Pythian Group

RMOUG was over last week but I haven’t got back until earlier this week and I finally managed to clean up the backlog of things I missed so I could write the conference wrap up. After the RMOUG, I went skiing with a bunch of good friends and discovered a great skiing resort of Breckenridge. This is me at the peak 8 summit:

These were great times except one day with the questionable results of an experiment to find a recipe for the perfect hangover that I and Mogens Nørgaard have conducted. Well, the science does require sacrifices…

Back to the conference…
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Update 9-Feb-10: Want to schedule a meeting with Pythian folks? See Pythian Events page.

I’m so much looking forward to the next conference in my schedule — RMOUG Training Days 2010. It would be only my second time I’m presenting at the RMOUG but it was enough to go there once to understand that it’s one of the top rated Oracle User Group conferences in the world. Some of the great speakers are presenting and registration fees are very low compare to other events of comparable quality. If your conference budget is low this year — that’s the conference you don’t want to miss!

Two of us from Pythian are going to speak at RMOUG Training Days 2010 that starts in just 4 week. I present the following session:

Alex Gorbachev: Oracle ASM 11g — The Evolution.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management has proven to be one of the most widely adopted new features in Oracle Database 10g and it has been dramatically improved in the later 11g releases. This presentation will explain what changes are solved by ASM, how these challenges are solved, what barriers there are to ASM adoptions, and how 11g Release 2 addresses these barriers.

My colleague, Christo Kutrovsky is presenting the following:
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I’m quite late to blog about it now but the OOW09 Bloggers Meetup was a success. I should say thanks to the OTN for sponsoring the bar tab as well as to HP for sponsoring a nice HP laptop as a prize.

The original location was a smaller area with a larger outdoor balcony but due to the weather concerns, it was moved completely indoor in the bigger banquet style room and it worked extremely well. We had more than 50 people showed up — probably around 70+ — as 51 t-shirts I printed for that occasion has completely gone.

The idea with t-shirt is to collect signatures from bloggers you meet and talk to. The most valuable result is that you get totally cool and unique t-shirt that you will want to wear after day (or maybe not wear and put it under the glad instead of the painting on the wall and demonstrate in your living room). The least all bloggers are going to do is to post a photo of their t-shirts — make sure you leave some feedback later.

Here is mine:

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Most of this week I spend in San Francisco — I arrived on Wednesday with couple other Aussie Oracle ACE Directors, Chris Muir and Marcel Kratochvil. This year I have my whole family traveling with me so it should be fun.

The first few days we spent by sleeping off our jet lag and I was also working on my presentations for the Oracle Open World (I’ve got to do 5 sessions this year. I also managed to finish a chapter that I’m contributing for one book (and I was terribly late) so those couple days were very productive.

I’ve also managed to visit Oracle headquarters on Thursday and meet with few Oracle Enterprise Manager product managers as well as said hello to some of the “Russian mafia” at Oracle HQ. It’s always a pleasure to finally meet people face-to-face after knowing them online for a while.

Of course, I managed to snap a few pictures of Oracle HQ.

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Day One at RMOUG in Denver is now over.

There were quite a few interesting presentations. Unfortunately, the very first I went to was canceled due to car trouble. I also found that several sessions of similar interest to me overlapped, so I had to choose my spots.

Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting
This presentation was particularly good. Tanel goes into detail on how to quickly asses a situation without going through a number of “health checks” and still be nowhere near solving the problem. His approach is to look directly at what a “hanging” session is waiting on, and to systematically determine the cause of the problem, with no time wasted.

Putting your database on a Diet: Oracle’s Data compression
A short overview of table compression. I found that that even though the presenter obviously had some experience with compression, there were hardly any examples nor anything mentioned about how to determine proper re-ordering to improve compression.

All About Oracle’s In-Memory Undo
An unusual topic—something that works so well that no one really talks about it. The presentation, however, was very short, and provided little new information. There was only one demonstrated test case. Although it went into detail about the difference between in-memory and standard undo, the other-than-obvious effects were omitted.

During lunch I took a picture that shows the entire RMOUG crowd:

Tomorrow is Day 2, and I will be posting about it here.

The time is flying here and two days of RMOUG Training Days 2008 have gone. In a nutshell, what a great conference! Well done RMOUG and special thanks to Peggy King!

It was very nice to see a bunch of old friend and meet new ones in person including Jeremiah Wilton and Tim Gorman.

I liked the lunch organization — everyone was seated and nice food served — way better than standing buffet. The area with the tables was also used for the breakfast and this is where the keynote was done — excellent idea to combine those together:

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As you may or may not know, I have been spending time in the Pythian Office in Sydney, Australia. Before I came, family and friends did some research and found that Australia was suffering from several years of drought and desperately needed rain. So I packed nothing but sunny summer clothing. I am not sure if my first mistake was relying on the word of others or not having a contingency plan. This has been the wettest summer in years. It rained practically every day for nearly three weeks in a row when I first arrived. If it wasn’t raining, it was cloudy and threatening to rain.

In a way, I should have known better. As a DBA, I have learned to confirm information and have contingency plans. For instance, when doing a database upgrade, you ensure that you have a backup and can revert back if any issues come up. Of course, in a work environment, you normally make plans, get them checked by co-workers and do one or more “dry runs” whenever possible.

When the sun finally came out and stayed out, I found myself in paradise. The weather is warm and when the wind blows it feels like a tropical breeze. When I meet and speak with Australians, I jokingly refer to “the island” — Australia being the only country that is also a continent and an island. At times I sit by the water and just watch the boats floating in their moorings and feel sad about having to leave here in the near future. Although Sydney is a large city, it has a relaxed pace, a friendly atmosphere, and I have completely fallen in love with her. I will be sad to leave.

There is just so much to see and do in Australia. With limited time, I spent most weekends doing the local Sydney attractions. I did not manage to make it to everything this city has to offer, let alone make side-trips. I can tell you my time here has been magical.

I have had so many wonderful experiences that just make me feel like I am on top of the world! For the first time in my life I tried, and fell in love with, sailing. Tonight is my last night participating in the Twilight Races.

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After landing (link), and a 5 day fiesta of arranging my long term apartment here, Pythian Dubai is now fully operational with me been the first employee here.

Here is a picture of the Pythian Dubai office:

And the view from the window:

Next step, hire more people! We have 4 desks to fill. I feel a bit lonely here.

Greetings from Dubai!

It is indeed a different world here. I have a feeling I’ll like it even more over the next three months I am here on Pythian duties. I will be writing more, so stay tuned.

The photos above and below are, respectively, of Dubai Internet City, and Dubai Marina.

I’ve got up at 6:30 today (it becomes a bad habit) because my phone started to make annoying sounds at 5:45 — it’s way too clever about meeting reminders and timezone-aware. I wish sometime technology is not that smart. Even though I went to bed after 3AM, I couldn’t get back to sleep — either I worry too much (ring-ring, Marco) or it’s that street noise that get through the window — I’m on the first floor and the hotel is next to a busy train station. But good for you — I decided to update the blog with few photos of Melbourne to kill some time and distract me from thoughts about my coming presentations.

Melbourne is a beautiful city! Interesting view from the Yarra River on a part of CBD:

We bought Sunday tickets (just two bucks each) and walked to Bourke Street for lunch. Babette took Chinese and I stopped at Tai chicken dish that supposed to be spicy but for some reason wasn’t at all.
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