Tag: #ukoug_tech16

UKOUG Tech16 : Wednesday

Similar to last year, I had a presentation on a day I wasn’t attending, so I used my “lunch break” to drive in, present and drive back to work. I did get to see a bunch of people while I was waiting for my session to start, including my dad and wife. 🙂

My session was called “Put your feet up and have a REST. Take a tour of JSON support in the Oracle database.” It was basically a romp through the JSON support provided by ORDS, APEX and Oracle Database 12c (12.1 and 12.2). More importantly, it gave me an opportunity to stand on my soapbox and preach my “how to stay relevant” message.

As a DBA and PL/SQL developer I’m a firm believer in the Thick Database Model, but we are no longer in a position to dictate terms. What we should be trying to do is make the stuff we develop, as well as stuff we have already built over the last 20+ years, as accessible as possible. You can’t achieve that by forcing people to use an Oracle client and telling them to call a packaged procedure. What you can do though is present them with a web service that makes it easy for them to use your code.

I’ve been pushing this message for years with XML web services and SOAP web services from the database. Nowadays the basic message is still the same, but the tools are a little different, and of course XML has been replaced by JSON.

So the question is, do you want to be legacy or play with the “cool kids”? 🙂

Thanks to everyone who came to my session and those that spoke to me during Sunday, Monday and today. Thanks to the folks at UKOUG for inviting me to come and play. As always, big thanks go out to the Oracle ACE Program for letting me continue to fly the flag in my cloud free skies. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG Tech16 : Monday

tech16_300wI got a bit of a late start to the day. I had a some work stuff I had to do before setting off for the conference and it dragged on a bit longer than I expected.

My plan for the day was to go to sessions about stuff I don’t do for my job. I could dress that up as something strategic, but the reality is I’m now totally conferenced out. It’s been a tough six months. 🙂

ukoug-markThe first session I went to was Mark Rittman with “Query, Integrate & Visualise All Your Data (In Real-Time!) Using Hadoop”. This was a strategic session, discussing the present and future direction of analytics over Hadoop. Every time I see aukoug-tanel Hadoop session there are some new projects I’ve never heard of before and a bunch of projects that are now out of favour. Gotta do it in the cloud and forget about the plumbing. Mark was joined briefly by Tanel Poder, who discussed what Gluent are doing to integrate information from different sources.

ukoug-neilAfter lunch I was planning to watch Robin Moffatt speaking about Kafka, but the room was full, so I went to see Neil Chandler with “It’s a Disaster! Making it Better Using FarSync & Fast Connect Failover”. So this is not exactly “not my job”, but Neil does this stuff at a bigger scale than I do.

I had arranged to spend some time speaking to Jennifer from the Oracle ACE Program, so I missed the next block of talks while I spoke to her and a few folks who dropped by, including a fully awake Jeff Smith. 🙂

ukoug-chris2Next I went to watch Chris Lawless from Dbvisit speaking about “Data Streaming From Oracle to Kafka”, but once again it was full. Do you notice a pattern here? Rather than miss out I sat in the corridor listening. I couldn’t see anything, but it was still a good presentation in audio only. 🙂

Next I was planning to see “Migrating to & Supporting Databases on Amazon RDS for Oracle” by Maris Elsins, but once again the room was rammed. I couldn’t face watching/listening from the corridor again, so I dropped out and went to get a coffee and some food.

ukoug-jamesThe last session of the day for me was “When The Rules Change: Next Generation Oracle Database Architectures Using Super-Fast Storage” by James Morle. There is no way I will ever work on stuff this high-end, but it’s fun to watch and it raises a whole bunch of interesting questions about the cost:benefit ratio of caching data when the storage is super fast.

From there we went across to Thai Edge for the ACE dinner. Lots of food. Lots of drink for those that do. Lots of talking. Altogether a great evening!

Towards the end of the evening I got talking to Lothar Flatz and I ended up giving him a lift back to his hotel, before heading home.

I’m just about to post this and it’s 01:20. I’m at work tomorrow. It’s going to be a tough day! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG Tech16 : Super Sunday

tech16_300wMy blog posts about a conference usually start with a post about my journey to the event, so…

I got in my car, drove 4 miles, parked my car, walked about 100m.

That’s it. 🙂

I met up with a gang of people in the ICC and pretty soon we moved up to the main reception area, where we had a natter and coffee before everything kicked off. They couldn’t find a badge for Mr Debra Lilley, so I had to make do with one for some guy called Tim Hall. There were several tracks, so I’ll only talk about what I saw…

ukoug-trondFirst up was Trond Enstad with “NodeJS & Oracle – A Match Made in Heaven”. The session was based around a live demo, including a new installation of Node, Oracle Instant Client and Oracle Node Driver. Trond built a Node app to act like an OS monitoring agent to capture “sar” data from the server and insert it into a DB table, so APEX could be used to visualise it. I now feel I am truly one of the cool kids!

Me: Alexa, am I cool?
Alexa: You’re cooler than cool. You’re the coolest!

I bet she says that to all the guys!

ukoug-jeffNext was Jeff Smith with “Auto REST Enabling Your Tables, Views, & More With SQL Developer & REST Data Services”. The session started with a basic REST primer and an introduction to ORDS. Jeff then gave some examples of how the AutoREST functionality of ORDS can enable RESTful access to tables and views. He also talked about AutoREST of PL/SQL objects (procedures, functions, packages etc.), which will be available in ORDS 3.1. Jeff was super jet-lagged, so once he finished his session I walked him to his hotel, tucked him into bed, then headed back to the conference. 🙂

ukoug-lonnekeMy little excursion made me a bit late for Lonneke Dikmans presenting “Internet of Things (IoT) in the Enterprise – A Case Study”. The session presented a proof of concept (POC) using air conditioning sensors, which constantly send information to Oracle IoT Cloud Service. When a problem with the temperature is noticed a ticket is raised automatically. A BIMServer was used to build a detailed model of the building. The maintenance folks could see the ticket and drill down from that into the model of the building, allowing them to potentially organise maintenance and fix things before the users even noticed the problem. Pretty cool, but not as cool as me according to Alexa!

ukoug-alexThe last session of the days was “Oracle 12c for Developers” by Alex Nuijten. This was a quick-fire session, covering lots of different development features that Alex likes from 12.1 and 12.2. I like these types of sessions because they cover so much ground. The audience was great, with lots of questions and interaction! It’s always interesting hearing other people’s questions. I wrote down a bunch of questions I didn’t know the answer to, which I will look into and add to my articles on the subjects. 🙂

Once the final session was over I had a quick chat with a bunch of people before heading home.

That’s UKOUG Tech16 Super Sunday done! I’ll be at the UKOUG Tech16 event all day tomorrow, as well as at the ACE dinner in the evening, so I hope to see you there!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I got a new sticker. The ORDS one in the middle. 🙂

ords-sticker