Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 16, 2012
The 2012 edition of RMOUG Training Days in Denver less than a month away, running February 15 and 16 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Although it’s only two days, there’s a lot of technical content there, and a refreshing reduction in marketing-oriented presentations from “product managers”. It’s not too late to register, and it’s a pretty nice excuse to get to the Rockies in ski season. I’ll be doing two presentations, and am polishing up whitepapers and presentations for the submission deadline tomorrow:
They’re right after each other in the grid, but I do get a short break for the dedicated exhibit hall time and paid vendor presentations (yes there are still a few; they have to pay the bills somehow).
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Posted by Maris Elsins on Jan 9, 2012
One of the hot topics at the UKOUG 2011 Technology and E-Business Suite Conference last December was the upcoming release of Oracle e-Business Suite R12.2. The new release will bring us lots of new features, usability improvements and new versions of technology stack components (Oracle Database 11g R2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 as the application server), but the most important and impressive new feature of course will be online patching. Online patching is supposed to change the game completely. All owners of E-Business Suite environments know that patching requires downtime. Although it can be reduced with various techniques (e.g. staged APPL_TOP), some downtime is still required to apply a number of changes. Online patching will not eliminate downtime completely, but will reduce it significantly by using “Edition Based Redefinition” (EBR) at the database level and using a secondary applications file system for online patching. In fact, all patching activity will be an online operation; downtime will be required only to switch from one version to another. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Dec 12, 2011
This blog post covers day 0 of UKOUG 2011 — Sunday, 4th of December, 2011.
Since there were so many of us from Pythian at the conference, I’m adding my name in the blog post title. I think I will be doing it for all conference posts as I think I’ve been doing for some time. This year, there were ten Pythian folks attending UKOUG Conference and we did twelve sessions including multiple presentations, masterclass, RAC Attack workshop, round-table and 10 minutes OakTalk. I think it’s the record number of session Pythian folks did at a single UKOUG conference and the record number of Pythian peeps attending. A dozen of Pythian people in Europe and now even a sales guy in the UK mean that Pythian penetration in the UK database services business is close to the infliction point. This is ultimately a good news!
Most of Canadian Pythian representatives arrived on Sunday morning to London Heathrow. The flight was quite empty so some of us managed to get a good nap in comfort of three empty seats. Since AirCanada has power outlets in most long haul flights, I was planning to work on my slides all the way in as I usually do. However, this time I was sitting next to Christo and he kept me involved in the conversation and at some point I was getting sleepy and finally took a nap as well so I’ve done literally nothing on my slides. Oh well, at least I had some rest and it was good because I was up for almost 20 hours after we landed except a quick nap in the car from London Heathrow to Birmingham. By the way, if you travel two or more from Heathrow, hiring car transfer service makes more financial sense than train or coach and is also quite convenient.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 6, 2011
On tap for Tuesday is a 2-hour master class from Michael Abbey, along with an all-day drop-in RAC attack workshop with Alex Gorbachev and the RAC SIG.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Dec 5, 2011
For those of you attending UKOUG today, there is a healthy dose of Pythian presentations on tap this afternoon. Actually, you can do it wall to wall 2:30pm to 6:30pm if you like.
To note:
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Posted by Michael S. Abbey on Dec 5, 2011
(editor’s note: the author is talking about UKOUG, the UK’s major Oracle conference, happening this week in Birmingham)
And so it should be :). The flight over was uneventful, save for my excitement about having 3 seats to myself. Then the big challenge surfaced … a 5’8″ human trying to recline in a 4’10″ horizontal surface. I woke about a bit later with a stiff neck but the shut-eye was worth it.
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Oct 11, 2011
While Oracle OpenWorld is still hot in our memories, I’m going to be presenting two of my OOW11 sessions at the Toronto Oracle User Group’s DD Day 2011 on 28-Oct-2011 — in just a bit over 2 weeks. Last time I presented for TOUG at their summer meeting in 2008 which makes it a tad over 3 years ago. It was a good fun and I’m looking forward to see many of you there again.
By the way, I think it’s quite a deal at $140 for non-members and $90 for TOUG members for a one day conference like that, especially if you are interested in the topics presented.
I have two sessions to present:
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Oct 5, 2011
The website for Oracle Database Cloud Services at cloud.oracle.com is now online, in conjunction with Larry Ellison’s announcement during the Oracle OpenWorld keynote going on now. It’s a hosted database service running Oracle 11gR2. The database can be accessed using a hosted Oracle application server, via JDBC across the Internet, or their own RESTful API a la Amazon. Notably lacking is Oracle’s own TNS network protocol.
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Posted by Don Seiler on Sep 1, 2011
This post is long overdue, as I was supposed to blog about my appearance at NoCOUG before I left (sorry, Vanessa!). However in my efforts to rehearse and adjust my presentation, blogging about it just fell to the wayside. However now that NoCOUG 2011 Summer Conference is in the books, I’d like to take a few minutes to share my experience not only as an attendee, but also as a first-time speaker.
When I found out that NoCOUG had accepted my abstract, “Oracle 11g: Learning to Love the ADR”, I was both ecstatic and terrified. This meant that I actually had to prepare the presentation and speak in front of peers. Surely they would throw me into San Francisco Bay if I didn’t bring my A-game, so I set out to do just that.
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Posted by Alex Gorbachev on Jul 27, 2011
I’m following up on a conference almost half a year later — try to bet that! Actually, this blog post was written more than 3 months ago and was sitting in my drafts waiting the moment I understand why I really wrote it. 3 months later… I still don’t know but I thought I should share it anyway. Maybe I could at least get some comments…
Pythian participates at dozens of database conferences every year. Usually, our participation comes down to sending speakers to present. Occasionally, we make a decision to join as exhibitors too. This is usually an exception (or so it’s been thus far) because our exhibition experience doesn’t always show any visible impact in the form of new revenue or generating real opportunities leading (with maybe couple small exceptions) to business. It means that when we think on whether we invest into an exhibition booth or in sending few more speakers to a conference, we are likely choosing the latter.
This year’s RMOUG Training Days was one of those exceptions — we thought that exhibition booth cost was very affordable and by getting a booth I could ensure that we have an OakTable Network booth too (which makes sense since we actually have few Oakies at Pythian). Traditionally, exhibitors setup raffle prizes. This is usually done to collect business cards in attempt to generate some marketing leads. While this is somewhat important (yeah — we do marketing too), I already mentioned that these leads haven’t really materialized into anything for us (well, maybe not yet) but we would still do it — get a simple prize and then add business cards to our database so that we can email a Pythian newsletter once in a blue moon or even reach out for sales if there is some indication that Pythian could help. I’d say nothing unusual.
It’s all good but the thought of doing just a boring raffle didn’t sit right with me. Read the rest of this entry . . .
