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Pythian OOW09 Diaries: Interviews

Singe I’ve got a special press badge this year, I felt I had to do something about it so I decided to make short interview with few people that I’m running into during this Oracle Open World.

I have already blogged about my Sunday’s interviews but I created a Youtube playlist where you can see them all (use arrows on the sides).

So far I interviewed Justin Kestelyn, Richard Foote, Stanley ACE Director, John Kanagaraj, Marko Gralike, Jacco Landlust, Chris Muir, Tim Hall, Steven Feuerstein, Gareth Llewellyn, Doug Burns, Marcel Kratochvil and Gary Goodman. There is one more day left so I’ll trying to do few more.

Pythian OOW09 Diaries: Bloggers Meetup

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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Oracle Bloggers Meetup @ OOW — Location Change!

Heads to everyone who hasn’t got a message on Twitter or didn’t read Justin’s blog post — we are moving completely indoor (guess why?). It’s now LJ’s Martini Club & Grill @ Metreon 2nd Floor but same address — 101 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.

You just need to look for a large Metreon label on the building — adjusted to Moscone South.

See you all there!

Pythian OOW09 Diaries: Don’t Miss OTN Lounge and Unconference Sessions

As I’ve done my presentation this morning, I’m free for the rest of the day and I stopped by OTN Lounge where the cool stuff is almost ready to go — final tweaks and preparation before 4 days of rocking.

I’ve spoke to Justin Kestelyn of Oracle Technology Network and here what he has to say about this year’s OTN activities at the Oracle Open World. The keywords for me – “Espresso in the Morning, Beer in the Afternoon”.


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OOW09 Diaries: The Week Before

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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Oracle Open World 2008 Diaries: the X Preview

It’s my first Oracle Open World so I get a bit frustrated by the magnitude if the event. I think I’m getting used to it now and it’s easier to find my way around and orient in what I want to see.

First, few words about my presentation on Sunday — Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware. The hall was packed full and, unfortunately, few people were not even let it as I learned later. The session went very well and I should, perhaps, send you to other blogs with responses instead of my subjective perspective.

This conference, I’ve spent more time than usual hanging around instead of sitting on the presentations. My favorite place is OTN Lounge — it’s nice and quiet. It also seems to be a de facto place for many folks to meet — no tough time seeking for old friends and good chances making new ones.

On Monday, I gave a short interview (truveo youtube) about Oracle entering cloud computing after the Andy Mendelson’s keynote. Andy had tough job on his keynote as he didn’t have much new-features-ammo but I enjoyed couple demos from Mark Townsend. In the first dome I liked OEM’s GUI to the real time SQL monitoring — nice visual representation of the the progress through the execution plan.

Backup to Amazon S3 storage service was quite amazing to see. Obviously, there will be many concerns over security but what a great way to take your backups off-site!

Lots of buzz about the X key note that will be just in couple hours and even non-OOW attendees are rumoring about it.

Well, what can I say? This about the following:
- Oracle acquisition strategy is quite clear
- There are some “small” fish providing interesting data warehouse solutions
- ASM is there for a reason and must be a good layer for tight integration with storage
- IO is the ultimate performance bottleneck these days (if everything else done right)
- You would enjoy this public document – Projects at Oracle

Alright, stay tuned — I’ll take the advantage of my blogger credentials to have a good sit during the X keynote and plan to have the blog posted right away…

Alex Gorbachev at Oracle Open World 2008: Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware

If a MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minute session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware.

I gave it during RAC Attack in Chicago and I’m pretty satisfied with how it went, so there should be no significant changes to the presentation. The session is in “User Group Forum,” thanks to RAC SIG and Dan Norris.

When the session was first added to the agenda it was misspelled as “Under the Good of Oracle Clusterware.” That’s hilarious and I thought I should have left it as is. Too late now — it’s been fixed.

I’m pretty sure that many of you will be at the OOW as well, so I’ll be glad to meet you in person. I’m getting back on Twitter slowly, so it might be a good way to track me down in SF. No guarantee I’ll keep it up to the minute if it takes too much effort, but I’ll try.

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