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.

I’m really tired now and I still need to tighten up my presentation before I can go and meet few Oracle geek at the nearest pub but I’ll probably take couple hours of sleep.

Unlike some slackers I have my own preliminary agenda for the first day. It’s short and can change easily but good to start with:

* 9:40 — Tom Kyte’s - keynote

* 11:15 — Tom Dale - Virtualization in production (there are also interesting sessions on Oracle licensing, Spatial intro and RAC vs DataGuard as well as Fusion… ok just kidding).

* 12:25 — Jonathan Lewis - Playing Russian Roulette with Silver Bullets (can’t miss the master)

* 13:30 — Chris Jenkins - TimesTen: Anatomy of an In-Memory Database (I’ll have to make my lunch short)

* 14:25 — this on is undecided. Interested in “Oracle Licensing Roundtable”, “Oracle or Open Source?”, RAC scalability with 6 nodes at CERN, 60TB standby.

* 15:20 — Joel Goodman - RAC Tuning Tips

* 16:40 — hm… I saw Julian Dyke’s presentation on flashback once and Tuomas Pystynen’s on RMAN incremental backups twice. I might give Julian another shoot or maybe just wander around. I might got to Melanie Caffrey’s session “Wielding That Pickaxe – Oracle 10gR2’s New and Improved Data Mining Facility” but then I would be late for the next one.

* 17:35 — Tom Kyte - 11g new features for DBAs. Hm… Tom has been qualifying him as developer, though. Maybe I should consider something else? ;-)

By the way, when you see RAC rescue team’s van - you know that Oracle geeks are around:

OK… not sure if I hit the sack now (my sleeping habits are screwed after so much travel recently) or as usual… Stay tuned - more to come.