First of all “the before” time is over — I’m done with my presentation. It’s been the first slot of the day — 8:30 and Cary Milsap was presenting in another hall so what chances do I have to get people in? It turned out that some people actually did show up and quite a few considering the circumstances.

I have mixed feeling on the results. The presentation started very well and I managed to wake people up at the very beginning — thanks to the “equipment” I had at hands (thanks Marco and Riyaj!). You can spot one of them on the photo (thanks for the photo Marco):

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Courtesy of our friends at Oracle cost containment company Miro Consulting, I am giving a webinar tomorrow at 1pm EST (click this link for the time in other timezones please.

The subject I’ve chosen is how to apply the best practices around advanced supply management that are extremely successful and mature in the product supply chain world to the equally extremely immature practices we typically find in enterprise IT supply provisioning.

It should be a great presentation; I give an overview of the famous “Toyota Way” and cover some recent findings from the California Management Review as well.

The first point of the webinar is gaining an understanding of what the “supply management promise” really is - in broad terms it means achieving double-digit annual compound cost savings on the resource being supplied. The second point of the webinar is to discuss the methods for achieving this recurring savings and how to apply them to IT services.

This isn’t easy and requires substantial discipline, leadership and often even attitudinal change and leadership from the purchaser, and of course a vendor that is committed to passing on those savings to their customer, something that is culturally de rigueur in the product/manufacturing space, but highly unusually in the IT infrastructure management space (since claiming those savings are typically the vendor’s profit model). Of course, the Pythian approach is highly compatible with the application of advanced supply management strategies, whereas most outsourcing companies in the IT infrastructure and architecture space are very much not. Interestingly enough, the fully-insourced approach to enterprise data and systems management is also incapable of delivering the savings (because of the substantial cost in morale and team cohesion of claiming any should they materialize).

The target audience for this presentation is executives responsible for the IT infrastructure spend, often CFOs, COOs and CTOs who have an oversight role not only for the database licensing cost, but also for the operational cost of IT infrastructure ownership. A technical audience will learn about how Pythian works and how we position our offering to the executive suite purchaser.

I’ll do my best to get the audio and slides up on our website in the coming days.

As I mentioned, the presentation is being hosted and sponsored by Miro, a great partner of Pythian’s, and I blogged about Miro once before, here. You can register for the presentation by following this link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/204538076. Although the presentation is sponsored by Miro and they focus on Oracle, the presentation is not at all Oracle-specific and the techniques I discuss within it are highly appropriate for customers of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL.

The time is flying here and two days of RMOUG Training Days 2008 have gone. In a nutshell, what a great conference! Well done RMOUG and special thanks to Peggy King!

It was very nice to see a bunch of old friend and meet new ones in person including Jeremiah Wilton and Tim Gorman.

I liked the lunch organization — everyone was seated and nice food served — way better than standing buffet. The area with the tables was also used for the breakfast and this is where the keynote was done — excellent idea to combine those together:

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It’s been a while singe I blogged last time. Not that I’m feeling guilty — it’s coming whenever I have the mood and time left — but I kind of missed it. I have enough to share for few blogs a day and let’s hope I make it more often. But I digress.

I’m in Denver now and it’s RMOUG Training Days time! The University Sessions were running yesterday and the conference itself starts today. I have heard a lot of good things about RMOUG and the conference is considered as one of the best Oracle events in North America. I will be able to confirm it during the next two days but I have no doubt that it’s true.
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Mind you this was actually written more than a week ago but I didn’t have time to review and upload the photos on time so sorry for this delay.

I’m on the plane back to Canada and I’m extremely satisfied with the conference this year. I should say that I found it harder to keep up in the evenings with some slightly non-sober DBA’s around and get up “early” in the mornings to visit several good morning technical sessions. You might blame age but I shouldn’t complain… not yet, at least!

Enough whining… This is my final UKOUG 2007 post as you might have figured already so let’s get to it.

The last day was the shortest but the most difficult. I set my alarm at 8AM and it worked, unfortunately. I got up but couldn’t find my way around bouncing from the walls and bumping into the corners so I had to catch another couple hours of sleep. I could only wake up after 10 and by the time I took a shower, packed my luggage and checked out, it’s almost the middle of Doug Burns’ presentation and I didn’t want to disturb his speech which was very good I heard. Christo’s presentation was over by that time but I saw it already anyway in a full 60 minutes format so I didn’t really need a 45 minutes refresher. In addition, I can always shout in the office if I need an answer to a memory questions.

I waited in the speaker lounge until Doug’s session is over and used this opportunity to chat with few other speakers and later bumped into Lisa Dobson (or did she bump into me?). I had an interesting observation that we both were whispering and my explanation would be that we didn’t want to bother several other speakers who were focused on work, presentations and emails. There is another theory as well but I like this one more. ;-)
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Yesterday morning, I let myself to sleep longer — I had to be rested before my presentation as the previous evening went quite late. I also had to review my slides and, finally, complete them with couple finishing touches. That means I couldn’t make couple morning sessions. I decided to go to a presentation about Enterprise Manager. Not that I was aiming to learn something new about the product but I was interested to compare my experience with others and the sessions served the purpose quite well.

My own presentation went probably well as far as I could judge following up with people later in the day. The session was in Hall 5, which is a relatively large room — it fits 300+ people. However, the problem in the room was that the light on the speaker (me) was very bright and the light on the audience was dimmed so I couldn’t really see the faces! That meant I couldn’t see the nods, whether the audience is following me as well as their reaction so I couldn’t be sure that my jokes worked (I think I heard few snickers) and this made me even more worrying. According to the information from a reliable source, I looked more worried than usual. I’m afraid this time I couldn’t hide it well enough - I’m always tense at my presentation.

Just before my session I bumped into Jonathan Lewis during lunch time and he asked me if it’s true that I fell asleep in the middle of his session. To give you some background, (more…)

ORA-600 [42].

Well, this was a nice Oracle Bloggers Meetup this year. It was less crowded compare to last year which is a bit surprising if you think about it — there are more and more Oracle bloggers around. On the other hand, it let me focus more talking to participants of Oracle blogosphere and other social networking Oracle related crowd and I met quite a few new faces.

On the other hand, I liked more last year’s blogging gathering when there were 3 events clashing together with larger crowd. I also think that few key personalities were missing this year but that’s life.
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As you probably guessed I didn’t have a chance for a nap yesterday as I mentioned. All the usual suspects gathered in the Jury’s Inn pub sipping beer. Some of us went for dinner in the Indian restaurant after which I ended up in All Bar One and then later in Tap and Spile with more traditional old style atmosphere and nice selection of ales on tap. Even though they had Guinness, I decided to enjoy London Pride premium ale — very smooth with interesting combination of flavors. Indeed, “the sensation of angels dancing on the tongue” as described by Stephen Cox, a famous beer writer. But that was yesterday so moving on…

Unjustifiably early start today at 6:30 (your fault Christo). After registration, we tried to find some breakfast across the bridge from the rear entrance to the ICC but no luck. I always wanted to have a breakfast on the boat that is parked on the canal below the bridge and this morning we decided to wait until 9AM when it supposed to be open for breakfast according to the ad on it. No luck - it was still closed and looked dead at 9:05 and 15 minutes later I saw the boat leaving.

We had interesting speaker gifts — motion powered torch and radio:
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Christo Kutrovsky and me arrived in Birmingham today - just 6+ hours direct flight from Ottawa to London and two and a half hours on the bus - not too bad compare to 30+ hours travel from Melbourne to Ottawa earlier this week. It’s cloudy with sporadic rain drops but warm. We couldn’t checking at 11 AM and leaving our luggage behind, went for a short walk and some lunch.

I was very surprised to find German-style Kristkindlmarkt in Birmingham - Christmas Market:

Birmingham is very nice. Christo loves its European neatness and style — he enjoys “walking” cities. After lunch (it was OK) we checked in Copthorne Hotel and I asked for a room with internet — not every room has it, apparently. The internet cost is just £9.95 for the duration of the whole stay. It ACTUALLY says £20 for 24 hours DURING online registration but the hotel staff assured me it’s a mistake. I hope they know it better on reception.
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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!