Tag: Oracle

Quick life and presenting update…

Just a quick post to let people know what is going on in the next few weeks/months…

UKOUG DE SIG

I’m speaking at the UKOUG DE SIG on the 10th July. Andrew Clarke had a free slot so I offered to speak to help him out. I owe him a few favors and it is on my doorstep.

I had a bit of a panic last night while I was rehearsing the talk. My laptop died and I ended up having to uninstall and install VMware Server. Not what you want to happen the week before a talk. As a backup, I’m going to use PortableApps to have my talk on a USB stick just in case. I won’t be able to run the demos, but I will have expected output ready to go just in case. Hopefully, the laptop will be fine and I won’t need it. 🙂

OpenWorld 2008

I’m speaking at OpenWorld 2008 as part of a group presentation organised by Lewis Cunningham. The lineup is Lewis Cunningham, Eddie Awad, Mark Rittman, Arup Nanda, Rich Niemiec, Bradley Brown, Hans Forbrich and myself. As you would expect with so many speakers, it’s a panel format, not a formal presentation. Should be fun.

I’m not sure if I’ll do the Unconference this year. I would like to, but I think it’s a bit unfair of me to hog a slot that someone new could use. If the uptake is slow I’ll jump in there.

I’m registered for OpenWorld and I’ve reserved my hotel room. I can’t book my flights until I know what’s happening with the AUSOUG and NZOUG events.

AUSOUG & NZOUG

I’m waiting to hear if I’ve been accepted to speak at the AUSOUG and NZOUG events this year. I’ll post more about this when I know. If I do it’s going to be a pretty hectic schedule. One of the percs of quitting your job is you have lots of free time to do conferences. 🙂

Life Update

The last person from my office quit work on Friday, so I’m now alone in the dungeon for a couple of months before I leave. I’ve been taking servers out of racks and rebuilding them for deployment in a new site. I can do RHEL, DB and AS10g installations in my sleep now. Yesterday I was setting up a system consisting of a database, two middle tier app servers and two front end web servers. It’s all sitting on the desk next to me making an awful noise. It was overloading my air con, so it was kinda tropical in here. 🙂

Today is the start of my final year of being 30-something. Happy birthday to me. How am I going to celebrate you ask? I’m teaching two Yoga classes to cover for someone who’s ill. Not exactly what I had in mind. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Automatic Memory Management in 11g…

I’m still trying to work my way through the 11g new features for the OCP upgrade exam. I’ve had so much going on recently that I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the syllabus. Here’s the latest installment.

Automatic Memory Management in Oracle Database 11g Release 1

I guess I need to write about 10 more articles before I’ll have covered the syllabus. I’m hoping to complete them and sit the exam before I go to OpenWorld, but if things keep going like they are at the moment that might be a struggle.

Cheers

Tim…

Installfest and Downsizing…

Installfest

Tod Trichler from OTN sent me a mail this morning about a new Installfest section on the Oracle Wiki. I’m always a bit dubious about putting links to my content on the Oracle Wiki because it seems like a shameless plug, but this section of the Wiki actively encourages it, provided the links are relevant. If you are into Oracle on Linux try and get involved. 🙂

Downsizing

As part of our continuing assimilation a whole bunch of projects at work are being downsized at the moment. Many will run in a limited capacity before being shut down completely in the near future. As a result, I’m in the process of moving several databases from large, expensive and power hungry hardware to commodity hardware running Linux. In a couple of cases, applications are moving from RAC to single node databases.

It’s quite good fun installing loads of little boxes and transferring the data. Sometimes, having lots of little jobs to tick off the list is quite rewarding, although I’m sure it will get very old very fast. 🙂

While sitting running some Red Hat updates I found myself saying, “I love Linux!”, to a colleague. I can’t tell you exactly why. It just has the right combination of ease of use and geek appeal all rolled into one. I work with Oracle a variety of platforms (Tru64, Windows, Linux) here, an I’ve used a whole bunch more in previous jobs, but I think Linux ticks most of the boxes for me.

Cheers

Tim…

Estonia Day 2 Update…

I’ve just finished the second day of teaching in Estonia…

I didn’t have any database issues today, which was a relief. Everything went according to plan, but it was a struggle to get all the information across in the time. I think I’ve got more than 13 hours of material and only 12 hours to present it in, but I can’t really see what I can remove without missing out something important.

As it was, I managed to get through everything, but I did need and extra 45 minutes. 🙂

I enjoy doing these 2 day sessions, but they are extremely draining. Anyone who knows me will find this hard to believe, but it’s really hard work to talk for 12+ hours in 2 days. I’m not sure I could cope with teaching a 5 day course, or teaching every week. I take my hat off to anyone who is a full time trainer, because it’s a very difficult job…

So now I’ve got a couple of days sightseeing before I head home. I had a quick walk round the city last night and it looks really cool. The weather is great and the days are so long it’s unreal.

I think I’m going to head off to the hotel gym to do some yoga, the go and have another look round the city before I start my proper sightseeing tomorrow.

Cheers

Tim…

Estonia Day 1 Update…

I’ve just completed day 1 of my PL/SQL workshop in Estonia. The first few minutes proved especially eventful!

When I did my workshop in Copenhagen, I had a lot of trouble with the projector. This morning I plugged the projector into my laptop and all was well. I even made a joke about how well it was going. Little did I know…

I started the presentation and the first demo hung! I don’t think I can fully describe the panic that sets in when something like that happens withing a couple of minutes of starting a 2 day workshop. It’s like a little piece of you dies. 🙂 I did a little messing around to try and get it working, but quickly realised I had to keep things going or it was going to get really boring, really quickly, so I just rebooted the virtual machine.

Lookily, wiser men than me (Andrew Clarke and Mark Rittman) had warned me long ago about the dangers of live demos, so I always carry a backup plan. I had text representations and screen shots of the expected output from the demos, so I used those while I waited for the VM to restart. After a little while the VM was up again and was working fine, so with more than a small sigh of relief, things were back on track.

I wonder what fate will throw at me tomorrow. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, or gives you a heart attack…

You gotta laugh…

Cheers

Tim…