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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This message is for our readers mostly located in UK and Europe but keep reading even if you are far away geographically - nothing is impossible in our digital age and you might actually consider traveling there in case of desperate interest. Your feedback would be useful, either way.

What I want to draw your attention to is that Jonathan Lewis has posted a call for attendees for a special event dedicated to virtualization technologies with Oracle. This event is considered by UKOUG and whether it happens or not depends on you.

I had a brief discussion with Jonathan at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham last week and shared significant interest about virtualization that I can see from our customers as well as a fear cloud around it. From my point of view, an event dedicated to virtualization technologies would be very timely now to satisfy quickly growing interest and provide real world experience in addition to publicly available marketing-like information from different vendors. Knowing high quality of UKOUG events, I’m sure that this would be a great forum to share ideas and learn what others do with virtualization.

Have a quick look here if haven’t done so already especially if you are closer to managerial role or wear architect’s hat rather than DBA’s one. It’s not only about host virtualization but also network, storage and other resources.

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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This was the presentation I gave at Open World 2007. It went pretty well, judging by how full the room was. I estimate more than 300 people attended.

Although the title may sound a bit like a sales pitch, the content is more substantial. It covers the features that are ready to use out-of-the-box, things that will make your life easier from day one, without any kind of “implementation” procedure. One-line changes do not count as implementation.

I was please to recognize a few of Pythian’s clients in the crowd. They came to see me after the session to say how much they liked it. Judging by how lively the audience was, especially in the wake of the big conference party, I would say most people enjoyed it.

I saw a few people take pictures of my slides, and had some ask me for the slides. As promised, here they are: 11g: The Perfection of a Masterpiece.

I will next be going to the UK Oracle User Group Conference in December giving my presentation on memory. I look forward to seeing you there.