Oracle Code : Hyderabad – 2018

Today was Oracle Code : Hyderabad.

I woke up in a bit of a daze, so rather than jumping straight into the fray I worked through my demos again just to settle my nerves. 🙂

I headed down for my session to find there was no lectern and they wanted to run my presentation from the audio desk. I said that wasn’t going to work as I had live demos, so they guys went off to find one. The keynote had overrun, so people were late coming into the session, which bought me some time. 🙂

The presentation was a little tricky. The sound on the wireless head mic kept dropping out or getting feedback, so I switched to a hand mic part way through, which made typing difficult. There was a large back-lit screen, which looked great, but didn’t work with a laser pointer, so that made life harder. Despite the issues, I think the talk went OK. It was a little choppy, but I think I got the message across. The main thing was I got through it without my laptop giving up. 🙂

After my session I spent a lot of time chatting to people and continuing the discussion of Oracle Databases on Docker, which filtered into lunch.

After lunch I did a periscope live stream with Connor McDonald chatting about a variety of things including my website, presenting and Oracle databases on Docker.

After that I went to watch Connor do a session on SQL. You know you are doing something right when they have to add a few extra rows of seats to the room and you still have people standing. 🙂

From there is was back to the developer lounge to look at the demos. One of the guys doing the IoT demos was a machine. He was so enthusiastic and went all day.

The developer lounge is also a good way to connect with more people. Some people are quite intimidated about asking a question in the session, but they will happily come up to you in private and ask. I always like this bit of the conference.

And before I knew it the day was over. Some of the folks went out to eat together, but I ducked out because I had been so short on sleep already. I decided to go back to my room and crash, but more on that in the next post… 🙂

Overall I think the event went really well. The turnout was great and people were really enthusiastic and open. Thanks everyone, especially those folks that came to speak to me during the day. It makes the events even more fun for me.

So tomorrow I travel to Bengaluru, where I will be “working from home (from India)” for a few days before the next event. I’ve got to save my holidays for events later in the year. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Twelve Years an ACE

This year’s anniversary is a little odd because from a career perspective I have now been an Oracle ACE for longer than I’ve not been one. On 1st April 2006 I got an email telling me I was in the program. This year’s anniversaries will look like this.

  • 23 years working with Oracle technology in August. (August 1995)
  • 18 years doing my website in July. (Original name: 03 July 2000 or Current name: 31 August 2001)
  • 13 years blogging in June. (15 June 2005)
  • 12 years on the Oracle ACE Program. (01 April 2006)
  • 1 year as an Oracle Developer Champion. (21 June 2017)

The Developer Champion is a little different as it’s a one year thing, so there probably won’t be a two year anniversary.

This last year has been a tough one. Let’s see if I can make it to the next anniversary.

Cheers

Tim…

Upcoming events I’m attending…

Just a quick note to mention some of the events I’ll be at over the next few months.

 

I’ll be at a couple of Oracle Code events in India in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve submitted for a few of the European Oracle Code events too, but I have no idea if I will be selected or not. When I know I’ll post an update. 🙂

Unfortunately I can’t make the “Oracle Code: London” event this year as I’m already confirmed for another conference on those dates. Apart from the Oracle Code events, I’m already confirmed for these two events.

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2018 : Day 2

Day 2 was a mixed day for me. I mentioned in the previous post my preparation for this conference had not been the best because of circumstances, and that started to get the better of me. I’ve said it before, public speaking is not natural for me. This was the first conference I had done since UKOUG Tech17. Having nearly a 4 month break and coming in without the normal prep was a bad idea, because it felt very much like I was back to square one, doing my first ever presentation. I spent quite a while talking to Chris Saxon in the morning, where I had pretty much decided to give up presenting blah, blah, blah…

My first session was “Using PL/SQL and ORDS to Develop RESTful Web Services for APEX? Why?”. Even though it is an APEX talk, I am speaking mostly about the organisation of applications, the use of API-first development and web services, but all in the context of APEX. I’m the first to admit I’m not a great APEX developer, but I do know a bit about PL/SQL and I think I am pretty good at organising applications. I think the talk went OK. That calmed my nerves somewhat for the next session, which was the one I was really worried about.

My second session was “Cool New Features for Developers in 18c and 12c”, which was mostly live demos, connected to an 18c database running on the Oracle Database Cloud Service. I had recorded the demos in case the internet connection dropped, but I think if it had it would have been game over really. The internet connection was fine, which was a relief. I couldn’t switch between the slides and the demos as seamlessly as I would have liked, but it wasn’t terrible. I had picked a selection of things that I think are cool from 12.1, 12.2 and 18c. Some things were cool because they are useful. Some things are cool for geek factor, even though I might not use them much. I had a couple of timing issues with the demos and I ran out of time, but overall it felt OK. There was a bit of banter with the crowd, which always helps me relax.

Update: Someone asked for the list, so here it is. I didn’t get to demo them all because of time. 🙂

From there it was off to the panel session I was meant to chair. So it turns out I’m bad on the panel, I’m bad in the audience and I’m bad as chair of a panel. I think the only way it’s going to work out is if I’m gagged or excluded. Dominic Giles got a grilling in part of the session, but he handled it admirably as always. As is always the case with panels, there’s a mixed bag of questions and a rather varied selection of answers… 🙂

From there it was a few goodbyes, and I hung around with Chris, before leaving for the airport. We got some food and as Chris left for his plane Neil and Martin turned up. I spent a few minutes chatting with them, then it was off to get my plane.

Some of the guys at the back of the plane were “a little rowdy”, but it was a quick flight and we got back OK. It was then a short taxi ride home and it was all over…

The OUG Ireland 2018 conference felt busier this year. I’m not sure how the numbers stack up, but a couple of people commented the same. Just a little reminder, if you are using one of the cheap airline companies, it’s probably cheaper to get to the OUG Ireland conference than it is to get to some of the UK conferences. Just sayin’. 🙂

Thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland for letting me come again. Thanks to the attendees and people who came to my sessions for helping me get through them. Thanks to the speakers also, especially those who did a bit of “counselling” for me. 🙂 This was a self-funded trip, but thanks as always to the Oracle ACE Program and Developer Champion Program for letting me fly the flag. See you all again next year.

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2018 : Day 1

When I originally posted about this event I was an attendee. Over the last week or so things have changed a lot. First I picked up a vacated speaker slot, then I was asked to chair a panel session, then I was asked if I could fill another speaker slot that had become free. Of the two presentations I agreed to give, one hadn’t been written yet and had live demos to prep. The other one was written, but needed some serious rehearsal. Needless to say, this last week has been a bit of a nightmare. My presenting skills are not natural, they’ve been learnt, and it takes me a lot of rehearsal to appear casual and relaxed. If you want to come and see if I manage to get through the demos without injury, my sessions are in the last three blocks on Friday. You can see the agenda here. 🙂

So day one began at silly o’clock with a taxi ride to the airport. It’s a really short flight to Dublin, so it feels more like a bus ride. When you are flying on CheapAir for pennies there really is no messing about. A lady had her full baggage allocation, but wanted to bring a giant box of tea bags with her, which was going to cost her £50 as a checked item. That was an interesting discussion/fight… The flight itself was really quick, and once at Dublin airport is was a short bus ride to the Gresham Hotel and the conference started…

First up was Dominic Giles with a keynote called “Towards Autonomous Data Management”. I’ve written about using the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service before (here). I’ve also written about my opinions of this type of service going forward (here). I’m looking forward to see how these services develop. As I’ve said before, this is the beginning of a journey, not the destination…

After coffee and some chit-chat it was off to see “Tell us Your Plans, ask us Your Questions” with the wife and Tony Cassidy. This was a question and answer session about Oracle Cloud Apps and I just wanted to keep my ear to the ground.

Next up was Neil Chandler with “JSON in Oracle”, followed by Chris Saxon with “18(ish) Things Developers Will Love About Oracle Database 18c”. I enjoyed both sessions, but I think people in one of my sessions tomorrow might feel some deja vu, because they collectively covered a lot of the stuff I am speaking about tomorrow. I’ve got some live demos (if my internet connection works), which will hopefully make it feel different. 🙂

From there I headed back to check in to my hotel and play catch-up on a couple of things, including checking out my demos again. 🙂

I popped over to the social event, to catch some people I hadn’t spoken to during the day. I was going to duck out of the ACE dinner as it had been a long day, but Brendan persuaded me I should go, and I was glad I did because it was announced that Kiran Tailor is the latest person to be made an Oracle ACE Director.

Kiran is a super-nice guy, so I was pleased this happened.

Once we had eaten, I walked the wife back to her hotel, and bought her an ice cream, then headed off to mine to crash. What a long day!

Quite nervous about tomorrow…

Cheers

Tim…

ODC Appreciation Day 2017 : It’s a Wrap (#ThanksODC)

Yesterday was the Oracle Developer Community ODC Appreciation Day (#ThanksODC).

Thanks to everyone who contributed. Here is the list of posts I saw in chronological order. If I missed you out, give me a shout and I’ll add you. 🙂

Four people chose the “online datafile move” feature, which is a feature I love too, so I guess that comes out top of this list in terms of popularity. 🙂

It’s always good to see some of the entires in languages other than English!

It’s wrong to have favourites, but the entry that made me the most happy was that of Flora B., who was inspired by this event to write her first blog post ODC Appreciation Day : EM CLI. That’s great!

In addition to the people who posted blogs, thanks to all those people that tweeted their favourite feature, and took the time to retweet everything. It was fun to watch them all coming in.

Once again, thanks everyone for getting involved and of course #ThanksODC! 🙂

Same-ish time next year! Add a comment if you have any ideas for themes for next year. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

ODC Appreciation Day : Silent Installation and Configuration (Automation) : #ThanksODC

Here is my entry for the Oracle Developer Community ODC Appreciation Day (#ThanksODC).

I’ve been mentioning automation a lot recently, both in relation to the cloud and on-prem. The OpenWorld announcements about the Autonomous Database service are not the first thing Oracle has done to ease automation of repetitive tasks. In fact, Oracle has quite a long history of making automation of installation and configuration easy.

I’m not sure what version introduced silent installations of the database, but I first wrote about them when using Oracle 9i (here), with the article changing a lot over the years. In addition to making installations faster, more repeatable and less error prone, they are also important these days if you are using a cloud provider for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), since using X emulation to perform tasks can be super-slow. Over the years I’ve also written about silent installations of WebLogic, Oracle Forms, ODI and OBIEE to name but a few.

In addition to installations, Oracle has made silent configuration possible too. Running the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) in silent mode is pretty simple (here). WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) is a not always easy, but it is a really powerful way to script build processes for WebLogic servers (here). If you are using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, you will find an API for pretty much everything, allowing you to script using EMCLI (here).

You can find a number of articles I’ve written related to silent installation and configuration using the links above, or grouped under this section of my website.

A good knowledge of this subject is important if you want to start checking out Docker, because you will be doing silent builds and configuration for everything.

When you are learning something new it is nice to use GUI screens, as they often feel a little simpler at first and sometimes give you a little more context about what you are doing. Once you’ve covered the basics you should really switch to scripting, as it will make you more efficient. When I first started to manage WebLogic servers I resisted the switch to using WLST for quite some time. It seemed a little complicated and I was in denial until Lonneke Dikmans persuaded me to try it. Once I got into it I never looked back! 🙂

To summarise the advantages of scripting your installations and configuration, they are:

  • Faster.
  • More reliable.
  • More repeatable.
  • Work fine on the cloud and in Docker.
  • Easily maintainable and can be version controlled.

If you’re not using this stuff already, do yourself a favour and give it a go. You will thank yourself!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2017 : It’s a Wrap

Time for a final post to summarize the craziness that was OpenWorld 2017. 🙂

For me the story of this year’s OpenWorld was the emphasis on humans doing stuff where humans add value, rather than doing boring crap that can be automated.

The obvious thing people will jump on is the Autonomous Database announcement, which I’ve written about already, but the story follows through many aspects of the conference.

The interest in chatbots is quite high at the moment. From a work perspective, it’s not about replacing every application you have with a voice or messenger interaction. It’s about finding use-cases where they work well. Having a chatbot that deals with trivial interactions frees up humans to deal with more important stuff. Over the last few years products using natural language processing for text and voice interaction have come a long way. Many people have devices in their pocket that do this pretty well (Siri on Apple and “OK Google” on Android). Products like Amazon Echo and Google Home have made voice interaction seem normal. As they become more normal, people will expect these services from you.

In the apps world there is an emphasis on making things simpler by making the apps more intelligent. Rather than expecting the user to fill in every bit of information, you default the most likely responses based on the information you have about that user. This could be a simple as pre-filling an address, or as complicated as using machine learning to make educated guesses at what they want. It’s all about making basic interactions as efficient as possible so user time can be spent more productively.

Cloud providers are a great example of software defined data centers. If you choose to move to the cloud, the cloud provider has done the heavy lifting for you. If you want to continue to work on-prem, you need to learn the lessons of the cloud providers and remove humans as much as possible from the process of deploying and managing virtual machines, containers, databases, app servers, networking, load balancers and firewalls etc. Those people can then focus on more architectural, development and performance-related issues.

We speak about the benefits of agile and DevOps all the time, but many people get caught up in the tooling and automation associated with this. Cloud providers take a lot of that burden off us, and tools like Oracle Developer Cloud Service, available for free if you have some other Oracle cloud services, save you from having to worry about some of that development tooling. Other cloud providers offer similar services.

The list goes on…

None of these messages are new, but it has taken me some time to adjust to some of them. Sometimes you have to have a personal use-case to really appreciate things. My experience of cloud services, voice devices, Docker and seeing data center automation using VMware Software Development Data Center have made me more responsive than I think I was before.

People often have a fear of change, and speaking about automation makes people think job cuts, but as I mentioned before this is about stopping people worrying about boring stuff and getting them to focus on where they add value. I don’t see this reducing the head-count in our IT department. I see it reducing the grunt work and directing resource at more important stuff. We are so preoccupied with the crap, we never get to stretch our wings…

Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program and the Oracle Developer Champions Program for making this all possible for me!

So that’s another visit to San Francisco done. Due to funding changes I don’t know if I will visit again. Time will tell.

Here are the 14 posts that relate to this trip.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld 2017 : The Journey Home

For some reason I thought I was flying home early today. I wasn’t. The flight was 15:00.

I had put myself on an waiting list for an upgrade, that I didn’t get. Unknown to me, and contrary to the advice from the Lufthansa agent I spoke to on the phone, this happened to mean I also lost my aisle seat for the 11+ hour flight home, since I was advised not to check-in online. Flying on a middle seat is not fun for anyone, but for me anything except an aisle is a big problem. It pretty much makes me freak out and fidget constantly. I once stood for 9 hours on a flight where I had a middle seat.

Needless to say I was super-pissed once I got to the airport and found out. I know it isn’t the fault of the airport staff, so I was careful not to go supernova at anyone, but it was extremely hard work. I spoke to the people at the desk, who wrote down my details, but said there was nothing they could do at that time, but would see what they could do as check-in progressed. I wrote an email complaint to Lufthansa, and vented my frustration on Twitter for some time, then the plane was delayed by 30 minutes…

Eventually I was called to the boarding gate and they had found an aisle seat for me again! It was such a relief as I would have annoyed the crap out of the people next to me if I had been in a middle seat.

The flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt was fine except for one brief, but violent bit of turbulence early on in the flight. The staff had to stop the food service and strap in for about 10-15 minutes. I just closed my eyes, grabbed my tray and tried not to have flashbacks to a flight I was on that was like that for hours. There were a number of spilled drinks, vocal people and children crying, but it didn’t last too long. When that does happen, you are twitchy for the rest of the flight.

I stood a lot during the flight and watched some films.

  • Life : I enjoyed this. Quite derivative of alien sci-fi, but good.
  • Wonder Woman : The plot was very generic, but Gal Gadot was awesome and the fight scenes were some of the best I have seen in a superhero film. With the problematic origin story out of the way I’m looking forward to the future Wonder Woman films.
  • Trancendance : I re-watched this. I kind-of like it, even though it is a terribly flawed movie.

We got to Frankfurt about 30 minutes late, which meant I had about 12 minutes to get from my arrival gate to the departure gate in another terminal. I checked with a member of staff, who suggested I wait for the next flight in 4 hours time, but I decided to try and make it, which involved me stomping through the airport like an aging rhino. A couple of people took pity on me, a panting sweaty mess, and let me through the fast lane at security, and let me jump the queue. 🙂 I made it to the boarding gate just as they were closing. A triumph for fatties everywhere!

I got on the plane, went to the toilet and changed my t-shirt, after using my current one as a towel. Yuck.

It was a short flight from Frankfurt to Birmingham with no dramas. I was doubtful my luggage would make it on such a short connections, but it was there waiting for me when I got to the baggage claim. 🙂

So I’m back and dealing with jet-lag, washing, the post-event emotional crash and I’ve got to write a talk about it all to give at work.

I’ll do a wrap-up post tomorrow when I am settled…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle OpenWorld (JavaOne) 2017 : Day 4 (Thursday)

I met up with some folks for breakfast, which was a first for this week. From there I went to my room, finished off some blogs and cleared down some work emails, then I was ready to start the day.

OpenWorld finished the day before, but JavaOne continued into Thursday, and since I was registered for both I decided to check out some sessions. A quick look through the agenda showed every session for the day was fully booked. I decided to go down and check it out, in case people didn’t show. When I got there is was really busy, with people queuing for sessions, so I turned round and went back to the hotel.

I heard later there were free seats in some of the sessions, but quite frankly waiting around on spec is not my idea of fun. There seemed to be a lot of angry people around, especially when they ran out of food. I can’t really complain as I didn’t pay for the conference, but if I was a paying attendee I would be really unhappy.

In the evening I met up with some folks to grab some foods, then it was back to bed. I’m not sure I’ve ever had such an “unconferency” day at a conference before, except when I’ve been sick.

Cheers

Tim…