I should get to bed soon because I have to be up at 4am for my flight to Stockholm (via Copenhagen). Tomorrow (and on Wednesday) I’ll be presenting at the Swedish and Finnish Oracle User Groups joint 20th Anniversary event on the good ship (I hope) m/s Silja Serenade. The nearer the event, the more I’m looking forward to a new experience. I’ll be giving two presentations :-
10g Performance Analysis - How I learned to love pictures
This is the presentation demonstrating the OEM Performance screens that I gave for the first time at the OUG Scotland event the other week. The feedback for that was very good, so I hope I can pull it off again but with a few improvements the second time around.
Have we forgotten OFA?
This is essentially the same as the presentation I gave at UKOUG last year but I’ve changed the title which many people found misleading and I’m going to expand the technical content a bit as I have an extra 15 minutes. In retrospect, I think this also adds to the ‘looking back in time’ theme to some of the presentations.
My excitement about attending is slightly dampened by the clash with the exciting climax to the Scottish Premier League Championship. Celtic and Rangers will both have reached half time as I land in Edinburgh on Thursday night so I’m still deciding the best strategy - stay in the bar in the airport or get a taxi straight home with my fingers in my ears in case the taxi driver has his radio on and watch it on TV Drive. I think it’ll be the latter. If only the final fixtures hadn’t been re-scheduled 
As for the Champions League final, I might see if I can watch it but I’m not that worried.
Tomorrow is also the abstract submission deadline for this year’s UKOUG conference in Birmingham (you’ve still got time - why not give it a try?). Another anniversary - the 25th this time. I had a few ideas up my sleeve but I decided on a couple aimed specifically at this conference.
First of all, an introductory presentation because I know the UKOUG would like to expand that aspect of the agenda this year. I was originally going to call it ‘Performance Tuning for Beginners’ but wondered whether that might put some IT people off.
Performance Tuning Basics
"Analysing server and application performance can appear complex at first sight but by approaching problems sensibly, using appropriate tools and focussing on the right metrics you increase your chances of success.
This presentation will focus on the type of approach proposed by most performance tuning methods and discuss the most common mistakes people make when tuning systems, whilst avoiding deep technical detail."
Next a user implementation story for a new product, which I think is one of the most important types of user group presentation. How did it go; what were the problems; is it all it’s cracked up to be etc.
Audit Vault Deployment Lessons
"Audit Vault is a fairly new product designed to help organisations manage audit information extracted from multiple instances into a single repository.
This presentation describes the experience of implementing Audit Vault across an estate of different database instances and applications running different Oracle versions."
So neither of the presentations is going to be a technical tour de force, to say the least, but hopefully they’ll both be very useful for some attendees if they’re selected. I almost added a Grid Control equivalent to the AV presentation but decided to settle for two.
Anyway, expect more from the boat, if the internet access is good.