InSync11 – Day 2

InSync11 day 2 was very much “the day after the night before” for me. I didn’t sleep very well at all. I think I spent most of the night winding myself up about my dodgy demo earlier in the day.

My next presentation was in the last slot on day 2, so I got to see the following presentations before I was up:

Jeremy Ashley & Chris Muir: What’s next for Oracle’s Application User Experiences?

On our first night in Sydney, Chris Muir and I were out with Jeremy Ashley and Mark Drake from Oracle. In addition to the regular geek talk, Jeremy waxed lyrical about end-to-end user experience. It’s quite an interesting subject, with a lot more to it than first springs to mind.

Graham Wood: Ashes of DBTime

I’ve seen Graham speak on this subject a number of times, but it’s always worth checking it out again. I’ll probably end up watching it again in OpenWorld in a few weeks. 🙂

Marcelle Kratochvil: Why you should be storing unstructured data in the Oracle database.

I have some experience of storing images and documents in the database, so I can appreciate some of the issues Marcelle was highlighting in her presentation. She’s very passionate about the subject and constantly pushing the barrier of what Oracle is capable in the multimedia field.

Connor McDonald: Managing optimizer statistics – A better way.

Management of database statistics has got to be one of the most contentious issues. Everyone seems to have a slightly different opinion and I always come away both agreeing and disagreeing with many of the points.

Connor always has great content and is renowned as an excellent presenter. This talk was no different in that respect. In fact, I would go as far as to say this is the best presentation I’ve ever seen him do, which probably means it’s one of the best Oracle presentations I’ve ever seen. If you get the chance to see Connor present, you really should take the opportunity. Of course, if you are a presenter yourself, you may want to avoid it, as it will probably make you paranoid about how bad you are in comparison.

Me: Edition-Based Redefinition.

Rule of thumb: Don’t present a database talk in the same time slot as Tom Kyte because everyone will go to his session, not yours. To be fair, if I wasn’t presenting I would have been in his session too. 🙂

Even so, the talk went ok and my demo worked as planned, so I slept well that night! 🙂

Conclusion

Pretty much everyone I spoke to said they were very impressed with the standard of the conference this year. The standard of the presentations was high and the location was cool.

Cheers

Tim…

CLOUG Day 2

The sessions I attended today were:

  • DB Time Based Performance Tuning – Graham Wood
  • A panel session about the Oracle ACE program. I was sitting in the audience for a while before I realized I should be on stage. You gotta laugh.
  • Creating a Technical Disaster Implementation Plan – Arjen Visser
  • Using Oracle Locator and Spatial with Application Express – Hans Forbrich
  • Advanced RMAN – Robert Freeman
  • My session 🙂

The whole event seemed to go down really well with the attendees and the speakers alike. This is the first CLOUG event of its kind in Chile and Francisco did a great job of getting it off the ground, so I would like to send a big thank you to him. Everyone I’ve spoken too is looking forward to the next event in Chile.

A special thank you also to Lillian Buziak from Oracle who paid all of her own expenses to be at this event to represent OTN on their stand and in the ACE panel session. If anyone at Oracle is listening, you really should reemburse her expenses.

So now I’ve got a day off before I have to suffer the 2 flights to get home.

Cheers

Tim…