I guess I have only one and a half posts about COLLABORATE 08 this year. It’s a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t make the whole conference, but only last day-and-a-half. In addition, I’ve been speaking at the two lasts slots of the conference so it’s been quite busy for me.

As I mentioned already, the scheduling for my presentation got a bit screwed-up due to the last minute call to participate in the speaker panel — “To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA”. Thanks to Dan Norris, my session was finally moved to 11:00, which is right after the panel. On the other hand, 11:00 slot is the last IOUG session of the conference. This fact, coupled with last minutes re-scheduling, brought the number of participants down. Even though there were about 30 people and the hall (Korbel 1C) was small enough not to seem empty.

Back to the RAC speaker panel, I enjoyed the discussion and especially the fact that speaker’s opinions on how wide RAC adoption should be were a little different. I took the liberty of starting the discussion with a quite provocative quote — “complexity is the enemy of availability”. Interesting that the other panel speakers seemed to disagree to it to some extent by countering it — use knowledge to fight complexity. Not that I don’t agree with it (on the contrary) but my point was rather, “why make it complex when you can keep it simple?” Some of the reasons for over-complicating systems can be found here.

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I’m at Collaborate 08 in Denver these days. I arrived yesterday evening so I haven’t had a chance to see any sessions yet but I did have a nice dinner with a bunch of OakTable folks. The steak wasn’t great but the best part was that I could enjoy my time with people I don’t get to see very often.

Today started with some confusion. My presentation, Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box, was originally scheduled on Thursday at 9:45 AM but due to participation in the speaker panel ,”To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA?”, it was rescheduled to today, Wednesday, at 4:30 PM. However, this change didn’t make it to the printouts with latest changes so the options right now are either re-schedule my session to a later time tomorrow or keep it at the original schedule and pull me off the panel. I’d really enjoy that panel as it goes right along my alley but I need to make my session as well so we’ll see how it works out.

I’m off to the Carol Dacko’s presentation about DBMS_XPLAN now and looking forward to show up at the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather later today. Stay tuned - more to come…