I recently traveled to Europe to present at a few conferences. The Slovenia Oracle User Group (SIOUG) conducted an Oracle conference in Portoroz, a port city in Adriatic Sea.

Thanks to my friend Joze Senegacnik, I had wonderful time in Slovenia. We also visited the city of Venice while we were there. Of course, we all knew that Venice is the city of bridges—over a hundred small islands connected by bridges. But visiting Venice in person had a dramatic effect on us. We were mesmerized by the beauty, culture, and architecture, in particular the Basilica of St.Mark. Venice is indeed the Queen of the Adriatic.

Back to reality. I presented a few papers for the Dallas Oracle Users Group (DOUG) for their October tech meeting too. All these papers can be accessed following these links: (more…)

My presentation was on the first day, right after the keynote, and following my habit of reviewing the slides before the show, I spent this keynote hour one-to-one with my MacBook. I could never underestimate the importance of this review following one fiasco I had in the past when I neglected to thoroughly review the existing slides of my older presentation before presenting it.

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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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…

Oracle RAC SIG web cast presented by your humble servant. Don’t miss it today! You can register on the RAC SIG web-site. This is a longer than usual session (90 minutes) packed with details of connection failover, load balancing and implementation details.

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!

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…

Small local user group meetings have their own beauty because of the special intimate atmosphere. We expected somewhat higher attendance but it seems that people were already in the holiday mode — it’s been a somewhat hot day and school kids had their last classes yesterday — so we’ve got about half of expected 50 attendees.

I should say that it’s been a nice and relaxing day for me. I started the morning reviewing my slides and then continued at the airport and on the flight. My flight to Toronto arrived just a bit late but I had plenty of time so I arrived quarter to one at the Oracle office building in Toronto (technically, Mississauga).

Djordje Jankovic and Carol Legros, who invited me there in the first place, were already there and, being a nice host, Djordje took me downstairs for a quick lunch. When we were back, the audience was almost ready so I just few 5 minutes to hook my laptops up which is more than enough — I know my Mac well enough now to avoid any surprises. Kenotes even managed to display few PowerPoint slides that Djordje used starting the meeting. By the way, he admitted that Keynotes is way cooler than PowerPoint. Well, that’s no brainer!
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Today I’m doing a presentation at the Toronto Oracle User Group meeting. It’ll be my first time there and I’m really looking forward to it.

My session is called Oracle 11g New Features Out of the Box. It went pretty well at Collaborate 08 and I think it will be the right audience at the TOUG meeting. I’m reviewing the slides at the moment — usual last minute tweaks but it’s time to leave to the airport — my flight is in 1.5 hour.

I have already checked-in on both the flight to Toronto and return. I didn’t know that you can check-in online on the return flight without completing one-way first. Well, I like technology advancing. :)