Last year, I had very pleasant experience presenting at AUSOUG Conference 2007 in Melbourne. It was a long way from Canada but no regrets. Since I moved to Sydney more than a month ago, it’s much closer to travel and this year I will be presenting on both AUSOUG conferences — in Perth and at Gold Coast.

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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For those of you who didn’t see the Larry Ellison’s keynote here it is courtesy to Sheeri.

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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It’s my first Oracle Open World so I get a bit frustrated by the magnitude if the event. I think I’m getting used to it now and it’s easier to find my way around and orient in what I want to see.

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…

Gavin Newsome, mayor of San Francisco, and Ed Begley, Jr. talk about being green, and commend Oracle and Oracle OpenWorld for being green.

Watch the video online or download the 19 Mb flash video file

Watch the video online or download the 18 Mb flash video file

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To start off the conference, the first keynote at Oracle OpenWorld took a break from technology and veered into the world of politics. The official conference description says:

Washington’s best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics.

Indeed, there was humor, and politics. For a light-hearted yet factual look at US politics, watch the video by streaming directly in your browser or download the 176 Mb Flash video file.

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Next week, Dan Norris and I will collaborate on a presentation at Oracle Openworld 2008. Our presentation, entitled So, You Want to be an Oracle ACE?, will be on Monday, 9/22, from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm in Moscone South, room 310 — that’s the very first conference slot.

We’ve already put together our presentation, with input from many Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE directors, complete with some great video clips. I’m excited and honored to be presenting with Dan. The official description of our presentation is:

The Oracle ACE program recognizes those who provide sustained community contributions, among other criteria. An Oracle ACE director, this session’s speaker emphasizes the value of community involvement and spends much time volunteering. It can be hard to know where and how to start. An intro to what community means (especially to Oracle) and specific volunteer activities may be all some people need to start. The session covers benefits of becoming involved in the community–so you can convince your manager to let you do so on company time.

We will also be presenting Tuesday afternoon as part of the unconference at 3 pm in Overlook I.

As I am a first-time Oracle Open World attendee, I’m a bit overwhelmed — there are over 1700 presentations! I’ll have my coworker, Alex Gorbachev as a guide, but if you see me, say hi — don’t let the speaker badge fool you, I will likely be pretty lost. :)

If a MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minute session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware.

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.

It’s all over now and I can’t describe how tired I am. As I type it, my flight from Chicago is delayed by 1.5 hour so far (the third delay already, 30 minutes each). I should say that I hate Chicago airport but I digress.

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…

I should say that I had interesting experience this evening — a tornado warning in downtown Chicago.

The alarms went off as soon as we tried to get out of the restaurant. Below is a year old example but it sounded exactly like that + it was much darker — like if the skies fell on us:

We had to turn back and were stuck in the pub for another hour or so sipping Guinness while the mother-nature had some fun around us. Funny, looks like it decided to come back now — skies are falling again with heavy rain, clouds and lightnings everywhere. The thunder is very loud and sirens went off again — can’t even sleep. But I digress so let’s get back to the overview of the day…

I love small classes! I mean small rooms with all chairs taken when people are close to me as I present and close to each other. The audience today was exact fit for the room — 20 people could fit on the chairs around the desks and few more (organizers and presenters) next to the back wall. What I like about small classes is the intimate atmosphere in the room. I also like live speech where my voice delivered natively without electronic distortion keeping all the beauty of the Russian accent (some people *still* noticed bits of German influence there).

The only small problem was the location of the stand where a speaker hosts the laptop — it was in the middle of the room. That felt somewhat odd and I kept running between the middle of the room and the stage (well, or the place where it’s supposed to be). I used to the fact that I have another view on my laptop screen — speaker’s view with next slide/motion and my reminders. I also had to do several demo’s on my RAC cluster and I obviously needed the keyboard badly for that. I should apologize that 8 people had to observe my back instead of my face for some time and I also couldn’t see how they were taking the material but I tried to look back from time to time and as soon I did that — I could see confirming nods so thanks for that!
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Just a quick note that I’m going to present two sessions on the RAC Attack! event in Chicago next week — 4-5 August 2008. The event is organized as two threads — one for advanced RAC DBA’s and another one for beginners. Each thread will have one day of hands-on labs and one day of lectures. Another option would be to choose two days of lectures. More details on the RAC Attack event home page.

I’ll be presenting on both days. The beginner’s presentation will be “Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware” and the more advanced session is called “Connections! Connections! Connections!”. Now, I’m terribly busy preparing for it — working on the slides (yes, I started earlier than some might expect…) and setting up the live demo.

RAC Attack is organized by IOUG and RAC SIG and, as far as I know, the attendance will pretty good but there are still few places left so you have a chance to register.

What’s for me? Great opportunity to catch up with few old friends and, hopefully, meet some new ones. In addition, I have never been to Chicago so it’s something I really keen to experience while I have a chance.