Tag: Poland

Oracle Code : Warsaw started for me with my first presentation of the day as I was in the first block after the keynotes…

My first session was about Analytic Functions. It’s a little difficult to predict the makeup of the Oracle Code crowds. In some cities you get predominantly Oracle developers, while in others it’s the opposite. As a result, you never know how what you are doing will be received until you get there. I shouldn’t have been concerned as the room was full. I had a little glitch at the start, which was caused by my laptop switching between the hotel and event wifi. Once I sorted that the connection to my Oracle Cloud DBaaS service was fine, which meant I was able to run through my demos. 🙂

Next I watched “Database DevOps and Agile Development with Open-Source Utilities” by Susan Duncan, which was another standing room only session. This included a demo of Oracle Developer Cloud Service, a freebie when you buy other Oracle Cloud services, and it looked pretty good. The demo was of the full lifecycle of an incident from logging through to release of a fix, which included database changes managed by FlyWay, with a quick a mention of LiquiBase and utPL/SQL.

After lunch I went to watch “Graal: How to Use the New JVM JIT Compiler in Real Life” by Chris Thalinger. I finally got to see this presentation, having clashed with Chris’ session slot at all previous events. I’m trying to think of something to say to make it sound like I understood what he was talking about, but between you and me it was a complete mystery to me. He did some awesome “Jazz Hands” though! 🙂 The session was a live comparison of Graal with an unmodified JVM, showing examples of potential performance improvements, and examples of where performance is no better too. I guess the take-home message that will impress most people is Twitter run all their Scala microservices in production on Graal and it’s saving them a bundle of cash because of improved performance…

Next up was Ewan Slater with “Honey I Shrunk the Container”, who amongst other things talked about using Smith to produce microcontainers, which looks really interesting. In one example he was able to shrink a container from about 850 meg to about 85 meg, which is pretty darn impressive. It’s definitely more impressive than –squash.

After that it was me with my session on REST enabling the database. I think this was a case of preaching to the converted, but I did get some questions at the end. 🙂

After my session I got chatting to some folks, so I missed the last session of the day, which meant that Oracle Code : Warsaw was over for me. Thanks to everyone that supported the event, including the Oracle Code crew, the other speakers and of course the attendees!

In the evening we went into town to get some food and I was introduced to a drink called The Terminator, which tasted really nice, but was rather deadly. I think it contained more alcohol than I normally drink in about 2 years… I was also given a shot of some vodka which was incredibly smooth. Despite feeling rather inebriated, I was sensible enough to switch back to water and juice for the rest of the evening. The photos of me with the empty vodka bottle and some bison grass (from the bottle) in my mouth were staged. 🙂

I was intending to be in bed really early as I needed to be up in the morning at 04:45 for my flight. I got back to the hotel at about midnight, so that didn’t work out so well… Thanks to the POUG folks for taking us out for the evening. It was much appreciated!

Cheers

Tim…

For a change it was a normal wake-up time for me. The advantage of flying late morning is you don’t have to get up so early. The disadvantage is the traffic. I left an hour earlier than usual, just to make sure, and it paid off. I missed some of the traffic, but there were some questionable decisions by my taxi driver. He seemed like a nice guy, but his SatNav was taking us on a rather strange route, and when he chose to ignore it, it seemed to be for all the wrong reasons, like he was speaking on his phone and missing the turn… Despite the long time and erratic route the price was the same as normal. Odd… 🙂

Having started off super early I arrived in plenty of time, so much so that the Brussels Airlines desk wasn’t open. Despite this delay, I managed to get through security pretty quickly, grabbed some food and a drink and parked at a table for about 90 minutes to do some work.

The first flight of the day was Birmingham to Brussels. We took off on time and it took about 55 minutes, so no drama there. The lady in the seat behind had a really shrill laugh, which I couldn’t block out with headphones. I noticed a number of people turning to look, so I wasn’t the only person this was annoying.

I had a 2.5 hour stop at Brussels, so not surprisingly I got the laptop out etc.

The 2 hour flight from Brussels to Warsaw was delayed a little, but it didn’t make much difference to our arrival time. I was meant to wait for Brendan to get a taxi, but instead Brendan was waiting for me. We got an Uber to the hotel, then it was pretty much time for the speaker dinner. I was going to duck out of this, but got persuaded. It was a good evening. 🙂

I mentioned in a previous post on the subject, I had agreed to do a second presentation to fill and empty slot. I went through that presentation a couple of days previously and wasn’t happy with it, so I spent the evening doing some work to tailor it more to the Oracle Code audience, who are not all Oracle techies…

Tomorrow (probably today when this gets released) is Oracle Code : Warsaw. See you there!

Cheers

Tim…