Pythian Group

I returned from AUSOUG conference in Perth (Australia) just last week. This blog is my report from the conference for the days 0 and 1. I have spent several days helping my family recover from sickness and had a short brake before getting back to normal and up to speed with day to day duties. Now I am ready do this report for you.

My flight from Sydney to Perth went well and I managed to write an application for a new internal position at Pythian plus went through my presentations’ slide-desks several times (I was about to present 2 presentations). The interesting thing about the flight from Sydney to Perth is the fact that it is by 1 hour longer than other way around (5 against 4 hours). I assume it is because of the earth wonder twisting :) Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you haven’t considered attending the AUSOUG conference in Perth yet, you definitely should! Out of 50 sessions I counted 21 to be presented by Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors; 8 by Oracle employees and at least 2 by Oracle Certified Masters!

Thanks to the conference organizers (including hard working Scott Wesley, Burke Scheld) and Oracle Technology Network team this years conference has a very impressive speakers list for the most remote city on earth! If you are base in Perth or close by :) you still have a chance to be part of the event! Read the rest of this entry . . .

Last Thursday I spent in Melbourne presenting two of my papers for Australian Oracle User Group Victorian members. I received a very warm welcome in that beautiful city.

The first part of the day I spent in one many coffee shops, enjoying fantastic coffee, working and watching how the stream of people changes during the day. I wonder how it is possible that Australia’s two biggest cities are so different! The difference is quite difficult to describe. You should visit these sites to feel it yourself!
Read the rest of this entry . . .

In this post:

• Introduction
• Reasons to submit a paper for an Oracle User Group event
• What should you talk about?

Introduction

Just a few days ago I received a reminder email from Burke Scheld for the “AUSOUG National Conference Series – Perth 2011 – Call for Papers”. I had an event-related conversation with several Oracle guys in my professional networks and the answers I received triggered this blog post. Some of the very good Oracle professionals I personally respect said “…I am not sure what I would get out of it …” or “…I haven’t done anything exciting for the last FEW MONTHS …”.
The answers I received shocked me a bit. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hello Community!

In this post:

• InSync11 – Oracle Conference!
• RAC SIG ANZ – way to find each other!
• Other ways to find your RAC SIG ANZ fellows!

InSync11 – Oracle Conference!

This post is addressed to all RAC SIG members who is planning to participate in the InSync11 conference this August in Sydney Australia! InSync11 is organized by Oracle Community for Oracle Community and is one of the biggest Oracle technology dedicated events in Australia and New Zealand region. If you are in the area by August 16th and haven’t considered participating yet, you should! This is a wonderful opportunity to learn from others, listen to experts from around the world and meet face to face people from your networks (including RAC SIG).

RAC SIG ANZ – way to find each other!

There are 130 members from Australia and New Zealand region in RAC Special Interest Group today! I am sure that many of the members will participate in the InSync11!
Read the rest of this entry . . .

It’s only one week to go now and the program for the AUSOUG National Conference Series 2009 is out. I’ll be presenting on the first day in Perth (Nov 10th) about Oracle Flashback technology.

I’m looking forward to attending the conference in Perth, not only because I’ll be presenting there but also because it’s my first time in Western Australia. All going well my presentation will be honed before the weekend and I’ll be arriving in Perth still this week, on Friday, to enjoy an extended weekend in Perth and Margareth River wine region with my wife before the conference begins.

My presentation was on the first day, right after the keynote, and following my habit of reviewing the slides before the show, I spent this keynote hour one-to-one with my MacBook. I could never underestimate the importance of this review following one fiasco I had in the past when I neglected to thoroughly review the existing slides of my older presentation before presenting it.

At the beginning of the session, once again I realized that DBA audience at AUSOUG conference is relatively small percentage. On the other hand it might be Tim Hall who has stolen my DBA audience to his session about PL/SQL 11g new features. Yeah… it must have been Tim as it turned out later he is the number two speaker in Australia. ;-)

My few jokes on the initial slides were not as good as they would be with larger audience but, at least, resulted in smiles so I guess I can call it success to a certain degree. The presentation itself went well I think but I wasn’t too trilled about it and there are few places I want to change before I present it at Gold Coast. Well, live and learn. I’ve got some positive responses afterward and even a piece of photography art tagged by “excellent” courtesy to Francisco Munoz Alvarez:

I managed to fit comfortably within 45 minutes with few question during and after the presentation. It’s been traditionally very difficult for me to manage 45 minutes slot but I guess I’m getting better at it.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Last year, I had very pleasant experience presenting at AUSOUG Conference 2007 in Melbourne. It was a long way from Canada but no regrets. Since I moved to Sydney more than a month ago, it’s much closer to travel and this year I will be presenting on both AUSOUG conferences — in Perth and at Gold Coast.

I arrived to Perth late Friday night and Saturday evening we had a very nice dinner with the bunch of Oracle ACE‘s (and some of them ACE Directors). Local ACE’s were presented by Chris Muir, Connor McDonald and Penny Cookson. Tim Hall represented UK ACE’s while me being semi-local ACE from Sydney. Two of us were double agents — me and Connor are also members of OakTable Network. Seven is definitely a better number than 5 so my family brought number of lunch guests to 7. It’s been great to catch up with everyone before the start of the conference. Food was also very nice. Unfortunately, I had to hurry up at the end — my junior was falling asleep on the table as it was already close to midnight in Sydney timezone.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

The first session I attended this morning was “Creating a data grid using Oracle Coherence. It was “hands-on”, so we were supposed to bring our laptops to install software and he was going to do demos. NO ONE in the room brought their laptop. So Tim Middleton did an excellent job of ad-hoc presentation and answering all of our questions for nearly two hours. I can’t say what the hands-on would have been like but I certainly got a lot out of the session the way it was.

During the lunch break, I went to the ASG Booth in the exhibitor hall and had my tarot cards done. I am a number 6 for numerology. Naturally she told me all kinds of wonderful things, including that my children are doing fine and I will have no major problems with them and they are both very intelligent kids (she has that right). The rest I will wait and see if it happens, before I discuss it.

In the afternoon I went to Ramesh Naidu’s presentation on Cluster-wide monitoring for RAC. It covered all the components in a RAC Cluster that need monitoring and the importance of doing so, including Cluster services, ASM, network and database. There was also a good overview and explanation of inter-relationship of the basic RAC components.

Alex had been sharing his internet with me, but he flies out tomorrow morning, so I am not sure when I will have connectivity again. Might not be a few days…but will do my best to post ASAP.

The second, and the last, day of AUSOUG 2007 in Melbourne is over. Earlier today I had great presentation as I already blogged about. I had a quick chance to peak into Steve Lemme’s presentation on CA approach for solving an IT management dilemma. The only reason I was interested in it is because one of our clients is using CA Unicenter and looking to move away from it so I wanted to make sure that this is right (I’m quite sure myself anyway but it’s just a DBA perspective).

I had baked potato for lunch plus a sandwich. After that me and Paul Moen went down for a coffee (thanks to Chris Muir for suggestion of a better place). Oh yes – I’ve finally had a pleasure to meet Chris Muir.

Instead of keynote and the following presentation, I paid a visit to exhibitors and spoke to practically every exhibitor. It turned out that some of them knew or heard about Pythian which was quite pleasing to hear. I also found out that Han Xie (I’ve met him yesterday first time during follow up on my RAC presentation) from Dialog Information Technology had only come because of my presentation! As soon as he saw my name on the agenda few days ago, he requested his managers to send him over. This was a very pleasing compliment — thanks Han.

I sat on presentation about Web 2.0 interface with APEX but, frankly, I was almost falling asleep as the result of little rest last night and extremely monotonic speaking manner of the speaker. I also expected to be presented on how actually do that in APEX instead of some pretty much web 2.0 propaganda and demonstration of few cool widgets. Widgets were very cool indeed but it was definitely not my expectations. Anyway, what am I, DBA, supposed to know about development?

The last session for me was The Great Oracle Development Tools Debate with panel speakers (no need for names ;) being proponents of:
- Oracle JDeveloper
- Oracle Forms
- Oracle APEX
- Oracle Fusion as the whole concept

No one from .Net and only one person from the audience admitted he is using it. Strange, I quite liked .Net when I used it few years ago. If only it could run on non-windows platforms.

Anyway, the whole audience was pretty much concerned about discontinued Forms support (2014 was the year given by Lynne Munsinger from Oracle). So it was clear that new projects don’t start in Forms nowadays. But the choice between APEX and J2EE based platform was difficult. The audience was very cautious about Java and Fusion while optimistic on APEX. However, concerned that APEX won’t fit enterprise solutions bill, many are waiting on Java platform to become enough stable and reliable enough to build applications that can be supported for years to come instead of changing technology every year or so.

From my point of view it all boils down to when the business wants to spend the money — in advance with Java based Fusion and have a risk of loosing everything or slowly as the progress using APEX and having results right away. For me the choice is clear but modern architects and technologists might not agree with me.

Closing was quick — Babette didn’t win anything even though I sacrificed my chance for her (read that I was too lazy to stamp the paper at every exhibitor). I’m satisfied with the conference. I met many interesting people and discussed about how people work here in Australia and how the business is organized.

I’m going to the observation deck now to watch the sunset and I must harry not to miss it. I’m leaving tomorrow morning and will be in Ottawa on Wednesday night after the long journey (I don’t want to think about it now).