Looks like our blog has turned into a MySQL blog over this week, so I have to do something about it. Luckily, I have zillions of pending posts, so I’ll start with posting my presentations materials from this conference with my remarks on how it went in general.

On Monday, I was presenting about Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensibility and, as an example, we created a new plug-in to monitor a MySQL database target. (Wait, I said I wanted to dilute our MySQL topics this week, didn’t I?)

This presentation was based on the material I prepared for the UKOUG Conference 2006. I learned that that audience was a bit overwhelmed by the details, so I introduced a live demo this time, switching to it between the slides. Since there was also a paper available in addition to presentation, I could afford to skip some detail; this let me slow down a little so that the pace was much more comfortable for the audience.

You can download the archive including presentation, paper and all examples. I recommend you follow the paper — it’s much better structured and more suitable for independent study compared to the presentation. The sample code and MySQL plug-in packaged into the Management Plug-in Archive (MPA) is available as well.

I have had great responses from the attendees and I found that interest in the topic was much higher compare to that from Birmingham in November last year. I don’t know if that’s because more DBAs started to look to Grid Control over the last half a year or because of some geographical influence: IOUG is attended predominantly by a North American audience compared to European-oriented contingent of UKOUG. It seems as though Grid Control has not been widely adopted in Europe.

On Monday evening, I took part in the Oracle 10g Grid Control Speaker Panel. The panel was moderated by Dr. DBA Ken Jacobs. Panel speakers besides me included Gaja Krishna Vaidyantha, Rich Niemiec, Leng Tan, Martin Pena, and Arup Nanda. I think it was the most successful speaker panel of the event — lots of interesting questions from the floor, and a lot of interest from attendees. I learned that Grid Control is being widely adopted, and that lots of Oracle shops consider Grid Control the tool-of-choice for Oracle database monitoring and administration these days. Many of the attendees were interested in extending the use of Grid Control to other areas of their IT infrastructure (the Grid, if you wish).

Stay tuned - more to come.