Oracloid Blog

Yes, it’s almost that time of the year when one of the best Oracle conferences in the world opens its doors to attendees in Birmingham — UKOUG Conference 2009: Technology & E-Business Suite. The lineup of speakers will be fantastic as usual and agenda is full of juicy bits — You will have usual troubles scheduling sessions to attend and hate to make compromises between presentations you want to see badly but that’s kind of problems you’d rather have at a good conference.

The past year was very eventful so I feel like I haven’t been at the UKOUG Conferences for years even though I did come to the UKOUG Conference 2008. This conference is something special for me — it’s the first conference I attended and presented on so it’s set the tone for the whole conferencing experience of my life and I’m very grateful for that! So far, I haven’t missed a single year since my first UKOUG conference and I hope I keep it this way for years to come.

The conference is different this year and I support the changes very much. Oracle family of products has become so large over the last few years that UKOUG conference kept growing and growing every year. This year, it was decided to split the technologies and leave only the core Oracle Server and E-Business Suite Technology with the conference scaling down to 3 days. In the past, anything more that 3 days was quite difficult as those days are very intense and the last day I felt quite tired which is really unfortunate considering that masterclasses are running during that last day. I think it might also be a timely decision in the light of current economic conditions when most organizations had to cut their educational budgets — attending a 3 days conference is easier to justify than a whole week.

I’m doing few sessions this year:

• Mon, 30-Nov 11:50 — Oracle ASM 11g – the Evolution.
• Tue, 1-Dec 16:50 — Managing Oracle Connection in WebLogic with RAC and Data Guard.
• Mon, 30-Nov 16:25 — Server Manageability Roundtable

I have already done the presentation about ASM few times but it was always incomplete (especially when I got access to 11gR2 beta program and learned new ASM features) so now I can include all the new cool stuff that’s come with Oracle Database 11gR2.

You might know that I’ve been doing few presentations about connection management with Oracle RAC but this time I decided to focus on a specific application tier. I think WebLogic server and its specifics in connection handling with Oracle RAC has not been covered at all so why don’t I try that?

Finally, it will be the first time that I’ll be organizing a roundtable at UKOUG conference — Server Manageability Roundtable. I’m really looking forward to it and to contributions from the attendees. The success of any roundtable depends on the interest of attendees and hitting the right topics. I encourage you to attend and post here what are the hottest issues you experience in server manageability area and what are the areas you would like to hear most about.

Early bird registration finishes on 30th of October so don’t miss that if cost is a big factor.

That’s all folks. See you in Birmingham!

Singe I’ve got a special press badge this year, I felt I had to do something about it so I decided to make short interview with few people that I’m running into during this Oracle Open World.

I have already blogged about my Sunday’s interviews but I created a Youtube playlist where you can see them all (use arrows on the sides).

So far I interviewed Justin Kestelyn, Richard Foote, Stanley ACE Director, John Kanagaraj, Marko Gralike, Jacco Landlust, Chris Muir, Tim Hall, Steven Feuerstein, Gareth Llewellyn, Doug Burns, Marcel Kratochvil and Gary Goodman. There is one more day left so I’ll trying to do few more.

I’m quite late to blog about it now but the OOW09 Bloggers Meetup was a success. I should say thanks to the OTN for sponsoring the bar tab as well as to HP for sponsoring a nice HP laptop as a prize.

The original location was a smaller area with a larger outdoor balcony but due to the weather concerns, it was moved completely indoor in the bigger banquet style room and it worked extremely well. We had more than 50 people showed up — probably around 70+ — as 51 t-shirts I printed for that occasion has completely gone.

The idea with t-shirt is to collect signatures from bloggers you meet and talk to. The most valuable result is that you get totally cool and unique t-shirt that you will want to wear after day (or maybe not wear and put it under the glad instead of the painting on the wall and demonstrate in your living room). The least all bloggers are going to do is to post a photo of their t-shirts — make sure you leave some feedback later.

Here is mine:

Doug Burns did a way better job than me with his review of the event.

Visitors of the bloggers meetup as well as you, fellow readers of this blog, have unique preview opportunity for the new Pythian logo and slogan if you keep your eyes open:

Btw, it’s Justin Kestelyn who is buying beer on the photo above.

As I’m moving from Australia back to Canada, this photo with fellow Aussie Oracle ACE Directors is one of the most valuable for me as I’ve had fantastic time down there.

You can find more photos in Bloggers Meetup Flickr tag.

So thanks all the bloggers for coming and sponsors for sponsoring! If you were on that meetup – make sure you blog about it, post you photos and publish the photo on *your* t-shirt to the community (yeah, you can take it off the wall this one time).

Heads to everyone who hasn’t got a message on Twitter or didn’t read Justin’s blog post — we are moving completely indoor (guess why?). It’s now LJ’s Martini Club & Grill @ Metreon 2nd Floor but same address — 101 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.

You just need to look for a large Metreon label on the building — adjusted to Moscone South.

See you all there!

As I’ve done my presentation this morning, I’m free for the rest of the day and I stopped by OTN Lounge where the cool stuff is almost ready to go — final tweaks and preparation before 4 days of rocking.

I’ve spoke to Justin Kestelyn of Oracle Technology Network and here what he has to say about this year’s OTN activities at the Oracle Open World. The keywords for me – “Espresso in the Morning, Beer in the Afternoon”.

Another note is that you definitely DO NOT want to overlook Oracle Unconference sessions this year. The lineups of the speakers is fantastic and here are just few names — Cary Milsap, Chen Shapira, Greg Rahn, Kevin Closson, Dan Morgan, Richard Foote, Chris Muir, Simon Haslam, Marcel Kratochvil, Mark Rittman. I’ll be there as well (see my schedule).

Here is what Richard Foote shared with me about his surprising topic for the Unconference. Who would think about that?

More to come — stay tuned!

Most of this week I spend in San Francisco — I arrived on Wednesday with couple other Aussie Oracle ACE Directors, Chris Muir and Marcel Kratochvil. This year I have my whole family traveling with me so it should be fun.

The first few days we spent by sleeping off our jet lag and I was also working on my presentations for the Oracle Open World (I’ve got to do 5 sessions this year. I also managed to finish a chapter that I’m contributing for one book (and I was terribly late) so those couple days were very productive.

I’ve also managed to visit Oracle headquarters on Thursday and meet with few Oracle Enterprise Manager product managers as well as said hello to some of the “Russian mafia” at Oracle HQ. It’s always a pleasure to finally meet people face-to-face after knowing them online for a while.

Of course, I managed to snap a few pictures of Oracle HQ.

Full day on Friday was invested in Oracle ACE Directors briefing at Oracle HQ. While many think that there are many top secret things shared, I think it’s not entirely true. While we asked not to disclose most of the facts from the briefing, pretty much all of them are going to be announced at the OOW keynotes so make sure you stay tuned. Areas that were interesting to me the most are Oracle database, of course, and APEX 4.0. Business Intelligence was also quite interesting but it’s a bit far from my area of interests. Of course, all-things-fusion were flying way above me.

One of the best part of that day were post briefing cocktails to enjoy few with your fellow ACE Directors. The bus ride was also fun as we manager to grab few roadies with us. The bus driver seemed to be quite lost and those of us who new San Francisco pretty well were making fun on the poor guy.

We grabbed a quick dinner at Little Joe’s. They say on their web-site — “cheerfully serving quality meals at reasonable prices since 1970″. I could verify 3 facts out of four are true — cheerfully, quality, reasonable — but I haven’t been here in 1970 so we have to trust them. The highlight of the evening was meeting couple old friends in the pub if InterContinental Hotel — long time no see! By the way, InterContinental is a very nice place to stay I have to say.

We woke up late morning on Saturday and took a cab to Pier 39 for lunch and meeting three good old friends from Germany.

We had very nice lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf — seafood was awesome! We were excited about Fleet Week and see some cool sky tricks. This heavy guy was maneuvering very impressively for its size:

Blue Angels F-18 Navy Fleet was supposed to be the highlight of the event but I think they only did couple circles around in less than 10 minutes. Disappointed as I expected more but they were still impressive:

Sea Lions were fun to watch but boy do they stink!

I had to go back to the hotel early to prepare for my today’s presentation — I have lots of demos to do and I have only 1.5 hour instead of “normal” 2 hours that I need for that presentation. It’s Oracle RAC Workload Management session that needs some careful planning to fit even within 2 hours. Initially, I thought to records the demos to speed it up but then I tried to record it with my voice and thought that it wasn’t nice to run recording at the live session. I then thought that I could keep only the video and comment live — I tried but was struggling to either synchronise or keep pausing the playback. Finally, I decided to remove 3 out of 9 demos and do it live anyway. Let’s hope I fit on time because the last few demos are the most interesting.

I checked pre-registration status and there are 173 seats still available. It meens there must be more than a hundred pre-registrations as it should be at least 300 people room (Moscone West Level 2 Room 2001). Not bad for 8:30am Sunday morning session. Last year my session on Sunday was at more reasonable time and few hundred seats room was full. I noticed that RAC SIG session at 10:00am is in the same room so I won’t need to go anywhere and in the worst case I might overrun just a little bit assuming the audience stays awake.

Time to go — my session starts in 30 minutes. Wish me luck!