Tag: nloug

The trip home from nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 started pretty early, so true to form I didn’t sleep properly, for fear of sleeping through my alarm. At about 04:00 I was in the bath watching YouTube videos. 🙁

A couple of hours later I was at the station in Amersfoort waiting for the train to the airport where I was joined by Sabine Heimsath. Pretty soon we were on the train, where I made use of the wifi, as witnessed by Sabine (see her photo). 🙂 It was about 40 minutes to the airport, which was just about enough time to get out a blog post about the previous day.

Once at the airport I had a total brain freeze looking at the departure boards, so Sabine gave me a reboot and pointed me in the right direction. We were leaving from different parts of the airport, so we said our goodbyes and I was off to security…

Security was really busy, with the queue for the passport scanners moving rather slowly. Luckily they opened the second half of the scanners, which made things move a bit faster… I made my way over to the boarding gate and parked until my flight…

Boarding time came and we were told the cabin crew were missing… They arrived and be boarded pretty quick, so I don’t think it delayed us drastically, even though I was personally having flashbacks to last week. I originally had a middle seat, but I was asked if I wanted to move to the empty exit row, and of course I said yes and got an aisle seat. The laptop came out as soon as we were in the air…

From the airport I decided to take the train into town as I wanted to pick something up. Unfortunately the shop didn’t have what I wanted, so I had to console myself with a giant burrito for breakfast. You win some, you lose some. 🙂 From the city centre is was a quick taxi ride home and the trip was complete.

What a difference a year makes. I was ill for the nlOUG Tech Experience 2017 event and just about made it through my sessions, then went back to bed. This year I was able to get involved in the whole conference and have fun.

Thanks very much to the folks in nlOUG for letting me come along to play. Thanks to the speakers and attendees that make this stuff possible. This was a self-funded event for me, but I’d still like to thank the Oracle ACE Program and the Oracle Developer Program for continuing to allow me to fly the flag.

Here are my posts related to this event.

• nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 : The Journey Begins
• nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 : Day 1
• nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 : Day 2
• nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 : The Journey Home (this post)

Cheers

Tim…

I had a rough start to day 2 of nlOUG Tech Experience 2018. The night before I was in bed and foolishly checked my email only to find some problems at work. I got out of bed, logged in and was checking out the impact of a storage fault. Some databases had been down and some app servers weren’t exactly happy. It was some time after midnight when things started to stabilise out. That meant the following morning I felt a little fuzzy…

Once I got to the conference the day started with a keynote about “Autonomous Data Management” by Penny Avril. Hopefully we will see Penny at UKOUG at the end of the year…

If you’ve followed the blog you will know I’m a fan of what Oracle is trying to achieve with this family of cloud services. To use my own words, it’s all about less time doing boring stuff, more time doing interesting stuff.

From there I went to see Ron Ekins talk about “DevOPS, Ansible and automation for the DBA”. Due to clashes I’ve managed to miss this session at each event where we’ve been together, although he did run through some of it with me in Ireland earlier in the year. Even though I was present during this session, I missed most of it as I was logged into work again. Sorry Ron. Someday I will actually see the full session. 🙂 Just in case you are curious, yes this was a train carriage.

The next session I went to was “All about linux memory usage by the Oracle database” by Frits Hoogland. If gaining knowledge is like peeling back the layers of an onion, Frits has got through a lot more layers than me. I was surprised at how little I knew about this subject before this session. Of course I will act all superior now like I always knew it, but seriously…

From there it was off to “Kicking the Tyres on Oracle Database 18c with Swingbench” by Dominic Giles. What’s not to love about Swingbench (and Dom)? I’ve been using SwingBench for years, long before I knew who Dom was. 🙂 Keep those releases coming Dom!

The last session of my day was my presentation called DBA Does Docker, which is about my journey so far with Docker. I’m a big fan, but I’ve not drunk the KoolAid… I think the session wet well, and all the demos worked. 🙂

After a quick closing ceremony, then some drinks and nibbles the conference was over.

A few of us went into town to get some food and then before I knew it the day was over.

I will do all the proper thank you messages in the closing post when I get home, but thanks everyone for a great conference. It’s been a tough year so far and this was the first conference where I felt things went OK for me. That’s not a criticism of the other events I’ve been to. It’s about something not clicking into position with me. I’m hoping this event has broken my run of bad luck…

Cheers

Tim…

Day 1 of nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 started with me missing the opening keynote to spend time talking with Frits Hoogland about all things Vagrant, Ansible and Docker…

The first session I went to was Penny Avril & Dominic Giles with “What’s New from Oracle Database Development”. This was a quick run through some of the key features that have been introduced in 12.2 and 18c, which sets the scene well for some of the other talks happening over the two days.

Next up was “Database Design Thoughts” by Toon Koppelaars. I think this type of session appeals on several levels. To a beginner it is full of solid facts about basic database design. To someone with more experience it’s more about hearing things you know, but from a different angle. I spoke with Toon about the session when it was over and I’m pretty sure I would not be able to present this type of session.

From there I went to see “SQL Model Clause: A Gentle Introduction” by Alex Nuijten. What I really need to do is go home and write an article about this now I vaguely know what it is all about. Unfortunately I think I will leave it a couple of weeks and be clueless again. Alex did a really good job of explaining it, so it is up to me to get on the case soon!

From there it was two back-to-back sessions by me. First up was, “Cool New Features for Developers in 18c and 12c”, which was a collection of things I think are cool that were added in 12.1, 12.2 and 18c. There were live demonstrations too, which went well. I ran out of time, but I felt happy with the presentation. I had fun!

My next session was “Make the RDBMS Relevant Again with RESTful Web Services and JSON”. It was a struggle to fit this into 45 minutes, but I hope I got the main message across without rushing too much. The live demos went smooth too.

After the last session there was food and drinks and random chatting, with the odd rant, which you expect at tech events. All in all a great end to a great first day. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. At last year’s event I was ill and spent most of my time in bed when I wasn’t presenting (similar to Riga this year). It was nice to actually participate properly in the conference this year!

The trip to nlOUG Tech Experience 2018 started at a pretty normal time. I left the house at 08:00, which was far too early really, but you never know about the traffic when you are in rush hour, so I thought it better to be safe than sorry. Rather than the normal 30 minutes, it took about an hour to get to the airport, but once there I breezed through security and had a full 2 hours before the flight, so out came the laptop.

The flight to Amsterdam was delayed by about 15 minutes due to the curse of Schiphol. Luckily I got moved to an exit row seat and had loads of space, so out came the laptop.

From Schiphol to Amersfoort was a train ride of about 50 minutes. The train had free wifi, so out came the laptop.

Last year my hotel was a bus ride away from the event, but this year I booked a hotel near to the station, so it was only a short walk then I was in my room, so out came the laptop.

Having a bit of space and wifi makes the day feel far less wasted. I was pretty productive in the end…

I spent the evening going through my talks and demos making sure everything was OK. As mentioned in a previous post I now have three sessions, so it takes quite a while to rehearse… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…