Tag: aced

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…

OUG Ireland 2017 : Day 2

I got up a little after 08:30, which was a bit of a surprise, and headed down for breakfast, where a met a bunch of other speakers.

By the time I got showered, changed and checked out of the hotel I had missed the first session of the day (sorry). The first session I went to was the wife presenting “PaaS4SaaS”. I know what you are thinking, and yes I could do this presentation as I’ve seen it so many times. 🙂

Next up was Francesco Tisiot with “What a Successful OBIEE 12c Upgrade Project Looks Like – Customer Case Study (Liberty Global)”. As mentioned before, I don’t work with OBIEE, but some people I work with do now, so I like to keep my ear to the ground. It is also looking like I will be looking after some of their infrastructure, so this session was really useful to me, just because of the additional context it gave me.

After Francesco’s session there was a vendor awareness session, lunch, chatting (networking), then it was back to the sessions.

Next up was Roel Hartman with “The Quest for the Little Gems in APEX 5.1”. Having introduced the headline features of APEX 5.1, he switched to speaking about some of the less well publicized cool features. Things like font APEX, button builder, live template options, improved dynamic actions, new PL/SQL APIs, theme styles and more. Cool!

I missed the next session as I was logged in to work, trying to catch up on some stuff. By the time I finished that I was a little late for Alex Nuijten presenting “Structuring an APEX Application”. I’m not sure how happy most APEX developers would be with some of the stuff Alex was suggesting, but I think it’s perfect, probably because we both came to APEX after spending years as PL/SQL developers. Listening to some of his structural approach reminded me of this. 🙂

The final session was “Question Time with ACEs & Ask Tom’s Chris Saxon and Maria Colgan”. The actual list of panelists was Chris Saxon, Martin Widlake, Joze Senegacnik, Neil Chandler, Alex Nuijten, Oren Nakdimon and Maria Colgan. I should not be allowed in panel sessions, whether I am on the panel or not. I have no off switch. It was a really funny session. Don’t mess with Maria! 🙂

And that was it for the OUG Ireland 2017… I’ll write a wrap-up post with all the usual thank you messages when I get home, but for today I would just like to say thank you to everyone for a great time!

After the last session I hung around in the hotel bar for a while having a chat with some of the folks, then it was time to head home, but that’s another blog post… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : Day 1

I arrived at the Gresham Hotel, registered and went straight down to the first session of the day…

First up was Maria Colgan presenting, “What to Expect from Oracle Database 12c”, a quick romp through the cool features in Oracle 12c (12.1 and 12.2). The room was full so I had to listen form the corridor, with my head occasionally popping round the door to see the screen. Maria’s sessions are always great value, so definitely get to her if you can.

Next up was Marcin Przepiorowski with “Direct NFS for DBAs”. I’ve used this for some time, but only because Kevin Closson made me. 🙂 Marcin worked through some of the pros and cons and gave a bunch of numbers and graphs to prove is points. Graphs mean science! 🙂

I then moved on to Christian Berg with “Doing Oracle Analytics this way? STOP IT!”. We are transitioning to Oracle BI for the on-prem warehouse associated with our Oracle Cloud Apps stuff. I’m not part of the project and I don’t understand any of this stuff, but I just want to understand some of the vocabulary. I’m definitely understanding some more of the words now. 🙂

Next up was Martin Klier with “42 facts for Grid Infrastructure, ASM and RAC”. This was a quick-fire introduction to RAC and ASM. I’ve used both for some years, but I still find it really cool to see a summary like this, from someone who can actually do it for real.

Then it was me with back-to-back sessions. I brought my underwear, but forgot my pointer, so I had to borrow one from the mighty Maria Colgan. Thanks Maria! My first session was “Put your feet up and have a REST. Take a Tour of JSON Support in the Oracle Database”. The second was “It’s Raining Data! Oracle Databases in the Cloud”. Both sessions got a good crowd and I really enjoyed them. Judging by the reactions on Twitter some of the audience appreciated them too. 🙂

After my sessions I went to Gerald Venzl with “Supercharge Your Code to Get Optimal Database Performance”. He had the word Java on the title slide, but by his own admission it applied equally well to any programming language that interacts with a database. He discussed a number of things like the impact of commits, set processing, array processing and bind variables etc. For some of the points he did live demos to show the impact of getting it wrong. It’s exactly what you need every developer to hear before they are allowed to develop against a relational database. I think Gerald has spotted a gap in the market and is positioning himself as “The New Tom Kyte”, so from now on he will be known as Gerald Kyte… 🙂

Kamil Stawiarski with “Back to the basics: TABLESPACES… but a little bit low level style”. In this session he spoke about how different operations affect the contents of the datafiles on disk. Not the data you can query from SQL, but actually what is written (or not) to disk. He demoed it, by performing the operations in SQL and displaying the contents of the datafiles using a little C++ utility. It’s important for people to understand this stuff from a space-manangement perspective, but also from a security perspective. Just because you’ve deleted the row, it doesn’t mean you can’t read it from the datafile (assuming you are not using TDE) etc. 🙂

After the last session we got together for drinks. The queue was pretty big, so I went across the road and checked into my hotel, then came back and got a pint of Guinness. We headed off to the ACE Dinner at Rustic Stone, which was quite fancy. From there we moved across to a local bar and I was “forced” to have another Guinness. Then it was back to the hotel, where Christian “forced” us to eat rather expensive chocolate. I ended getting to bed really late. It was a really fun day at the conference and the evening. 🙂

Let’s see what tomorrow brings… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : The Journey Begins

There is something about early starts that get me so nervous I can’t sleep properly. As a result I was awake before my 05:00 alarm, which gave me plenty of time to get ready. That was good because I hadn’t packed up laptop bag, which was also acting as my overnight bag. 🙂

The taxi ride to the airport was pretty standard, but I did have a conversation about Roza Bal in Kashmir.

I only had hand luggage, so I didn’t have to wait for the bag drop and security was mercifully quick. They did an explosives test on my phone, but ignored my laptop, cameras and huge power bank. Go figure…

Boarding happened on time and there was a gap in our row, so I was able to get the laptop out, which is always a bonus. The flight took about 40 minutes and was generally uneventful.

The journey from Dublin Airport to the conference venue was pretty simple. The AirLink Express takes you straight to the Gresham Hotel, so no drama there.

It is easier and cheaper for me to get to the OUG Ireland events than it is to get to London events. 🙂

I arrived, registered and went straight to the first session, but that’s another blog post! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG Tech16 : Wednesday

Similar to last year, I had a presentation on a day I wasn’t attending, so I used my “lunch break” to drive in, present and drive back to work. I did get to see a bunch of people while I was waiting for my session to start, including my dad and wife. 🙂

My session was called “Put your feet up and have a REST. Take a tour of JSON support in the Oracle database.” It was basically a romp through the JSON support provided by ORDS, APEX and Oracle Database 12c (12.1 and 12.2). More importantly, it gave me an opportunity to stand on my soapbox and preach my “how to stay relevant” message.

As a DBA and PL/SQL developer I’m a firm believer in the Thick Database Model, but we are no longer in a position to dictate terms. What we should be trying to do is make the stuff we develop, as well as stuff we have already built over the last 20+ years, as accessible as possible. You can’t achieve that by forcing people to use an Oracle client and telling them to call a packaged procedure. What you can do though is present them with a web service that makes it easy for them to use your code.

I’ve been pushing this message for years with XML web services and SOAP web services from the database. Nowadays the basic message is still the same, but the tools are a little different, and of course XML has been replaced by JSON.

So the question is, do you want to be legacy or play with the “cool kids”? 🙂

Thanks to everyone who came to my session and those that spoke to me during Sunday, Monday and today. Thanks to the folks at UKOUG for inviting me to come and play. As always, big thanks go out to the Oracle ACE Program for letting me continue to fly the flag in my cloud free skies. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…