I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I’m only attending Monday of UKOUG Tech13. One of my colleagues quit, so there is no DBA at work today while I’m out on a jolly. 🙂
My session was at 09:00, which meant getting up at 05:00 to get the train to Manchester. While I was on the train I did a final run-through of my presentation and surfed the net on the train WiFi. I left the house in the dark. It was still dark by the time I got to Manchester. The winter is so depressing!
My talk went pretty well. There were quite a lot of people there, but when you are presenting in an auditorium it looks really empty. 🙂 I think I got a bit excited because I finished early. That rarely happens to me, but it did leave room for an extended question and answer session, which was pretty cool. I was asked a variety of questions, some of which were really quite challenging. I came out and bumped into Jonathan Lewis, which gave me the perfect opportunity to discuss some of the issues with him. I think I will be adding a few points to my article to pick up on some of the themes raised by the questions. It’s always good when interactions with people open up new trains of thought. Thanks to everyone that came along, everyone who asked such good questions and everyone that said really nice things about the presentation on Twitter. 🙂
I kind-of missed the next session because I kept bumping into people and chatting. Meeting up with friends, new and old, is one of the best things about conferences for me. Amongst others, I had a quick chat with the previous Optimizer Lady (Maria Colgan) and said hello to the new Optimizer Lady (Tom Kyte). Tom has taken his new role to heart, turning up in a skirt and knee length boots!
Next up was “Self-Provisioning Pluggable Databases Using PL/SQL” by Brynn Llewellyn. I’ve been playing around with pluggable databases for a while now, but it’s still early days for me, so there were quite a few neat things that came out of this talk, including the use of DBMS_SQL to perform operations in the scope of a pluggable database and scheduler jobs of type SQL_script.
After that session I bumped into Melanie Caffrey and Martin Widlake and we chatted about the current state of software development in the age of “Coding-By-Google”, before I started to stuff myself with food.
The next session was “Introduction to the New Oracle Database In-Memory Option” by Maria Colgan. It all looks so simple and cool it can only be the result of witchcraft! It’s surprising how many long standing bits of the Oracle optimizer go into making the in-memory database work…
From there it was a quick trip across the road to watch Doug Burns speak about Database as a Service (DBaaS) at OakTable World UK 2013. This is a subject that I have a big interest in and one that I know very little about.
I did intended to go to another session, but I got chatting to Debra Lilley (who is not technical), Sten Vesterli, Lonneke Dikmans, Ronald Luttikhuizen and Simon Haslem instead.
From there is was a quick trek over to the station to start my journey home. I’m now just about to arrive in Birmingham.
Overall it’s been a really cool day. I got to present, see some great sessions and meet lots of cool people! Thanks to everyone involved in the organisation of UKOUG Tech13 and OakTable World UK 2013. Thanks to the Oracle ACE Program, who didn’t have to pay for anything this time, but allow me to keep doing what I do. Thanks also to my current employer, who paid for my train ticket. 🙂
Back to work tomorrow, where I’ll be doing one of my fortnightly Tuesday presentations…
Cheers
Tim…
I’m there Wednesday & Thursday only =( my friend’s brother is there every day