Pythian Group

Now that our new web-site is live I’d like to do the first blog post on it!

You shouldn’t be surprised if you notice that it’s difficult to locate your DBAs in the first week of December (i.e. in just two weeks from now)! And you know why? Because you need to be looking in the right place to find them.

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Yes, it’s almost that time of the year when one of the best Oracle conferences in the world opens its doors to attendees in Birmingham — UKOUG Conference 2009: Technology & E-Business Suite. The lineup of speakers will be fantastic as usual and agenda is full of juicy bits — You will have usual troubles scheduling sessions to attend and hate to make compromises between presentations you want to see badly but that’s kind of problems you’d rather have at a good conference.

The past year was very eventful so I feel like I haven’t been at the UKOUG Conferences for years even though I did come to the UKOUG Conference 2008. This conference is something special for me — it’s the first conference I attended and presented on so it’s set the tone for the whole conferencing experience of my life and I’m very grateful for that! So far, I haven’t missed a single year since my first UKOUG conference and I hope I keep it this way for years to come.
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I arrived to the conference at yesterday around lunch time. I was supposed to come on Sunday but I was delayed because of my UK visa renewal. In fact, I almost had to cancel it completely but the world is not without good people who were able to magically help speeding up the process.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the road for the 42 hours or so which includes about 8 hours drive to the UK High Commission in Canberra and then back to Sydney airport. Then the flight to London with stop-over in Singapore — way too long to be reasonably enjoyable. From London it’s a coach to Birmingham and finally after quick check-in at Jury’s Inn and shower, I was here — “fresh and rested”.

My first presentation was supposed to be today at 16:30 but I wasn’t sure if I would make it on time or not so we decided to keep Gregory Guillou as he volunteered anyway to substitute me in case I wouldn’t get a visa (thanks Gregory!). Well, turns out that I would be able to help and having couple people on stage (assuming they know what they talking about) is better than one. ;-)

When I realized the issue with my visa, we also started to think about options for the masterclass on the last day of the conference and we had a great idea of setting up a remote presentation bridge UK-Australia with couple Oakies on the stage locally. Those brave volunteers were Michael Moller, aka M2, and Moans Nogood. In fact, I think they might still pop up on Friday and I’m sure it would be good fun so please drop by.

The presentation yesterday went pretty well except that we obviously had to skip all the demo’s as it was 45 minutes and the original presentation was for 1.5-2 hours slot. In my experience, it’s tough to follow someone’s else slides but Gregory did a good job. It was also his first conference speaking experience as far as I know and I hope he would consider doing it more often — he has lots to share. I had nothing better to do than to play with the laser pointer but I took the liberty to answer few questions and add few details — in the end, why would I sit on the stage then!?

Alright, back to the conference now. You should be able to find me in few places – OakTable, Pythian booth or wandering between the halls as well as sitting on few session, I hope. You can catch me on the phone as well if you want to meet me but don’t see me around — text me at +44 7901581915.

Oh, almost forgot to say that I had great evening last night and it was a pleasure to catch up with everyone at the Focus Pubs and later and the Tap & Spile. I should mention that Scottish table was my favorite at the Focus Pubs as they had the best drinks around (what a surprise, Thomas!). I should also share my disappointment in Tap & Spile this year — their beer selection wasn’t great this time and they closed down the downstairs area doing some painting job — bad timing guys! I should say that I survived until midnight after this loooong day for me and this morning looks great (so far).

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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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, Read the rest of this entry . . .

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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