLogic session. It really was the end of the day and I think everyone, including me felt like it. 🙂

The Evening

After the last session, we took a taxi back to the hotel to drop off our stuff, then headed out to the closing party at a bar in the old town. I had a couple of pints and watched the band, which I believe was made up of some of the techies from one of the local companies. I really enjoyed it! After the band came some comedians, which I didn’t really hear as I was standing at the other side of the room talking geek with Robin Moffatt. When the festivities were over we headed back to the hotel and sat in the bar chatting for a couple of hours, then it was off to bed.

It was a long day, but a really enjoyable one. The conference was great fun and all the people I interacted with were really enthusiastic! I’ll write some more about the event in my closing post.

Cheers

Tim…