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…

OUG Ireland 2018

Next month (22-23 March) is the OUG Ireland 2018 event. Somehow I managed to miss the call for papers, so I wasn’t in the race for a speaker slot, but I just booked my flights and hotel, so I’ll be lurking around.

If anyone drops out of a session after 11:00 on the first day, or at any time on the second day, I’m happy to drop in and fill the spot. Just sayin’! 🙂 If not, I have an overnight stay in Dublin.

Maybe see you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’m registered as an attendee now through my company’s membership, so I’ll definitely be there. If I get a stray speaker slot, all the better. 🙂

OUG Ireland 2017 : It’s a Wrap

I guess four blog posts and 3 videos over a two day period is a little excessive, but this is the closing post to make it five. 🙂

Here are the posts I put out during the event. I’ve added in some videos I finished editing today.

This is the first time I’ve stayed over at the event and I think it made a big difference. When I’ve done it in a single day it adds quite a lot of pressure. From the minute you wake up until the minute you get back home there is a nagging doubt about the logistics of the day. I still had to get there in time for my talks, but I was not constantly checking the time for when I had to fly home and it made me feel much more relaxed. I’ll try to do it this way in future.

Big thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland and UKOUG for inviting me and making it a great day. I’ll see you next year! Thanks also to the attendees and speakers who had to put up with me for two days this year. Sorry you didn’t get to have a day off. 🙂 This is one of the conferences I where I pay my own expenses, but I would still like to thank the Oracle ACE Program for continuing to allow me to fly the flag!

See you all next time!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : The Journey Home

I left the hotel bar with Martin, Chris and Neil and after an abortive attempt to get an airbus, we got a taxi to the airport.

I was convinced Dublin Airport was one of the few airports that don’t want you to unpack your laptops from your bag so I didn’t and my bag got flagged. I have no idea where I got that idea from, but I felt like a dick. 🙂

We then went to get some food and wait for our respective flights, whilst discussing our favourite movies…

When it was my time to board I said my goodbyes and headed to the boarding gate…

All three seats in my row were full and all three of us were of a “fuller figure”, but fortunately the row across the aisle was free so I got to “upgrade” from a middle seat to my own row. Happy days!

The flight home was about 45 minutes, then it was a taxi ride home to complete the journey. Wrap-up post to follow!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : Day 2

I got up a little after 08:30, which was a bit of a surprise, and headed down for breakfast, where a met a bunch of other speakers.

By the time I got showered, changed and checked out of the hotel I had missed the first session of the day (sorry). The first session I went to was the wife presenting “PaaS4SaaS”. I know what you are thinking, and yes I could do this presentation as I’ve seen it so many times. 🙂

Next up was Francesco Tisiot with “What a Successful OBIEE 12c Upgrade Project Looks Like – Customer Case Study (Liberty Global)”. As mentioned before, I don’t work with OBIEE, but some people I work with do now, so I like to keep my ear to the ground. It is also looking like I will be looking after some of their infrastructure, so this session was really useful to me, just because of the additional context it gave me.

After Francesco’s session there was a vendor awareness session, lunch, chatting (networking), then it was back to the sessions.

Next up was Roel Hartman with “The Quest for the Little Gems in APEX 5.1”. Having introduced the headline features of APEX 5.1, he switched to speaking about some of the less well publicized cool features. Things like font APEX, button builder, live template options, improved dynamic actions, new PL/SQL APIs, theme styles and more. Cool!

I missed the next session as I was logged in to work, trying to catch up on some stuff. By the time I finished that I was a little late for Alex Nuijten presenting “Structuring an APEX Application”. I’m not sure how happy most APEX developers would be with some of the stuff Alex was suggesting, but I think it’s perfect, probably because we both came to APEX after spending years as PL/SQL developers. Listening to some of his structural approach reminded me of this. 🙂

The final session was “Question Time with ACEs & Ask Tom’s Chris Saxon and Maria Colgan”. The actual list of panelists was Chris Saxon, Martin Widlake, Joze Senegacnik, Neil Chandler, Alex Nuijten, Oren Nakdimon and Maria Colgan. I should not be allowed in panel sessions, whether I am on the panel or not. I have no off switch. It was a really funny session. Don’t mess with Maria! 🙂

And that was it for the OUG Ireland 2017… I’ll write a wrap-up post with all the usual thank you messages when I get home, but for today I would just like to say thank you to everyone for a great time!

After the last session I hung around in the hotel bar for a while having a chat with some of the folks, then it was time to head home, but that’s another blog post… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : Day 1

I arrived at the Gresham Hotel, registered and went straight down to the first session of the day…

First up was Maria Colgan presenting, “What to Expect from Oracle Database 12c”, a quick romp through the cool features in Oracle 12c (12.1 and 12.2). The room was full so I had to listen form the corridor, with my head occasionally popping round the door to see the screen. Maria’s sessions are always great value, so definitely get to her if you can.

Next up was Marcin Przepiorowski with “Direct NFS for DBAs”. I’ve used this for some time, but only because Kevin Closson made me. 🙂 Marcin worked through some of the pros and cons and gave a bunch of numbers and graphs to prove is points. Graphs mean science! 🙂

I then moved on to Christian Berg with “Doing Oracle Analytics this way? STOP IT!”. We are transitioning to Oracle BI for the on-prem warehouse associated with our Oracle Cloud Apps stuff. I’m not part of the project and I don’t understand any of this stuff, but I just want to understand some of the vocabulary. I’m definitely understanding some more of the words now. 🙂

Next up was Martin Klier with “42 facts for Grid Infrastructure, ASM and RAC”. This was a quick-fire introduction to RAC and ASM. I’ve used both for some years, but I still find it really cool to see a summary like this, from someone who can actually do it for real.

Then it was me with back-to-back sessions. I brought my underwear, but forgot my pointer, so I had to borrow one from the mighty Maria Colgan. Thanks Maria! My first session was “Put your feet up and have a REST. Take a Tour of JSON Support in the Oracle Database”. The second was “It’s Raining Data! Oracle Databases in the Cloud”. Both sessions got a good crowd and I really enjoyed them. Judging by the reactions on Twitter some of the audience appreciated them too. 🙂

After my sessions I went to Gerald Venzl with “Supercharge Your Code to Get Optimal Database Performance”. He had the word Java on the title slide, but by his own admission it applied equally well to any programming language that interacts with a database. He discussed a number of things like the impact of commits, set processing, array processing and bind variables etc. For some of the points he did live demos to show the impact of getting it wrong. It’s exactly what you need every developer to hear before they are allowed to develop against a relational database. I think Gerald has spotted a gap in the market and is positioning himself as “The New Tom Kyte”, so from now on he will be known as Gerald Kyte… 🙂

Kamil Stawiarski with “Back to the basics: TABLESPACES… but a little bit low level style”. In this session he spoke about how different operations affect the contents of the datafiles on disk. Not the data you can query from SQL, but actually what is written (or not) to disk. He demoed it, by performing the operations in SQL and displaying the contents of the datafiles using a little C++ utility. It’s important for people to understand this stuff from a space-manangement perspective, but also from a security perspective. Just because you’ve deleted the row, it doesn’t mean you can’t read it from the datafile (assuming you are not using TDE) etc. 🙂

After the last session we got together for drinks. The queue was pretty big, so I went across the road and checked into my hotel, then came back and got a pint of Guinness. We headed off to the ACE Dinner at Rustic Stone, which was quite fancy. From there we moved across to a local bar and I was “forced” to have another Guinness. Then it was back to the hotel, where Christian “forced” us to eat rather expensive chocolate. I ended getting to bed really late. It was a really fun day at the conference and the evening. 🙂

Let’s see what tomorrow brings… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : The Journey Begins

There is something about early starts that get me so nervous I can’t sleep properly. As a result I was awake before my 05:00 alarm, which gave me plenty of time to get ready. That was good because I hadn’t packed up laptop bag, which was also acting as my overnight bag. 🙂

The taxi ride to the airport was pretty standard, but I did have a conversation about Roza Bal in Kashmir.

I only had hand luggage, so I didn’t have to wait for the bag drop and security was mercifully quick. They did an explosives test on my phone, but ignored my laptop, cameras and huge power bank. Go figure…

Boarding happened on time and there was a gap in our row, so I was able to get the laptop out, which is always a bonus. The flight took about 40 minutes and was generally uneventful.

The journey from Dublin Airport to the conference venue was pretty simple. The AirLink Express takes you straight to the Gresham Hotel, so no drama there.

It is easier and cheaper for me to get to the OUG Ireland events than it is to get to London events. 🙂

I arrived, registered and went straight to the first session, but that’s another blog post! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : See You There!

I’m speaking at this years OUG Ireland event! (agenda)

I booked my flights a little later this year, so the flights are super-expensive, about £38 return. 🙂 I’ve also booked a night in the Holiday Inn. That’s right, I’m staying for both days this year! 🙂

Both my sessions are on the first day, so I will have the second day to relax and mingle. 🙂

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2014

As you probably know by now I was at OUG Ireland yesterday.

It was a pretty early start for me. I needed to be up by 03:30 to get a taxi to the airport, but fear of missing my flight meant I was awake from about 01:00 onward. My taxi driver wanted to talk about some rather strange stuff during the ride. A conflicted individual I guess…

The Ryanair flight across to Dublin went smoothly enough. There were 18 people on a 737, so I’m guessing that flight didn’t cover the staff costs, since I paid £30 for a return flight. Once at Dublin I took the AirLink bus for 10 euros, which dropped me outside The Convention Centre Dublin.

I headed straight for the RAC Attack table at the Oracle stand, where I met some of the conference organisers and of course some of the RAC Attack Ninjas. I pretty much spent the rest of the day there, speaking to anyone and everyone that came within a three yard radius of me. 🙂 Thanks to Mina Zadeh for getting the ball rolling on organising this! I hope we will be able to do this every year. Even if people don’t want to spend time during a one day conference doing the RAC installation, it acts as a good focal point for people to come and chat about RAC and any other Oracle technology that they are interested in. Kinda like a “meet the geeks” thing. 🙂

It was good to meet up with Debra Lilley again, as it must have been at least 9 days since I last saw her. Thanks for my little brass Ganesha!

My first presentation of the event was “An Oracle DBA’s Guide to WebLogic Server”. I felt really nervous at the start of this presentation. I’m very quick to tell people I am still a newbie and this is very much sold as, “What I wish I had been told in my first hour of learning WebLogic”. Even with that in mind, there is always a niggling doubt that people might be expecting something different, which feeds into the insecurities and the inferiority complex. I think it went OK, but the nerves made me race a little and it might have freaked some people out with the pace.

My second presentation was on “PL/SQL : Stop making the same performance mistakes”. Being back on familiar ground felt good! I was really relaxed for this one and just went with the flow and enjoyed it. I had to miss some slides at the end because of the shorter time slot, but all the information is on my website, so it’s not that big a deal in the scheme of things. 🙂

Despite the jetlag, Tom was on great form during the day. He’s got a very British sense of humour and he handles having the piss taken out of him really well, so when he pulled out his phone I couldn’t help but comment on how massive it looked next him. I think it was a Galaxy Note of some description, but it looked like me using an iPad for a phone. 🙂 That prompted a comparison in hand sizes and I can now categorically state that my hands are smaller than Tom Kytes! That’s hardly surprising, since my hands are smaller than most humans above the age of 10 years old. After that bit of banter it was off to watch Tom do his thing for the last session of the day. I was in a playful mood, so I couldn’t help but heckle a bit. 🙂 This morning I got an email from him pointing to this Dilbert strip.

From there it was a quick trip to the boat/bar next to the conference centre for a farewell drink, then it was off to get my plane. Patrick Hurley was on the same flight as me, so we got to chat for a while at the airport. We’ve met a few times, but I’ve never really got to speak to him for that long before. He’s a totally cool guy! He is also a witness to the fact I drank a pint of Guinness in Ireland before I got on the plane home!

I got back into my house at about 23:00, so it was a very long, but very enjoyable day.

Thanks to everyone at OUG Ireland for making this event happen and thank you for inviting me. I’m hoping this will become a yearly entry in my calendar from now on. Thanks also to all the RAC Attack Ninjas and of course to all the attendees, without whom there would be no conference. Thanks to OTN and The Oracle ACE Program. It’s a privilege to be able to represent you folks at these events!

Cheers

Tim…