In the recent month there were several Oracle community web sites created. Well, I remember I registered on one or two but I couldn’t really keep an eye on many so I decided to wait and see which one wins. Turns out that Oracle Mix came out as a winner. Maybe it’s just my impression.

But I digress… I just wanted to make a quick note that Oracle Mix organized an interesting hybrid between call for papers and abstract judging. Anyone registered at Oracle Mix can propose a session abstract to present themselves or as an idea for others. Everyone can give their votes to the proposed sessions. At the end of the voting deadline (25th of June) Oracle will select the top sessions to be included in the Oracle Open World schedule.

So what? Well, I did send mine few days ago — Demystifying Workload Management with Oracle RAC based on my Hotsos Symposium 2008 presentation. I’m not sure how wide is the potential audience for this session — it’s far from beginners session and is specific to RAC. However, I do believe that this topic is often misunderstood and there is very good potential to spread the knowledge. So if you are coming to the Oracle Open World and interested in that topic - go ahead and vote. If not mine, there are plenty of others.

PS: I managed to do 2 (!) typos in the title and can’t edit it anymore. I don’t have any error on update but the title comes back unchanged. I have already filled in a bug report - let’s see if it gets fixed.

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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Last year’s Hotsos Symposium was the first for me. These were exciting few days and I fully enjoyed the conference. I’m very pleased that this year I’m going to Dallas again but this time in the new role — I’m doing a presentation there.

I don’t need to tell you what Hotsos Symposium is about — if you are on this blog, you should know it already. 3 days of high quality presentations and endless networking opportunities where you can share your ideas or concerns and get your questions answered.

My presentation is the first one on Tuesday — 8:30! It’s my first time presenting at Hotsos and I feel somewhat more tense than usual (as if I take it easy every time). I’m not the only new presenter at Hotsos and I know that Robyn Sands is doing her first Hotsos presentation as well (come on Robyn, when can I put that link on your name? ;). Anyway, I guess my sessions would not be attended by a huge crowd — it’s early and Cary Milsap is speaking in the next hall so people must be really interested in my topic to come to mine.

The topic of my presentation is Workload Management in Oracle RAC. I’m quite happy with the end result but I might have a little bit too much material to cover in 1 hour. I expect to spend most of the time in the “demo mode” on my 10g and 11g RAC clusters running on virtual machines on my MacBook. Depending on how it goes, some demos could span a bit longer than I plan depending on position of the moon and stars on Tuesday. I have a contingency plan as I really have to get to the last demo — it’s the coolest part of the session, I think.

I’m still rehearsing the demo and polishing the white paper. Excluding demo placeholders and navigational slides, I have just a little over 20 slides so not much efforts there. Most of the stuff I demonstrate “live” but a lot of details are in the white paper + demo examples provided to follow.

In addition, to the presentation, I will take part in the “Hotsos Campground” sessions on Monday and Tuesday evenings. There will be four of them and each is focused on a particular topic. I’m going to participate in the Hotsos RAC Campground. No surprise. Eh?

My plane leaves at 9:30 tomorrow. I hope there won’t be much snow and I leave on time — today is the first day of the spring on the calendar but I still did my 2 hours shoveling exercise. I think I’m getting better on it and it takes me half of the time I used to spend 3 months ago. Interesting, how much more can I improve?

Anyway, I hope I won’t need to do it again this year. Olga and Alex Jr. are joining me in Dallas after Hotsos and we are going to spend almost 10 days traveling around and, hopefully, enjoying some bits of sun. Bye, bye snow!