It will take me a while to follow up on all the presentations I’ve visited during UKOUG06 and photos I’ve taken. One of the best presentations was Inside RAC from Julian Dyke. You can find it here if you don’t have access to UKOUG06 archive.

However, the fun part you won’t get unless you’ve been on his presentation. It turned out that toilet paper is an integral part of a RAC cluster. Just go to give you an impression (more pictures here):

The performance with participation of few volunteer was great. Cones on the heads indicated the role of the nodes for a certain block during a particular operation. Square label with an SCN number of it is an image of the block. Toilet paper marked the path of the block.

Very quickly the scene became a mess of toilet paper which wasn’t of very high quality. This leads to a real life hint - make your interconnect rock solid and reliable.

Another issue is that some “nodes” were busy quite with several activities and blocks/cones/toilet paper ends were falling out of their hands. This is another lesson - make sure your nodes have enough CPU capacity and not totally occupied with something else (read short on CPU).

All in all it was a great performance. Artists?

• Node 1 - Stephen Booth
• Node 2 - Babette Turner-Underwood
• Node 3 - Murali Vallath (he obviously was a master node)
• Node 4 - Carel-Jan Engel
• Director - of course, Julian Dyke.

You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.