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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I had a great time today at RMOUG. Still very tired from traveling yesterday, I missed the opening session. I managed to make it to Bradley Brown’s APEX session, only a little late. I was quite impressed with some of the things that can be done in APEX. Brad demonstrated a sample application with master detail records in different regions of the screens with colour and with context changing automatically based on which records were selected. I like the way that Brad used SQL statements and returned different data based on values set in the page data.

Daniel Liu did a good job of presenting 11g New Features for DBAs. It will be interesting to see how partitioning on virtual columns work. The new 11g data compression also sounds very interesting. It now works on a block level, rather than table level and dynamically re-compresses data as necessary. I wonder what new wait events are related to this new workload ?

I attended the “Building Dynamic Google Gadgets in Java” session. I was a little concerned that it would be heavy into Java and I might get lost. I was pleasantly surprised at how little Java there was and how simple the gadgets were to use and develop. Hopefully I will get a chance to play with this when I get back.

For the rest of the afternoon, I attended Graham Wood’s presentation on “The DB Time Performance Method”, followed by Michael Rosenblum’s presentation on “Autonomous Transactions”. I had used them a lot in a previous life for error logging and processing child records did not think I was going to get too much out of the presentations. I was very pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed some of the tricks used and interesting ways that Michael was using autonomous transactions.

I ended the day of presentations with Mogens Norgaard’s Tuning session. OK…perhaps it is not fair to say it was Mogens’s presentation as he did rely heavily on audience participation, especially from Daniel Fink, Jonathan Lewis and Graham Wood. I am not sure he even let them know that he would be calling on them to co-present. But he did bribe them handsomely with some very rare Danish Beer.

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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