Tag: OOW19

Oracle OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : It’s a Wrap!

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 are over, and here are a few thoughts…

The tech side of things was based almost exclusively at Moscone South this year. No walking around to different buildings and hotels. In part that was due to the Moscone rebuild, making it a much larger venue now, but I suspect the numbers were down a lot on previous years. It’s hard to know as wider corridors mean you are less packed in, so maybe it was an optical illusion…

The conference felt more like a tech event this year, and less like a marketing event. OpenWorld and Code One were a lot more joined up, and I would suggest this year it was actually a single conference. I’m sure the split branding will remain for political reasons, but it would make life a lot easier if it were one event with one session catalog.

The new branding for Oracle was interesting. I said in a previous post I liked it. Much softer than the old red stuff. Let’s see how people react to it, and let’s see if the company actually changes to be more customer focused. I wrote a post called Oracle: Tech Company or Service Company? a few years ago. Maybe Oracle are now catching up? We’ll see.

The VMware announcement was interesting. I expressed my opinion on this here. I just hope this isn’t short-lived and I hope sense prevails. Oracle need to build bridges now. It’s still possible. Remember when everybody hated Microsoft?

Obviously Oracle continued to push Cloud and the Autonomous brand, including the new Autonomous Linux and Autonomous JSON. If you’ve used SODA, you know what’s going on with Autonomous JSON. From my perspective, keep the autonomous services coming. The more automated the mundane stuff becomes, the better!

The continued involvement in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is interesting. The work on OLCNE I mentioned in a previous post is looking very useful.

For many database people, the big news items were:

  • 3 PDBs in 19c and desupport of non-CDB in 20c (discussed here)
  • Free Tier : At last, something more than the 30 second free trial. I hope people make use of this and give plenty of feedback to Oracle!

Overall, it was a cool, fun, weird, stressful, tiring week. Part of me thinks this might be my last OpenWorld, but I said that after my first one, and I’ve now been to 14…

The posts I put out during the event were as follows.

Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and the Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassadors Program for allowing me to come and play. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : The Journey Home

I got up at a reasonable time and got caught up with blog posts, then it was time to check out and get the BART to the airport. Bag drop was empty, because the rest of the planet was waiting at security. After what felt like an eternity I was through security and sat down and waited for my plane…

We boarded the flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam on time and didn’t have a significant wait for the departure slot, so the captain said we would arrive early. No luck with a spare seat on this flight. The guy next to me was about my size, but wasn’t making an effort to stay in his space. There was some serious man-spreading going on. I ended up spending most of the flight leaning into the aisle and pulling my arm across my body, so my left elbow feels knackered now. Doing that for 11 hours is not fun. I managed to watch the following films.

  • The Shape of Water – I love this film. I’ve seen it a load of times.
  • Rocketman – I wasn’t feeling this at the start. I’m not big on musicals, and I didn’t like the stuff when he was a kid. Once Taron Egerton started playing him it was cool. I kind-of forgot he wasn’t Elton John. If you can get past the start, it’s worth a go!
  • The Accountant – I liked it. Ben Affleck doing deadpan and expressionless is the perfect role for him.
  • John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum – I got up to the final sequence, so I’m not sure how it ends. Pretty much the same as the previous films, which I liked. Just crazy fight scenes with loads of guns.

There was one bit of the flight that was odd. The in-flight entertainment died, then we hit some turbulence. Queue me deciding it was linked and we were all going to die… Pretty soon the turbulence stopped, then after about 10 minutes the screens rebooted…

I had quite a long wait at Schiphol. About 3 hours. That was pretty dull, but what are you going to do?

The flight from Amsterdam to Birmingham was delayed by a few minutes, then the was the issue of people trying to board with 15 pieces of hand luggage and a donkey. I had my bag on my feet. Luckily it was only an hour flight.

II was originally planning to get the train home, but I was so tired I got a taxi. The driver was a nice guy and we had a chat about his kids and future plans, which is a lot nicer than listening to me drone on…

I’m now home and started doing the washing…

I’ll do a wrap-up post tomorrow, with some thoughts about the event…

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : Wednesday

I started Wednesday by trying to play catch-up with some of the keynotes. I don’t like going to them, but it’s important to hear what was said, because people often put their own spin on what was actually said to make it fit with their narrative.

From there I headed down to the conference to see Michael Hüttermann with “DevOps: State of the Union”. Michael managed to pull off a session where we did all the talking. How does that work? 🙂 It was really good fun, and it was interesting to hear other people’s experiences, and how they define DevOps.

Next up was Simon Coter with “Practical DevOps with Linux, Virtualization, and Oracle Application Express. At the start of the session Simon started a Vagrant build using the “vagrant up” command, then continued with the session, describing how tools such as VirtualBox and Vagrant can help you build consistent environments. He then described this specific build and showed us the finished product. I think the session went really well, and if you follow the blog you know I’m a VirtualBox+Vagrant fan. The other thing worth mentioning was he showed how a VirtualBox VM can be exported to OCI, and maybe in future an OCI VM imported back into VirtualBox. The first of those two operations means you could use VirtualBox and Vagrant as your choice for custom infrastructure builds for the cloud. Interesting…

Next up was “Embracing Constant Technical Innovation in Our Daily Life”, which was a panel session made up of Gustavo Gonzalez, Sven Bernhardt, Debra Lilley, Francisco Munoz Alvarez and Me. We didn’t have a big crowd, but we did get some crowd participation. I find panels fun, and some of the practical suggestions included.

  • Write stuff, and preferably put it out on the internet. Thinking someone might read it makes you up your game, and something like blogging can help some people with motivation to try out new stuff. (Writing Tips)
  • Do presentations, because of the pressure of a deadline often makes you focus, and there is also a desire to present something new. Remember, presenting is not just about conferences. Get a group of people in your office and present stuff to the group. It’s a good skill to develop, improves your confidence and makes you more visible in the company and of course improves knowledge transfer! (Public Speaking Tips)
  • When you get good at one thing, it makes it easier to learn new things. You understand the effort it takes and you know you have to look below the surface. (Learning New Things)
  • Get involved with the community. A wise person learns by other people’s mistakes. Go to local meetups for subjects outside your main skill set, to give you a different perspective. It might reinforce your beliefs or challenge them.

After that it was off to see “Understanding the Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment (OLCNE)” with Wiekus Beukes, Tom Cocozzello and Thomas Tanaka. Oracle have built a tool that allows you to install, manage and upgrade selected Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects. That tool is called OLCNE. Why is this important? Because there are loads of CNCF projects, with a load of dependencies, so trying to install, and more importantly upgrade them, can be a nightmare. This tool will make that easier, as it will manage dependencies, and keep track of which versions of project X are certified with which versions of project Y. All these versions will be tested by Oracle to make sure things just work. The idea being you want Kubernetes + CRI-O + Prometheus + Istio? Sorted. For someone like me, who is a complete noob at most of this, that is a really interesting proposition. The project will be open sourced and on GitHub. Once it gets enough non-Oracle people contributing to the project, they hope to submit it to CNCF. Maybe we are seeing the start of how to manage CNCF projects in the future?? 🙂

After that I went to see Colm Divilly speaking about “Database Management REST APIs”. The management APIs were introduced a couple of versions ago, but with each release they are adding more stuff. We now have integration with the DBCA for instance and PDB lifecycle management, as well as APIs to control features like Data Pump and get performance monitoring information. I really need to spend some time paying with these, because it’s a great way to automate operations and make them available to other people. I like to think of it as breaking down the walls of the silo by presenting what you do as a service.

Once that session was over I spent a few minutes talking to the ORDS and SQL Dev folks, then it was back to my hotel to crash. I ducked out of the concert (the ticket went to a good home) and other invites because I am old and my bed was calling me.

That was my last day at OpenWorld. I leave Thursday morning US time and will be back home at some point on Friday UK time. I’ll no doubt do a post about the journey home and a wrap-up post once I get back.

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : Monday (Puppies and Free Tier)

I was tempted to call this “Day 1”, because it’s day 1 of the main conference, but I’ve already had two very full days with very little sleep.

The day started with a walk down to Moscone, where I got my first surprise.

This is my 14th visit to OpenWorld and I’ve never seen this road open during the conference. I’m sure this made the locals a lot happier, as there were less traffic issues, but it did restrict the flow of people somewhat. Having said that, the finished Moscone rebuild means things are a lot more centralised this year, so that wasn’t such a big deal for me.

I started off with a walk around the demo grounds, where I saw some familiar folks. Thank you Dbvisit for something familiar in sea of changes around the conference. 🙂

I also saw Connor MacDonald drawing a crowd at one of the “theatres” in the demo grounds. You can barely see the people sitting, because of the people standing around…

I stalked bumped into Wim Coekaerts in the demo grounds and had a fanboy moment chat with him about the move from Xen to KVM that has been happening. I’ll no doubt be at some of the Oracle Linux stuff over the remainder of the conference.

I chatted to John Beresniewicz for a while, which is always a pleasure. I bumped into Richard Foote, and we went to get some food and check out where our rooms were for presentations during the week. With the Moscone rebuild, it’s worth finding your feet early. Eventually I had to leave him, as he was constantly mobbed by people mistaking him for David Bowie. We also saw this…

Gone are the days of scantily clad “promo girls”. Now you get people to your stand by having a pen full of puppies. Everyone standing around thinking, “Tech or puppies? Food or puppies? Autonomous something or puppies?” I guess you know what won… 🙂 This was only one section of the pen. There were a lot of them, and I believe they were already adopted with good homes to go to, so I’ll forgive this exploitation. 🙂 I assume based on the results, next year’s OpenWorld and Code One event will morph into a dog show. You gotta do what pulls in the punters. 🙂

I booked in for a shift at the Groundbreakers Hub. I was meant to do 14:30 to 17:00, but I ended up starting early and finishing late, so most of my afternoon was playing at being a bouncer for the photographers doing head-shots for the speakers and members of the assorted community projects at the event. Really it was just an excuse to stand and chat to people. 🙂

As a result of my shift, I missed the keynote, so I’ll have to catch the recording of that, but I already knew most of the announcements, as would anyone paying attention to the exhibits around the conference. These were on the monitors before the announcements.

Now I wonder what one of the announcements was??? 🙂

Once my shift was over, I headed back to the hotel, then met up with some folks for dinner. I was once again the walking dead by that time, so I just slurred my way through the conversation. It was a good evening though! 🙂

Tomorrow (today by the time I post this) is my first presentation…

Cheers

Tim…

OpenWorld and Code One 2019 : Groundbreakers Unconference

This year the Groundbreakers Briefing was completely different. Rather than have some formal presentations, the Groundbreaker Ambassadors an a bunch of Oracle staff all took part in an unconference. People suggested topics and we went into groups to discuss the topics that interested us. Obviously there was a lot of overlap in interests/concerns.

The first one I took part in was discussing a number of areas relating to “Is the RDBMS dead?” and this also included platforms and delivery mechanisms, such as containers. There were people from both sides of the camp, meaning those that favour the RDBMS and those that don’t. From my perspective I say use the correct tool for the job. In some cases that is a RDBMS. In some cases not. When we become too partisan, it’s easy to lose perspective. Of course, it’s also hard to be objective if you’ve spent most of your working life in one camp or the other. I think we have a lot to learn from each other, and the “next big thing” will only happen if we keep an open mind.

The next one I went to related to diversity in the workplace, which is something I have an interest in. The person that suggested this session was basically asking the question, “How do I know if I’m part of the problem?” As always with these types of discussions, it was interesting to hear different takes on the subject. I’m not going to talk specifics, as I don’t think it’s my place to report on some of the things that were said, but it seems like awareness is the first step in this process. Rather than move on to the next session, I continued this discussion with some of the folks. The great thing about an unconference is the rules are, there are no rules (sort-of). 🙂

From there we went off to the San Francisco Science Museum for a couple of hours. I’m a town/city person, but I like looking at nature. We spent some time looking at fish, butterflies, snakes and frogs etc. Pretty cool. Let’s hope this isn’t the only way to see these in future!

From there we had to shoot across to the Oracle ACE dinner. Chatting with people is what I really enjoy at conferences, so being able to meet up with everyone and have a chin-wag is great. Not surprisingly I had far too much food! 🙂

It was a long and busy day, and the conference hadn’t even started yet!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. There is an event during the evenings called the Groundbreakers Unconference, which is open to all the people at the conference. That’s not what I’m talking about here. 🙂

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