At the beginning of the session, once again I realized that DBA audience at AUSOUG conference is relatively small percentage. On the other hand it might be Tim Hall who has stolen my DBA audience to his session about PL/SQL 11g new features. Yeah… it must have been Tim as it turned out later he is the number two speaker in Australia. ;-)

My few jokes on the initial slides were not as good as they would be with larger audience but, at least, resulted in smiles so I guess I can call it success to a certain degree. The presentation itself went well I think but I wasn’t too trilled about it and there are few places I want to change before I present it at Gold Coast. Well, live and learn. I’ve got some positive responses afterward and even a piece of photography art tagged by “excellent” courtesy to Francisco Munoz Alvarez:

I managed to fit comfortably within 45 minutes with few question during and after the presentation. It’s been traditionally very difficult for me to manage 45 minutes slot but I guess I’m getting better at it.
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I arrived to Perth late Friday night and Saturday evening we had a very nice dinner with the bunch of Oracle ACE’s (and some of them ACE Directors). Local ACE’s were presented by Chris Muir, Connor McDonald and Penny Cookson. Tim Hall represented UK ACE’s while me being semi-local ACE from Sydney. Two of us were double agents — me and Connor are also members of OakTable Network. Seven is definitely a better number than 5 so my family brought number of lunch guests to 7. It’s been great to catch up with everyone before the start of the conference. Food was also very nice. Unfortunately, I had to hurry up at the end — my junior was falling asleep on the table as it was already close to midnight in Sydney timezone.
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We cut out the HP part but I don’t think anyone will complain. It’s not the best angle but we didn’t get there early in advance to secure the right location for the camera.

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First, few words about my presentation on Sunday — Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware. The hall was packed full and, unfortunately, few people were not even let it as I learned later. The session went very well and I should, perhaps, send you to other blogs with responses instead of my subjective perspective.

This conference, I’ve spent more time than usual hanging around instead of sitting on the presentations. My favorite place is OTN Lounge — it’s nice and quiet. It also seems to be a de facto place for many folks to meet — no tough time seeking for old friends and good chances making new ones.

On Monday, I gave a short interview (truveo youtube) about Oracle entering cloud computing after the Andy Mendelson’s keynote. Andy had tough job on his keynote as he didn’t have much new-features-ammo but I enjoyed couple demos from Mark Townsend. In the first dome I liked OEM’s GUI to the real time SQL monitoring — nice visual representation of the the progress through the execution plan.

Backup to Amazon S3 storage service was quite amazing to see. Obviously, there will be many concerns over security but what a great way to take your backups off-site!

Lots of buzz about the X key note that will be just in couple hours and even non-OOW attendees are rumoring about it.

Well, what can I say? This about the following:
- Oracle acquisition strategy is quite clear
- There are some “small” fish providing interesting data warehouse solutions
- ASM is there for a reason and must be a good layer for tight integration with storage
- IO is the ultimate performance bottleneck these days (if everything else done right)
- You would enjoy this public document - Projects at Oracle

Alright, stay tuned — I’ll take the advantage of my blogger credentials to have a good sit during the X keynote and plan to have the blog posted right away…

The session starts later than usual — 1pm PDT or 4pm EDT. However, I will have to wake up at 4am here in Sydney, Australia. Besides being way too early for me, it would be the first time I present in the form of a web cast. I’m somewhat worried that I won’t actually see the audience and there is no immediate feedback link but I guess I will have to assume that nobody is snoring. ;-)

That’s all folks. Can’t write too much rumblings here — I’m way too busy these days settling Down Under… settling down Down… eh, you know what I mean. See you on the web cast!

Long story short — I’m moving to Australia. My flight from Ottawa leaves in three hours and I’m all packed and ready to go. Today we had a kiss-goodbye lunch at here at the Pythian office in Ottawa, and I was presented my new role Down Under. Hmm . . .  to be honest, I expected it to be somewhat different:

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Open Query is a leading provider of high-quality MySQL, PostgreSQL and related training in Australia and New Zealand. They offer consulting services too, and are also known for their MySQL Graph Storage Engine. Feel free to browse through Open Query web-site for more info.

Open Query was founded by Arjen Lentz, who was employee number 25 at MySQL AB. If you follow the MySQL community then I’m sure you already read Arjen’s blog.

Since you’re reading this blog, I guess you probably already know what Pythian does, but if you want to learn more, please click through to our home page.

Together with Open Query, we are going to extend our service offerings and strengthen our positions in outsourced database management services, consulting, and training.

I gave it during RAC Attack in Chicago and I’m pretty satisfied with how it went, so there should be no significant changes to the presentation. The session is in “User Group Forum,” thanks to RAC SIG and Dan Norris.

When the session was first added to the agenda it was misspelled as “Under the Good of Oracle Clusterware.” That’s hilarious and I thought I should have left it as is. Too late now — it’s been fixed.

I’m pretty sure that many of you will be at the OOW as well, so I’ll be glad to meet you in person. I’m getting back on Twitter slowly, so it might be a good way to track me down in SF. No guarantee I’ll keep it up to the minute if it takes too much effort, but I’ll try.

I’ve got this link while browsing the search results for RAC Attack. I guess should ask my granddad to pass my best wishes to Mr. George H.W. Bush.

Last night, I left my presentation in a good state and verified the first batch of demos — all worked fine. This morning turned into a disaster as I found out that the rest of my demos stopped working — my 11g RAC cluster on Ubuntu (I have the reason for such unusual setup) got issues with network connectivity. I should probably blame VMware Fusion 2.0 beta combined with Ubuntu but the net result was failing network connections with weird TNS errors and hanging connection requests. Obviously, I couldn’t demonstrate advanced connection management without *simple* connections working.

Well, I didn’t have any other choice but to add new slides with some demo results. Since I did it in a rush, there were some overlaps and I ended up with way too many slides. Good news that the first demo generated sufficiently enough interest about services automation and connection load balancing so we spent significant time there. Well, nothing comes for free so the rest of the presentation had to be covered too quickly but I did manage to go through the failover scenarios and failover technologies available. Run-time load balancing and load balancing advisory wasn’t left aside either so I did make it till the very last slide!

All in all, today’s session wasn’t as good as yesterday but I managed to avoid a complete failure with the demos so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

This morning I checked how the labs went on the 24th floor and I should say that labs agenda looked very impressive and it seems that lab part was probably the best feature of the event. The amount of material Jeremy Schneider prepared was huge and there would be enough labs for 2 full days, not just one. The attendees could choose the areas they are interested in most and work on different threads with their own pace. Great job Jeremy!

Back to the reality and the airport… The flight Chicago-Ottawa is 3+ hours late and they moved us to another gate. Oh… Do I hate Chicago airport! In the meantime I managed to transfer this text from my MacBook to the Blackberry and publishing it from there. The Blackberry syncronisation utility for Mac is a big shame. Can’t wait for iPhone…

To finish on a good note — I’m very glad I came to RAC Attack! What a pleasure to see old friends and make new ones. I just hope I can actually *leave* this place…