OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : GUOB, Brazil – Day 1

I woke up pretty early again, spent a bit of time working, then headed down to meet the wife at breakfast. I was gabbing away, when she mentioned it was time to register. I had a mad dash to get back to the room, shower and head down to the GUOB event. Thankfully, I am stopping in the conference hotel.

This was a three track event, so I tried to get to sessions that I hadn’t seen at other events.

  • The event opened up with Pablo Ciccarello discussing OTN and the ACE program.
  • My first session for the day was “Pluggable Databases : What they will break and why you should use them anyway!” talk. I was introduced by Alex Zaballa, Brazil’s latest Oracle ACE Director. Well done mate! I was incredibly nervous for this talk. I think it was because of the rushing around before the session. Once I got going I calmed down a lot. I think the session went well. People were a bit shy about questions during the session, but people came up to me after the session to say hello and ask questions without being in front of the audience. The questions you get are the best bit of doing these conferences. In answering questions, you learn a lot yourself.
  • After speaking to a few people I headed (a little late) into Kerry Osborne‘s session on “Controlling Execution Plans (without touching the code)” Part 1. The room was too full for me to get into this session in Argentina.
  • After lunch I headed on to see Dana Singleterry speaking about “Development Platform in the Cloud – Why, What and When”.
  • Next up it was me with my “It’s raining data! Oracle Databases in the Cloud” session. I really like doing this talk. It’s not a heavy technical session, but I like to think it brings a bit of sanity to the Database on the Cloud discussion.
  • After me came Alex Gorbachev speaking about “Benchmarking Oracle I/O Performance with ORION”.
  • After a short break, it was on to Kerry Osborne‘s session on “Controlling Execution Plans (without touching the code)” Part 2.
  • Next up was Alex Gorbachev speaking about “Big Data and Hadoop for Oracle Database Professionals”.

The last session was in Portuguese, so I ducked out and spoke to a few of the attendees instead.

After saying our goodbyes to some of the folks, we headed out to a Brazilian barbecue. Obviously, it was a meat-fest, but it was a good place to eat as a vegetarian too. Unfortunately, I drank one and a half drinks that were designed to injure humans. 🙂

It was a long, but fun day. Big thanks to the organisers and attendees at the GUOB event. I hope to see you again! Thanks also to the ACE Program for getting me here!

I’ve got a ridiculously early start for Chile tomorrow! 🙂 Goodbye Sau Paulo!

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : GUOB, Brazil – Day -1

As I mentioned in the previous post, I got to bed at the hotel in Sau Paulo at about 03:00. I woke up at about 07:00 and did some work for a couple of hours before hitting breakfast with the wife. At breakfast we were joined by Francisco and his son. 🙂

After breakfast, Debra and I went on a sight seeing trip. I was in Sau Paulo about 2 years ago, but I saw nothing of the city as it was such a short visit. I did have a few photos from the event in 2013, as well as a couple people sent to me (here).

Trying to do Sau Paulo in 4 hours pretty much means sitting in the car a lot. 🙂 Even during the day the traffic is heavy. Added to that, the temperature was in the low 30’s. With the lack of sleep and the temperature combined, we were struggling. Added to that, our driver started to feel ill. I did get some photos, which you can see here. Once again, wide angle is on, so don’t assume everything in Sau Paulo is bowed. 🙂

Despite our struggles, it was really nice to finally see something of the city!

When we got back from sightseeing, we popped across the road to get some food and bumped into Francisco, his son and Alex. 🙂

Then it was back to the hotel, with a plan to get some sleep. Instead, I started to catch up on blog posts, as well as spending £54 (or $84 USD) on washing. 🙁 It’s a sad day when you have to pay someone to do your washing! At least this way I should have enough clothes to complete the tour. 🙂

I’ll pretty soon be off to bed, ready for the GUOB conference tomorrow. Happy days!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m going to us the English spelling (Brazil), rather than the Portuguese version, as it’s the only way I have a chance of staying consistent. No offence meant by spelling the name of your country “wrong”. 🙂