Tag: oow

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 : Day Minus 2

Day 2 of the ACE Director briefing went pretty much to plan. My recent adventures in WebLogic meant I had to pay special attention to a few areas I would normally let wash over me. 🙂 I also learned a few things about the WebLogic roadmap that made me kick myself for some of the recent decisions I had made. I guess that’s what happens when you get forced into a position of doing a role you have no background in. I confess I’m a WebLogic noob! 🙂

Thanks for Victoria and Lillian for organising the ACED briefing again. It’s good to get face time with the movers and shakers in the Oracle tech world…

At the end of the day we were taken from the Sofitel in Redwood Shores across to the Hilton in San Francisco. That’s my bas for the next few days. Sleep still alludes me…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 : Day Minus 3 (continued)

Continuing from my previous post, the Oracle ACE Director Meeting went well. There seems little point in giving you a list of things I can’t tell you about, so I think I will just say I like Eddie Awad‘s summary of the day in tweets here.

I think it is safe for me to say there will be some interesting things going on this week for a variety of reasons. When you are following the blog posts and tweets, keep in mind the following three things are legally *very* different:

  • Talking about future tech under a safe harbor disclaimer. This basically means Oracle promise nothing and all the stuff they say may not come to pass in future products. There is absolutely *no* legal requirement for them to deliver.
  • Making an official announcement of a new product. This has some legal ramifications. These types of announcements have to be followed by real products within a certain time frame.
  • Releasing the product. This is the bit I care about, because it means I can get my hands on it. 🙂

Some of the things we’ve been told seem very… odd. It’s difficult to say more without digging a hole for myself, but I suggest you listen carefully over the coming week and make sure you place what you hear in the correct one of those three categories…

Regardless of the *oddness* of some of the information, it was a cool day. Wim Coekaerts is always a highlight for me. I just like to listen to the guy talk about tech. He makes things sound so simple and obvious. Very cool.

Cheers

Tim…

OOW11: Wednesday…

Wednesday: This was actually my last proper day at Open World. I fly home Thursday morning, effectively missing the last day of the conference. It’s a shame, but it’s the way things worked out and I’m totally burnt out now. 🙂

Wednesday was definitely “the day after the night before”. I was a little bit under the weather the previous day, so I didn’t feel great on Wednesday morning. Once I got out of the hotel and moving things got a little better. Bagels with cream-cheese in the OCP Lounge helped also. I went to see Cary Millsap speaking about instrumentation, a subject close to my heart. Everyone knows Cary is a great presenter, so I will not big him up any more or his head will pop. 🙂 After that I hung around the RAC Attack in the OTN Lounge, then it was the big keynote. @brost sent Gwen Shapira and I up to the Hilton to watch a stream of the keynote. They didn’t have it there so we had to walk back to Moscone North and sit on the floor to watch it.

Keynote: The keynote was more-or-less what I expected from the ACE Director briefing. There were a few inconsistencies from what we were told, but nothing to write home about. It was all engineered-cloud-exa-grid, with a bit of “everyone else is rubbish” thrown in for good measure. Larry was on good form, but the “live”-ish demo went on a bit too long and I lost interest.

Steve Jobs: I was sorry to hear about the death of Steve Jobs. It’s always sad when people die young. I wish the press would stop making him out to be some sort of Messiah or Saint. He was just a very clever man. Let’s not turn his death into a farce.

Blogger’s Party: After that is was off to the Blogger’s Party, sponsored by Pythian. As with previous years, there were prizes for a number of things, including an iPod Touch for the person who got the most signatures on a Pythian bandana. I made a conscious decision to go for it this year and managed to get a signature from everyone at the event. When it came to the judging I had won, but then felt a little guilty because everybody else hadn’t taken it quite so seriously as me, so I gave the prize to the lady (DBA Kevlar) who came in second place. The sweet smell of victory was easily more important than the prize. 🙂 Thanks to Pythian for another great event.

Once the Blogger’s Party was starting to wind down, most people moved on to the Appreciation Event. I was not really feeling up for it, so I gave my wristband away. I would have only stayed an hour or so, which would have been a bit of a waste. I hope the person who got my wristband ate loads, drank loads and enjoyed Tom Petty and Sting. 🙂 Instead, I went for some food with Chris Muir and Bex Huff, then crashed in my room.

OOW11 Take Home Messages:

  • “Exa” means an engineered solution from Oracle that includes a bit of “magic sauce” software that you can’t run on anyone else’s hardware.
  • Appliance means an engineered solution with stock software running on it. You could build it yourself, but why would you want to?
  • Oracle now do NoSQL (based on the Berkeley DB Storage Engine) as a product. You can get this wrapped up with Hadoop on an engineered system called the Oracle Big Data Applicance. Not sure I will ever touch one of those, but it sounds kinda cool.
  • If BI is your thing, Oracle now provide an Exalytics product that has loads of memory allowing you to do much of your BI workload directly from memory. Once again, sounds cool, but not sure I’ll ever get to touch one.
  • There’s a new version of Grid Control called Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. I guess we now know the next version of the database will be called 12c. 🙂
  • The movement in the Linux and VM space has got Oracle to the point where they can finally acknowledge that cloud exists and they can build one for themselves. See cloud.oracle.com. If Oracle do this well it could be great for them. If they stuff it up there will be plenty of vendors waiting in the wings to point the finger.
  • Fusion Apps actually exists! Nuff said!
  • Lots of people know about my website, but very few people have got a clue about who I am. That’s the way it should be I guess. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OOW11: Monday and Tuesday…

Monday: I went to some presentations, hung around in the OTN lounge and ate at every possible opportunity. Tanel Poder‘s presentation on “Large-Scale Consolidation onto Oracle Exadata: Planning, Execution, and Validation” was pretty cool.

In the evening I planned to meet a former colleague at the OTN party. I decided they best way to find him was to visit every food station at the party, which of course meant sampling the goods. Unfortunately I spent too much time eating and not enough time looking for him. Sorry Ian! The cool thing about Open World is you can enter a giant tent full of thousands of people and pretty much guarantee you will bump into loads of people you know. 🙂

Tuesday: I spent most of Tuesday helping out at RAC Attack in the OTN Lounge. I did manage to get to see Greg Rahn‘s presentation called “Real-World Performance: How Oracle Does It”, which focussed on Real-Time SQL Monitoring. Greg’s presentation style is really easy to listen to and you know this isn’t just theoretical knowledge. He’s in the trenches doing this stuff as part of the Real-World Performance Group.

As the afternoon progressed I felt a little tired, so I went back to the hotel, puked and fell asleep. I think this was more to do with being over-tired than anything else. That meant I missed some of the later sessions and didn’t hook up with anyone in the evening.

This morning I feel a little ropey, but I’m going to head on down to RAC Attack again and see if I can make myself useful. Tonight is the appreciation event, but I’m not sure if I will be able to “appreciate it” unless I get a major energy injection at some point today. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OOW11: Saturday and Sunday…

Saturday: This was my day off before OOW11 started. I spent the morning following Chris Muir round toy shops, trying to find something cool to take home for his kids. Then we went and registered for the conference. After that it was back to the hotel to chill out a bit before the OakTable Network party in the evening.

I have to admit to feeling a little daunted about the OakTable Network party. I wasn’t able to go last year because it clashed with the Oracle ACE party, so this was my first time. I’ve met many of the members before, but standing in Graham Wood’s house surrounded by a bunch of people with brains the size of planets tends to make a grunt DBA/developer like me feel a little paranoid. Luckily, everyone is really low temperature, so I quickly felt at home. Graham and Joan certainly know how to throw a party. Vast quantities of food and drinks along with great conversation. I’m already looking forward to the next one, but I must eat less next time. 🙂

Sunday: I started the day of with Marcelle Kratochvil‘s session about unstructured data and multimedia. If you know Marcelle, you’ll know that she is passionate (a massive understatement) about multimedia and is now starting up a multimedia and unstructured data user group called OMMUDS. It’s early days at the moment, but I hope things go well because it is a fascinating subject and one that will do nothing but grow in importance in the coming years.

After that I went to see Scott Spendolini do a brief history of APEX, which is a pretty cool intro session for the APEX symposium. I was planning to watch some more of the APEX symposium, but I got pleasantly side-tracked and ended up going to get some food with Frits Hoogland. That developed into a couple of hours of geeking-out about Exadata. I know very little about Exadata, but Frits knows loads, so I guess I got a lot more out of it than him. 🙂 During that time he showed me some of the stuff he’s presenting at UKOUG this year. If you have the opportunity you should definitely go to his sessions. He has some really neat stuff to show you.

In the evening it was the ACE party. Once again, a cracking event, but once again I ate far too much. Victoria also forced me into taking a doggy-bag home with me, which I really didn’t need, but emptied anyway. 🙂 I spent a lot of time talking with Oded Raz and Liron Amitzi. With a bit of luck I might get to present in Israel in the future. Just as it was closing time I bumped into Steven Feuerstein and we had a little chat. Don’t forget to try my questions on the PL/SQL Challenge in October. 🙂

I’ve continued to get to the gym a couple of times each day, but considering the amount of food I’ve eaten, I’m not sure it will do me much good. This morning both Lillian and Victoria were at the gym, but there was no sign of Justin. Come one dude, you are letting the side ACE Program down. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OOW11: Oracle ACE Director Briefing Day 1 & 2…

If you’ve followed Twitter over the last couple of days you’ll have seen cryptic posts about the content of the ACED briefing. We all had to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to make sure we didn’t tweet or blog about the Oracle Games Console (OGC) before Larry announces it next week. Day 2 is done and we have a day off before OOW11 starts for everyone else. I’m already totally knackered. 🙂

It’s quite freaky to think the ACE program has got so many of us together in one spot and essentially provided a 2 day conference just for us. It’s even more amazing to think that they were able to get so many important people to take time out during the busiest time of their year to come and speak to us. I don’t think many people can pin down Thomas Kurian for an hour this close to Open World. It says a lot about the amount of work Justin, Victoria and Lillian have put in over the last few years, that they can get this level of buy-in for the program. Despite being a tired and grumpy old man, I am extremely grateful to be part of the program.

If you are coming to OOW, you are going to hear a lot of interesting announcements this week. If you can’t make it, you might want to keep an eye on the Oracle YouTube channel. It will have live content streaming, which should help keep you up to speed with what’s going on over here.

I mentioned in a previous post Jeremy Schneider invited me to help out at RAC Attack at OOW 2011. I’ll be doing a couple of shifts on Tuesday. Come along and have go. It should be fun.

I’ve managed to drag myself into the gym quite a bit. I did the evening of my arrival and morning and evening on both days since. Once the mayhem surrounding OOW kicks in I don’t know how easy it will be to keep it going. Time will tell.

Cheers

Tim…

Arrived at San Francisco (OOW & ACED)

There were no real dramas on the way from Birmingham to San Francisco, which makes a change for me. 🙂

I got to San Francisco at 16:00 local time and told myself I would go to bed at 21:00 at the latest. I trotted off to the gym, got cleaned up and went down to the bar to say hello to some people. Fatal mistake. I did my normal trick of talking incessantly until about 01:00. Luckily I was not drinking pints of “jetlag” like others I could mention. 🙂

So at about 01:00 I was in bed. I woke up at about 04:15. 🙁 If nothing else it meant I got to catch up on all my emails and go to the gym again. I think there are going to be a few very tired people during the ACED meeting today. I apologise in advance if I fall asleep in your session.

As always, I’m a little daunted at the start of this week. Having 2 days of ACED meetings followed by the main 5 day conference is a lot more difficult than it sounds, especially when everyone knows enough to make you paranoid about your own abilities. Having said that, I know it’s going to be fun and I know I’ll be glad I came.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Already missing the people I know can’t make it this year. Excited about meeting up with everyone again.

PPS. Must remember to speak less and listen more.

PPPS. Must try remain calm this year, not act like a kid in a sweet shop. 🙂

Thursday OpenWorld Sessions…

Sessions:

  • Kevin Closson cancelled his session, which was a bummer, but life goes on.
  • Oracle Optimizer Roundtable: Some members of the optimizer team answered the audience questions.
  • Real-World Database Performance Roundtable: Members of this group answered questions from the audience on a variety of performance related subjects.

The roundtable sessions were pretty cool, but it feels a little like groundhog day sometimes. I think I could summarize much of the advice as follows:

  1. Design your database properly.
  2. Write good SQL. This is usually pretty easy if you have a good design.
  3. Use default settings and functionality, unless you hit an issue that forces you not to. Even then, don’t assume you can not use the defaults for other projects. Work on an exception basis, not a one-size-fits all approach.
  4. Newer versions of the database probably have features to eliminate or offset the problems seen in previous versions. If possible upgrade and make sure you understand the new features so you can apply them.

I don’t know about you, but this list has been true for as long as I’ve worked in Oracle. Unless you are working on systems requiring extreme performance or of extreme size, modern Oracle versions make life incredibly easy. It would be cool if people actually started taking the advice given by these guys every year…

Cheers

Tim…

Wednesday OpenWorld Sessions…

Wednesday was a slash and burn day for me. I woke up and decided I couldn’t cope with any more sessions so I ditched the lot. Some of the RAC ones looked really cool, but I just couldn’t drag myself out of the seat to go to them. Instead I went to the OTN lounge to chill out and chat to people. Lots of cool people, talking about technical and non-technical issues.

I ended up tagging along with some of the guys to a couple of discussion type unconference sessions, but generally it was a downtime day.

The “big” keynote kinda passed me by. There was nothing there that held much interest for me, either because I already knew about it, or just didn’t care. The Arnold thing was a little surreal, but celebrities will do anything for cash, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

In the evening I went to Treasure Island with some of the guys. I ticked a couple of boxes (Seen Aerosmith and Roger Daltry), then came home.

I feel a little guilty about being so apathetic about the day when others would give there right arm to be here, but OpenWorld started nearly a week ago for me, because of the ACE Directors meeting, so I was feeling really burnt out.

Cheers

Tim…

Queuing and Decoupling for Performance…

Some of the data warehousing and Exadata presentations have talked about queuing requests to improve performance. They have suggested that using Resource Manager to throttle the number of active requests results in better performance/throughput compared to letting multiple requests all run simultaneously. The Terabyte Hour session yesterday showed an example of this and sure enough, when they limited the heavy requests to batches of 3, the overall throughput of requests improved.

This kinda links to something I keep banging on about in my PL/SQL presentations, which is decoupling. Don’t do it, queue it…

In any system you have a variety of business functions that have differing importance and differing required turnaround time. It’s good if you can identify this up front so you can consider decoupling some business functions. That way, functions that MUST happen instantly are fired on the spot, while those that can accommodate some lag time are queued for later processing. The acceptable lag for each of these business functions may vary.

Why do I care? Two reasons really:

  • Why hog resources processing low priority tasks when they could be used for high priority tasks? You don’t run your backups and stats collection during peak hours. Why would you waste cycles on low priority business functions when the user experience is poor due to lack of resources.
  • Decoupling allows you to take small transactions and batch them up, allowing you to take advantage of performance features available in both SQL and PL/SQL.

Queuing and decoupling are by no means new concepts, but they seem to have been lost in the mix. It’s interesting to see them being brought back onto the agenda, even with the sort of horsepower provided by Exadata.

Cheers

Tim…