Some of you might know that for more than two years we have had an office in Sydney, Australia. Last year, I had the pleasure to travel there to present at the AUSOUG conference and work from our office in Sydney. It’s been a huge pleasure, especially if you consider what was going on back in Ottawa at that time.

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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I’d like to share some great news — The Pythian Group and Open Query have become partners!

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 have arrived in Sydney!!

I have been in Sydney for a few days now. I was staying at Robert Menzies College (right across the street from MacQuarrie University or “Uni”). During the summer, the college offers short-term accommodation for $60 / day. Not too bad, as long as you are willing to stay in student residences and share a bathroom with 15 other women. Actually, considering that the price includes your meals at the cafeteria, it is a pretty decent price ( especially if you manage to be there at mealtimes).

I was staying there because I needed to be at MacQuarrie yesterday morning for my LSAT exam. No matter how much you prepare for the LSAT, it is a tough exam. I had the worst time with the logic games. I can always solve them, but they take me 20 minutes and you have about 8.5 minutes per game. Hopefully I got some marks for all the questions I had to guess at !!

It was very interesting doing the LSAT. You show Photo ID at the door and they take a thumbprint image on the admittance form. We had to be there by 8:30 and by the time we completed all the administration it was 9:15. We had one ten minute break and were not done until at least 1:15pm. Grueling!!! We had about one minute between ending one session and then starting on the next section, six sections in total. I used the Kaplan material for preparing and they recommend that you read each section, critically, and then when you move to the next section, just forget it. To me, the LSAT is like that, just do it, then move on.

So after the LSAT, I spent the afternoon looking for accommodations. Very interesting experience getting around the city. It is always fun to travel by bus and train to areas of town, you know nothing about, to find a place to live

I was quite lucky. The first person. Gillian, met me at the Milsons Point train station and drove me around Kirribilli. It is a lovely area just south of North Sydney and reminds me of the Glebe or Westboro. Lots of lovely little shops and restaurants along the street. But it was also small. It felt like a little town within a city. Gillian had a friend who also had a place available, so after seeing Gillian’s place, Eoin picked me up. Eoin also gave me a little tour. Hearing that I was new to the area and had not yet been across the Sydney Bridge, Eoin took me across so I could experience the bridge. He was great, after seeing his place, Eoin, drove me to the third place and offered to swing by later to give me a ride back to MacQuarrie.

So my day consisted of writing a tough exam and then being escorted around town by two complete strangers. It reminds me of the famous quote (from the movie “A Streetcar Named Desire”, which I have never seen, but remember the quote) “. . . I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Well that certainly was my case yesterday!!

The first session I attended this morning was “Creating a data grid using Oracle Coherence. It was “hands-on”, so we were supposed to bring our laptops to install software and he was going to do demos. NO ONE in the room brought their laptop. So Tim Middleton did an excellent job of ad-hoc presentation and answering all of our questions for nearly two hours. I can’t say what the hands-on would have been like but I certainly got a lot out of the session the way it was.

During the lunch break, I went to the ASG Booth in the exhibitor hall and had my tarot cards done. I am a number 6 for numerology. Naturally she told me all kinds of wonderful things, including that my children are doing fine and I will have no major problems with them and they are both very intelligent kids (she has that right). The rest I will wait and see if it happens, before I discuss it.

In the afternoon I went to Ramesh Naidu’s presentation on Cluster-wide monitoring for RAC. It covered all the components in a RAC Cluster that need monitoring and the importance of doing so, including Cluster services, ASM, network and database. There was also a good overview and explanation of inter-relationship of the basic RAC components.

Alex had been sharing his internet with me, but he flies out tomorrow morning, so I am not sure when I will have connectivity again. Might not be a few days…but will do my best to post ASAP.

The second, and the last, day of AUSOUG 2007 in Melbourne is over. Earlier today I had great presentation as I already blogged about. I had a quick chance to peak into Steve Lemme’s presentation on CA approach for solving an IT management dilemma. The only reason I was interested in it is because one of our clients is using CA Unicenter and looking to move away from it so I wanted to make sure that this is right (I’m quite sure myself anyway but it’s just a DBA perspective).

I had baked potato for lunch plus a sandwich. After that me and Paul Moen went down for a coffee (thanks to Chris Muir for suggestion of a better place). Oh yes - I’ve finally had a pleasure to meet Chris Muir.

Instead of keynote and the following presentation, I paid a visit to exhibitors and spoke to practically every exhibitor. It turned out that some of them knew or heard about Pythian which was quite pleasing to hear. I also found out that Han Xie (I’ve met him yesterday first time during follow up on my RAC presentation) from Dialog Information Technology had only come because of my presentation! As soon as he saw my name on the agenda few days ago, he requested his managers to send him over. This was a very pleasing compliment — thanks Han.

I sat on presentation about Web 2.0 interface with APEX but, frankly, I was almost falling asleep as the result of little rest last night and extremely monotonic speaking manner of the speaker. I also expected to be presented on how actually do that in APEX instead of some pretty much web 2.0 propaganda and demonstration of few cool widgets. Widgets were very cool indeed but it was definitely not my expectations. Anyway, what am I, DBA, supposed to know about development?

The last session for me was The Great Oracle Development Tools Debate with panel speakers (no need for names ;) being proponents of:
- Oracle JDeveloper
- Oracle Forms
- Oracle APEX
- Oracle Fusion as the whole concept

No one from .Net and only one person from the audience admitted he is using it. Strange, I quite liked .Net when I used it few years ago. If only it could run on non-windows platforms.

Anyway, the whole audience was pretty much concerned about discontinued Forms support (2014 was the year given by Lynne Munsinger from Oracle). So it was clear that new projects don’t start in Forms nowadays. But the choice between APEX and J2EE based platform was difficult. The audience was very cautious about Java and Fusion while optimistic on APEX. However, concerned that APEX won’t fit enterprise solutions bill, many are waiting on Java platform to become enough stable and reliable enough to build applications that can be supported for years to come instead of changing technology every year or so.

From my point of view it all boils down to when the business wants to spend the money — in advance with Java based Fusion and have a risk of loosing everything or slowly as the progress using APEX and having results right away. For me the choice is clear but modern architects and technologists might not agree with me.

Closing was quick — Babette didn’t win anything even though I sacrificed my chance for her (read that I was too lazy to stamp the paper at every exhibitor). I’m satisfied with the conference. I met many interesting people and discussed about how people work here in Australia and how the business is organized.

I’m going to the observation deck now to watch the sunset and I must harry not to miss it. I’m leaving tomorrow morning and will be in Ottawa on Wednesday night after the long journey (I don’t want to think about it now).

Regardless of my unfortunate early wake up, the day started great. I spent a couple hours reviewing and tightening up my block change tracking presentation. Unfortunately, just before the beginning I realized that one animated slide was completely screwed up and I wasn’t able to fix it on time so I apologize to the audience once again — it will be uploaded fixed.

Other than that screwed up slide, the presentation went very well. I had a small room (90 people) and it was pretty packed with few seats empty so very good turnover and almost nobody stepped away even though I warned about the level of material in the disclaimer. Very brave audience — thanks Ozzies!

So I’m pretty happy about today and decided that quick update on the blog wouldn’t harm. By the way, this update is “sponsored” by Global Software Inc.. These guys provide Excell automation software to simplify access to any ERP application database like Oracle E-Business Suite. Thanks Sherri!

I’ve got up at 6:30 today (it becomes a bad habit) because my phone started to make annoying sounds at 5:45 — it’s way too clever about meeting reminders and timezone-aware. I wish sometime technology is not that smart. Even though I went to bed after 3AM, I couldn’t get back to sleep — either I worry too much (ring-ring, Marco) or it’s that street noise that get through the window — I’m on the first floor and the hotel is next to a busy train station. But good for you — I decided to update the blog with few photos of Melbourne to kill some time and distract me from thoughts about my coming presentations.

Melbourne is a beautiful city! Interesting view from the Yarra River on a part of CBD:

We bought Sunday tickets (just two bucks each) and walked to Bourke Street for lunch. Babette took Chinese and I stopped at Tai chicken dish that supposed to be spicy but for some reason wasn’t at all.
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Monday, 26th of November, 2007.

I set my alarm at 6:30 so that I can finish all my morning procedures on time and register earlier. It wasn’t too difficult to wake up early today as I was in bed before midnight yesterday. Babette has already posted some details about yesterday and I only need to sort out my photos to add some “coloring” to it (at some point I’ll figure out how to do that on time!).

I registered at about 8:30 and went to the speaker prep. room. I was looking for internet there but…

When I first saw the label, I thought it’s some kind of a ba

Quick sum up of my previous post – I’m in Sydney this week and getting ready for my AUSOUG “snoitatneserp” next week. (Note that I wrote it in Sydney last week and only now managed to get the photos sorted out — sorry for the delay).

Thursday evening I was honored with a visit to Noons’ house. We had done a very nice walk around his place through Warriewood Wetlands. It was one of the most amazing walks I had –- a walking path via jungle style swamp (heh… they call it wetlands).

I saw many bird species but couldn’t remember the names – sorry Nuno, I know you tried your best. Actually, I think I do remember at least one – Kukubara Kookaburra (thanks Nuno!). Birds were beautiful and some fellows you can see here courtesy of Noons. I also saw few iguanas “water dragons” lizards (thanks Sarah) on the way and they ran away quickly as soon as they realized that I’m watching them.

It’s amazing that such a magical place can be so close to Sydney –- it took us only 40 minutes by car to get there from Sydney CBD but we had to leave early to get ahead of the traffic and not everyone drives as aggressive as Portuguese do.
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Yesterday morning my co-worker, Alex Gorbachev, arrived from Sydney. We went together to sight-see around the city. First stop was across the street to the IGA to buy a bus pass…sold out ..across the street again ( kitty corner from hotel) to the “Southern Cross Station”. It is a really big train station and used to be called “Spencer Station” because it is on Spencer St.

We stopped off and got a map of Melbourne and made our way to Bourke Street for lunch. It is an area of town like Sparks Street in Ottawa that is closed off from regular traffic, open only to pedestrians and “the tram”. After lunch we caught the tram ( only one stop ) just for the sake of catching it. We walked through Confederaton square, which was interesting only for the unusual buildings and then took the alley to the canal and finally to the park.

Next we headed to the large cathedral. It was HUGE and glorious and open to the public. It was breath-taking in it’s beauty and architecture. While there, both Alex and myself, made a contribution to the candle fund and lit a candle. After having “no joy” ( no luck) finding the other churches in the area ( both were small and closed), we got on the tram system and headed to the botanical gardens.

The gardens were absolutely gorgeous. It was smaller than the map let on and we managed to do the entire park. At first, I thought we would have to skip parts of it…but we managed to see the entire park. On the last side path we did, I somehow lost my footing and tripped and scraped my other knee. So if ‘Australia does not kill me, it is certainly going to get me in really good shape. We left the hotel by noon and did not get back until nearly 6:30. Even with the few stops for lunch and coffee and tram rides, I musta walked for hours and hours !!!

We went to China town for dinner last night, where Alex had real ( and real hot ) chinese food. A combination pot of some sort. He did not look too healthy while eating it. I admire his tenacity for managing to eat it all. It was far too hot and spicy for me.

Today was day one of AUSOUG in Melbourne. The first session I attended was Penny Cookson’s session on Oracle 11g. It is the same one she gave in Perth and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to go again. After I went to Chris Muir session on load testing APEX and JDeveloper. It was very interesting and he demonstrated the tools for capturing and replaying sets of data. The whole process is much simpler than I thought it would be.

In the afternoon, I attended Penny Cookson’s sesson on APEX, followed by Tony Jambu’s session on Histograms. I presented in the 4pm timeslot today, but having my luggage this time, I was much better prepared. I brought the famous “easy button” and used it to make the presentation on LDAP and Oracle Application Server easy. Hopefully by the end of it all, the participants could say “that was easy” !!