Tag: openworld

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Wednesday – Day 3

I started the day by meeting up with a bunch of people at the Dbvisit breakfast. This has become a regular event over the last few years. Followers of the blog know I like the Dbvisit folks and they tend to attract people I find fun and interesting. After food, loads of coffee and interesting conversation, it was time to head across to the conference.

I bumped into Liron and Zohar at the OTN lounge and walked over with them to watch Connor McDonald with “12 Things DBAs will love about in 12cR2”. We joined a big queue of people, which included Toon Koppelaars and Kim Berg Hansen, all waiting to get in…

Connor’s sessions are always great. It’s a pity he had to squeeze it into 45 minutes. The combination of his session and my chat with Chris Saxon yesterday have left me really looking forward to the 12cR2 on-premise release, regardless of when it gets released. 🙂

After grabbing some lunch, I headed across to watch Chris Saxon, Connor McDonald, Steven Feuerstein, Bryn Llewellyn and Michael Rosenblum in “Optimizing PL/SQL for Performance and Maintainability”. It was a panel session, I was there early and near the front, so I got picked to do microphone duties during the session. I was the person walking around passing the mic to people wanting to ask questions. 🙂

panel-session-oow16

From there it was back at the OTN lounge where I chatted to a bunch of people, whilst blocking the gangway, then I headed back to the hotel.

I showed my face briefly at the Bloggers Party and found a new home for my Appreciation Event wristband. I got to have a quick chat with Sten Vesterli about his thoughts on the future of ADF, MAF and JET. I also got to have a quick catch-up with Mike Dietrich, who I see eye-to-eye with on a bunch of subjects. 🙂

From there is was back to the hotel, where I spent the next few hours on the laptop dealing with some work, community and website issues that have been building up in my absence…

Tomorrow is the last day of OpenWorld and my last day in San Francisco!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Tuesday – Day 2

Day 2 started a little late for me. I was up early, but I logged in to work and had to do a few things. Once I had got through that I headed down to the conference…

On the way there I bumped into Ronald Bradford and we hit the exhibition hall together. We stopped by the SolarWinds stand and noticed a “Deploy Faster” sticker. Part of the promotion for the Girls Who Code Foundation. If you see one, take a selfie with it and tweet it using the #DevelopersRule hashtag. That will get them a $10 donation!

From there I moved across to the demo grounds and made a nuisance of myself with Jeff Smith, Kris Rice and David Peake at the SQL Developer, ORDS and APEX stands…

After that I headed off to watch Dad do his Real-World Performance Group session. Unfortunately the session was full and they wouldn’t let me in. I tried both the, “Don’t you know who I am?”, and, “I just want to see my Dad speak!”, lines, but neither worked… Instead I headed back down to the demo ground to annoy more people. 🙂

I watched the start of Larry’s keynote on a big screen outside, then went down to the keynote room itself to see the second half of it. I’ve not watched a keynote live for years…

I bumped into Liron Amitzi and we spent a little time brainstorming ideas for the British Columbia Oracle User Group (BCOUG). I’ll write a separate post about that…

I met up with Chris Saxon and we discussed 12cR2 PL/SQL and SQL features. He had already done a session on it, so he gave me a quick run through. From there I headed off to watch him and Connor in “Ask Tom Live with Chris Saxon and Connor McDonald”. It was a really fun session!

A quick chat with Y.V RaviKumar and Oren Nakdimon, then I headed back to the hotel and that was Day 2 over…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Monday – Day 1

I’ve been away from home for over a week and we’ve finally got to Day 1 of the conference… 🙂

After not feeling too great last night I skipped the bay swim. I headed down to the conference and my first stop was the AppsLab Internet of Things (IoT) Workshop. With some help from Mark Vilrokx, I have now joined the world of the cool and hip. During the workshop you get a little Arduino board that is wifi enabled. You connect a button and a speaker, then upload a program to the board. Once you’ve done all that you can press the button, it connects to the Oracle IoT Cloud Service and it plays a little tune. You can also control other people’s devices. Next stop, world domination…

iot

From there I moved on to the “Oracle Applications User Experience Cloud Exchange”, hosted by the UsableApps folks. They had a whole bunch of stands, each demonstrating a different facet of user experience (UX). For example:

  • Large multi-screen visualisations.
  • Desktop and mobile UX from the current Oracle Cloud Applications and future directions of these products.
  • Current and future versions of the extensibility framework.
  • Rapid Development Kits (RDKs) for ADF, Mobile and JET, allowing you to quickly develop PaaS applications that look and function the same as the SaaS applications.
  • Office of the future.
  • Customer success stories.
  • Some were just plain fun, like using a toy guitar to control a player in a virtual world, who could throw Pokeballs. What’s not to love? 🙂

For someone from my background this is a totally different world.

I especially enjoyed speaking to Basheer Khan about the work his company (Knex) has been doing extending Oracle SaaS using Oracle PaaS. In a world of proof of concepts (POCs), it’s great to see someone successfully delivering real products on top of Oracle Cloud Services. It’s also good to see all the messages from the UX team being put into practice by him and is company. If you get a chance to speak to him about it you really should.

The combination of the IoT and UX sessions put me in a super-positive mood. Happy days! 🙂

From there it was back to my day job, so I headed off to see Andrew Holdsworth speaking about “Real-World Performance Monitoring: Can You Believe the CPU Numbers?” Turns out you can’t believe the numbers! The Real-World Performance Group, which Andrew heads up, always deliver quality sessions, based on science and real-world experience, rather than the fluff you get from some. I try and get to their sessions every year for this reason. There was also another reunion with Dad, who has started on the Marmite and teabags I brought him. 🙂

After that I headed down to the exhibition hall to say hello to the Dbvisit gang. They’ve got a new version of Dbvisit Standby coming out soon, as well as a product called Dbvisit Replicate Connector that can stream data from Oracle to Kafka, amongst other things. I’m definintely going to kick the tyres on both of these once they are released!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : User Group Sunday

User Group Sunday started with the bridge run/walk. A group of us got a Ubers across to the visitors centre, then walked or ran across the bridge and back.

If I was really sad I would tell you it’s a great way to hatch Pokemon eggs and there are loads of Pokemon to catch along the bridge, but I’m not sad at all, so I don’t know this and I never did any of that… 🙂

bridge

On the way back I was getting out my camera to video something, slipped on a metal grate and ended up on my back. I didn’t get hurt in the fall, but it was kind-of embarrassing. I slipped about 3 more times on the journey back, but managed to stay on my feet.

I got back to the hotel, cleaned up, then it was down to the conference. The “EOUC Database ACES Share Their Favorite Database Things” session, was a 2 hour session with a large group of speakers, all doing 5 minutes on their chosen subject.

I like this lightening talk format. It means you get to touch on loads of subjects and give people lots of pointers to things to look out for. It also means the user group can get loads of speakers up on stage, rather than just 2 each year!

From there I was feeling a little wasted and walked back to the hotel with Martin Widlake, both of us doing a good impression of grumpy old men…

Once I was back at the hotel I edited the EOUC video, then my neck started to feel really stiff and I got a banging headache. By about 18:00 it became obvious I wasn’t going to make it to the Oracle ACE Dinner, so I decided I was just going to have an early night and try to sleep.

I’ve checked out some of the photos of the Oracle ACE Dinner online and it looked really cool. I’m gutted I never got to go, but I’m not sure people would appreciate me having a Machu Picchu moment there. 🙂

After a ridiculous amount of sleep I feel OK today, but my neck is still really stiff. I’m starting to think I might have tweaked it during the fall on the bridge. Let’s see how today goes.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle ACE Director Briefing – Day 2

ace-directorToday was Day 2 of the Oracle ACE Director Briefing.

As with yesterday’s post, we had a number of speakers coming in to talk about specific areas of the Oracle stack and Oracle Cloud. Once again, I’m not going to mention any details.

There were a few areas that were super-relevant to what’s going on with me at work, so it was good to make some more contacts in those areas.

The shear volume of stuff going on at Oracle at the moment is actually quite scary. I’m sitting in the sessions wondering how I’m going to do my job, learn all the new regular Oracle stuff and learn all the new Oracle Cloud stuff as well. It’s quite daunting…

Thanks to the folks at the Oracle ACE Program for making this event happen. This last two days has been like a full-on conference, complete with multiple tracks. Your efforts are greatly appreciated. Thanks to all the speakers too. I know we sometimes give you a hard time, but we do appreciate you taking the time to come and speak to us!

I’ve got tomorrow off, then the crazy world of Oracle OpenWorld 2016 starts!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle ACE Director Briefing – Day 1

ace-directorToday was Day 1 of the Oracle ACE Director Briefing.

After some food and some quick hello’s, we jumped straight into a session by Thomas Kurian, giving us a “State of the Union” type presentation, what’s coming in the next few days, weeks, years etc. This helps you focus on the things to look out for during the OOW conference, as well as get a feel for the main message of the event. I guess you all know what that will be. 🙂

After that we had a number of speakers coming in to talk about specific areas of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). I’m not going to mention the speakers or the subject matter as it might allow you to guess what some of the OOW announcements will be and I really don’t need that drama in my life. 🙂

As always, the questions from the audience were “probing” and the discussions that followed these questions were rather “passionate”. 🙂 I think one of the big things the ACE program can add to Oracle is honest feedback about what we as customers think about their products and their focus. In some cases it can be hard for Oracle to hear this, but it has to be done!

It was a good first day and I hope the speakers enjoyed it and didn’t feel we were being too hard on them. 🙂 As always, it’s great to meet up with the other ACEDs. There are more each year, but we are still quite a small group of people really.

Let’s see what day 2 brings!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I managed to deliver the teabags and Marmite to my dad!

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Newark to San Francisco

I woke up at about 05:00. After a quick check on work, I got my stuff together and headed down for the shuttle to the airport. The roads around Newark airport are terrible. Really bumpy with loads of holes. It felt like bad turbulence. 🙂

Bag drop and check-in at Newark was self service and it went OK. The security line was kind-of long, but I got lucky and was redirected to a shorter line. 🙂 Officially, Newark airport has free wifi for 30 minutes, but in reality it has no functional wifi which sucks! Ignoring the wifi issue, it’s not the worst airport I’ve been to…

The flight from Newark to San Francisco took about 5.5 hours, which wasn’t too bad. The problem was there was a 40 minute delay before we got going and about the same again waiting on the runway before we could actually get off the plane.

Doing a domestic flight makes the entrance into San Francisco so much easier. I had all the pain entering at Newark. 🙂 I got my bag and got the hotel shuttle to the Sofitel in Redwood Shores. As I got on the shuttle I met Lonneke Dikmans, Lucas Jellema and Luc Bors. 🙂

The Sofitel in Redwood Shores will be my home for the next few days.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Birmingham to New York

For this year’s Oracle OpenWorld I decided to spend some money and take a trip to New York before the OOW craziness begins.

There is a direct flight from Birmingham International to Newark Airport, so it’s a pretty simple journey and cuts the journey to San Francisco in half. I don’t normally take this route as it makes Newark my first point of entry into the USA, so I would have to pick up my bags and go through security again, which is a major pain. Since this time I was planning to stop at Newark anyway it wasn’t a problem. When I say it wasn’t a problem, I am carefully omitting the huge queues for immigration and the extremely rude staff…

Once I got my bags I took the Airtrack to the Newark Liberty International Airport Station, then took a train to Penn Station in New York. From there I could have taken the subway three stops to my hotel for about $2.50, but I hadn’t thought too far ahead so I took a cab for about $20 that took much longer because of the traffic. 🙂

The plan was to stop the next two nights in the Hilton Garden Inn, Central Park South, before transferring to the Hilton at Newark Airport the night before my flight to San Francisco.

All in all, the trip was fine. I’ll write about my time in New York in a separate post.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 : Come and Play!

In a few short weeks I’ll be jetting off to Oracle OpenWorld 2016. It’s pretty crazy to think this will be my 11th visit to OOW and San Francisco…

The rough itinerary for the trip will be…

New York City. I’m going to break my flight in NYC for a few days on my way to San Francisco. I’ve only recently confirmed my flights, but as soon as I did I reached out to NYOUG to see if they wanted me to speak at a local meetup. Unfortunately the only working day I’m in NYC is Monday 12th September and that is a couple of days before a big meeting they are organising. It’s a shame we couldn’t work something out, but maybe next year?

If there is anyone in NYC that would like me to come and speak at their office on 12th, drop me a line and we’ll see if we can arrange something. If not, I’ll just be hunting Pokemon before I go to San Francisco… 🙂

User Experience (UX) Day. I’m going to San Francisco an extra day early this year as I’m taking part in the UX Day. I’m not totally sure what that entails, but I think the folks on the UX team are awesome people and I would like to know more about what they do professionally. I’m keen to feedback about the UX of Oracle Cloud, so building that relationship with team will be good.

Ace Director (ACED) Briefing. After the UX day comes the 2 day Ace Director (ACED) Briefing. We heard a lot about the future versions of several products last year, some of which have still not been released. It will be interesting to see what is in the pipeline.

So that’s three full days before OOW16 actually starts!

User Group Sunday. I’ll be taking part in the EOUC #EMEADBA sessions.

Conference: Oracle OpenWorld
Session Type: User Group Forum Session
Session ID: UGF2630 + UGF2632 (It’s one big double-session)
Session Title: EOUC Database ACES Share Their Favorite Database Things: Part I & II
Room: Moscone South – 102
Date and Time: 18th September 2016, 13:00 – 15:00 (1-3 PM)

In previous years we’ve focused on 12c features. This year Debra suggested people pick their favourite feature for their 5 minute slot and there is a really good mix of features, spanning database versions Oracle 7 to Oracle 12c. I’ve got 5 minutes on Data Pump. 🙂

I really like these sessions. The pace is great, if a little frantic at times. You cover lots of ground in a small time. Even if you don’t care about a specific subject, it’s only 5 minutes until the next speaker. 🙂

SQL Panel Session. I’ve been invited to join in on a SQL Panel Session later in the week.

Session Type: Panel Session
Session ID: CON6557
Session Title: Optimizing SQL for Performance and Maintainability
Room: Moscone South – 103
Date and Time: 22nd September 2016, 13:15 – 02:00 (1:15-2:00 PM)

I was in something similar last year and it was really scary, but good fun!

Of course, I’ll spend the whole week trying to get involved in whatever is going and generally making a nuisance of myself. 🙂

If you are going to be at OOW16 and you see me, please come and say hello. Speaking to people about geek stuff is the best thing about conferences!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 : It’s a Wrap

I’m back home from Oracle OpenWorld 2015. My overall feeling for this year was evolution, not revolution. We got newer versions of some products, like APEX, WebLogic, SOA Suite and Oracle Forms, just before the conference. We got previews of new versions of products, like Oracle Database 12cR2 during the conference, which we might get next year.

Of course, there was a heavy emphasis on cloud, but the difference between this year and previous years was some of the product are now generally available (GA), so it’s possible to trial or buy them. In previous years, you could only use some of the cloud products if you were “special”.

Not surprisingly, Oracle are trying to ease the migration from on premise to cloud with hybrid options, like their private cloud offering. I expect this is pretty much the way OpenWorld will be for the next few years until the cloud vision is complete, or something else comes along.

Many thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for getting me across to San Francisco again. Thanks for the invites to the EMEA group presentation and the Oracle SQL Panel session. Both were good fun. Also, a big thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with me during the week. It is this aspect of any conference that I enjoy the most.

Here is a list of posts during the trip.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: You can see a random video of some footage from OOW15 here.