Straight after that it was the second part of my PL/SQL Presentation Layers session. Familiar faces from the day before and a couple of new people, although I think I did lose a few to Robert Freeman as I expected. I thought this session would finish early, but true to form I over ran and had to bolt through the last few slides. The blind panic at the end meant it didn’t feel as slick as I would have liked it to be, but that’s the price for trying to squeeze 120 minutes of content into 100 minutes.

I spent the rest of the day talking to people. I am blessed, or cursed depending on how you look at it, with the ability to talk to anyone and I just kept finding myself on conversations with various attendees and exhibitors about a whole variety of subjects. This is my favorite bit of going to conferences if I’m honest.

The day was wrapped up by an assortment of prizes from the sponsors, including a couple of people who got prizes for injuries sustained during the luge ride the night before. There was blood.

In the evening I went out for food with a few of the guys and we had a walk around the park, looking at all the thermal vents that spontaneous appear there. Lots of bubbling mud and water, along with a little cat sitting slap bang next to one. Cats are crazy.

So that’s the NZOUG conference over for another year. It was good fun and I hope I get to come back again, but with it being such a long way from home you never really know if it’s going to happen. Fingers crossed though.

Thanks to all the people on the NZOUG committee for making it happen and to all the attendees for coming. I hope to see you all again next time. Also, a big thank you to the Oracle ACE program for getting me down here. Without them this just wouldn’t happen.

Cheers

Tim…

One of the difficult things about being a speaker at so many conferences is you often struggle to see something on the agenda you have not already seen several times around the world (nice problem to have). As a result I side-stepped Dan Morgan’s first presentation because I had already seen it (or most of it) at OpenWorld. I’m sure it went down well because Dan is a natural speaker.

My first session of the day was Robert Freeman’s. A quick romp through the Oracle features that have been around for ages, but you probably don’t know exist. You will struggle to find a nicer guy than Robert, so it’s always good to see him present. I kinda like this sort of presentation because because Oracle has such a lot of functionality, it’s easy to miss things. Robert has turned “to the dark side” and is now an Oracle employee. Come on Oracle. Stop poaching our ACEs.

I spent a lot of time during the day chatting to people (there’s a surprise). Plenty of familiar faces along with some new ones.

My session was the last time slot for the day. I’m doing a two-part session on PL/SQL presentation layers. I had a good turnout. It felt like it went well. I guess the real test will be how many people turn up for the second part, although I’ve just noticed I clash with Robert Freeman on my second slot, so when nobody turns up I can massage my ego by telling myself I was amazing, but Robert is famous.

In the evening we went over for the social event at the Skyline Skyrides. It was great fun going on the luge again. I learnt two lessons last year.

1. You have to brake on the corners, or you die.
2. You don’t enter the “carry a cup of water to the bottom” game unless you want to be ridiculed the whole evening for having a wet ass.

I remained alive and dry, so all was good.

After the luge rides came the dinner. Lots of food, lots of drinking (for those that do), comedian, party games and very little in the way of speeches. I think the NZ sponsors have got it right. Essentially it was, “Thanks for coming. Have a good night. Cheers”. Perfect.

This morning I’ve got a “Learn about the Oracle ACE Programme” session, followed by the second part of my PL/SQL presentation layers session. Then later in the afternoon I’ve got a “Meet the Experts” session. I’m interested to see what experts they’ve got for me to meet.

Cheers

Tim…

The following day was mostly spent with a trip to some of my friends relatives and general idle conversation. Very low pressure. Very cool. The funny thing is, it’s about 18 months since I was last here and I feel like I never left.

This morning I got up early to pick Chris Muir up from the airport, where I bumped into Dan Morgan, not literally. Chris was delayed, so after a bit of messing about we got on our way to Rotorua. The roads were quiet so we made good time and I’m now in the hotel ready to go. We have a little get together tonight, then the conference starts tomorrow.

I guess I’ll do a run through of my presentations now, and maybe sleep a little later.

Cheers

Tim…

I got to the airport 2 hours before the flight as usual, but I’ve been here 3 hours already and I’ve still not boarded the plane. I have a long wait at Dubai, so this delay shouldn’t affect my connection. It’s 7 hours from Birmingham to Dubai, then 18 hours (including a fuel stop in Melbourne) to Auckland. I have a feeling I’ll look like “Dawn of the Dead” when my friend picks me up from Auckland Airport. I’ve not even started yet and I’m already kinda nervous. The thought of 18 hours on a plane is really getting to me. I only hope I can get some sleep on this trip.

It’s about 5 minutes to boarding now so I need to go through my last minute panic session before getting on the plane.

If there is ever another blog entry it means I made it. If not, it was nice knowing you all…

Cheers

Tim…

It’s worth knowing about though.

Cheers

Tim…

Here’s the link I’ve always used for this profile. It’s been on my blog, website and forum for years and worked just fine when I’ve clicked the links in the past.

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=19297:4:3351497719856466::NO:4:P4_ID:43

If you click that link you’ll see it’s now Steven Feuerstein.

I did a new search on my profile and the URL is now this.

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=19297:4:3829173635384582::NO:4:P4_ID:41

The key component is the two digit number at the end. Seems I used to be 43, but now I’m 41. Freaky.

I wonder how long that has been happening.

Cheers

Tim…

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Oracle+11gR2

As a homage to lmgtfy.com I’ve created a documentation search.

http://www.oracle-base.com/search/

If you specify your search it gives you a URL you can pass to others. When they use the URL it shows them what they could have done rather than bug you.

http://www.oracle-base.com/search/?txt=automatic+storage+manager

Update: It now uses TinyURL, like this http://tinyurl.com/yamsmc2

It’s a little basic to look at, but it made me laugh.

Cheers

Tim…

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Data Guard Setup using Oracle Grid Control

Cheers

Tim…

I thought the reference to the quality of Red Hat’s support was quite comical. I’ve always found their support to be terrible. To be more specific, you raise a service request and never get a response. If that is quality support I obviously have very different standards to the CIOs surveyed.

Cheers

Tim…

A few years ago I was doing a lot of Linux installations and I got sick of running around with CDs, so started doing network installations to save time. I’ve been doing loads of installs on VMs at home recently, so I started doing PXE Network Installations, which saved me even more time. As a result of the article I wrote about that, Frits Hoogland pointed me in the direction of Cobbler, which makes PXE installations real easy (once you get to grips with it). I’m not a sysadmin, so why do I care? Even when I’m installing and running a handful of VMs at home I can see productivity gains by using some of these tools. Imagine the impact in a data-center!

So back to Grid Control. Does anyone remember the days when you kept a “tail -f” on your alert log? At one site I used to have a CDE workspace on an X station just running tails. Then the number of instances got too big, so I used to scan through the alert logs each day to look for issues. The next step was to use shell scripts to check for errors and mail me. This was a pain at one site where I was using Solaris, HP-UX and Windows, which meant I needed three solutions. Then the Oracle 9i Enterprise Manager with the Management Server came into my life. All of a sudden it could manage my alert logs and I could assume everything was fine ( ) unless I got a notification email. This feature alone sold me on the 9i management server.

Back then, being a DBA and admitting using Enterprise Manager was a little like announcing to the world you were into cross dressing. Time has moved on, the product name has changed and so has its functionality, but essentially it’s still doing the same thing, which is reducing the effort needed to manage databases (and other things). The difference is that rather than managing 40 instances, teams are now managing thousands of instances.

Of course, none of this is new. I guess it’s just been brought into focus by a few things that have happened to me recently, like the PXE/Cobbler thing, the recent demise of my Grid Control VM at home and the constant talk of cloud computing and SaaS etc.

Specialists and performance consultants have the time to obsess over minute detail. The day-to-day DBAs and sysadmins have to churn through work at a pace, with reliable and reproducible results. Failing to embrace tools, whatever they are, to aid this is career suicide.

Cheers

Tim…