Tag: OUG Ireland

OUG Ireland 2019 : It’s a wrap for me!

This is going to be a really short post, because the event was really short for me.

It was an early start, which meant a lack of sleep. As usual, this made me feel terrible. I never sleep well, so when something interferes with my already terrible routine I really can’t handle these days. The flight across was fine, and I got to the hotel at the correct time. Unfortunately, I had made a reservation for the wrong month. They had free rooms, so I paid for a room for about twice the price of the original room I booked. I got a shower and sat down to think. I then booked a new flight home for that evening.

I had a couple of DMs from concerned folks who had seen my tweets. Debra came across to chat to me, as she was flying out after lunch, and I had decided I was only turning up for my own session.

My session was a “Multitenant : What’s new in Oracle Database 18c & 12c Release 2” at 15:10. I did the session and went back to my room to wait for my flight home. When the time came, I flew home. Everything was fine.

I’m sure the conference was great, because it always is. Sorry for not being present for most of it.

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2019

Just a quick post to mention OUG Ireland 2019, which is just around the corner. The event is on the 4th-5th of April at the Gresham Hotel, Dublin.

I’ve got one session this year, which is called, “Multitenant : What’s new in Oracle Database 18c & 12c Release 2” on Thursday 4th at 15:10. Bits of 19c are starting to creep into this presentation now too. 🙂

Last year I started with no presentations and ended up with two. This year I’m starting with one, so let’s see what I end up with. 🙂

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2018

Next month (22-23 March) is the OUG Ireland 2018 event. Somehow I managed to miss the call for papers, so I wasn’t in the race for a speaker slot, but I just booked my flights and hotel, so I’ll be lurking around.

If anyone drops out of a session after 11:00 on the first day, or at any time on the second day, I’m happy to drop in and fill the spot. Just sayin’! 🙂 If not, I have an overnight stay in Dublin.

Maybe see you there!

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’m registered as an attendee now through my company’s membership, so I’ll definitely be there. If I get a stray speaker slot, all the better. 🙂

OUG Ireland 2017 : It’s a Wrap

I guess four blog posts and 3 videos over a two day period is a little excessive, but this is the closing post to make it five. 🙂

Here are the posts I put out during the event. I’ve added in some videos I finished editing today.

This is the first time I’ve stayed over at the event and I think it made a big difference. When I’ve done it in a single day it adds quite a lot of pressure. From the minute you wake up until the minute you get back home there is a nagging doubt about the logistics of the day. I still had to get there in time for my talks, but I was not constantly checking the time for when I had to fly home and it made me feel much more relaxed. I’ll try to do it this way in future.

Big thanks to the folks at OUG Ireland and UKOUG for inviting me and making it a great day. I’ll see you next year! Thanks also to the attendees and speakers who had to put up with me for two days this year. Sorry you didn’t get to have a day off. 🙂 This is one of the conferences I where I pay my own expenses, but I would still like to thank the Oracle ACE Program for continuing to allow me to fly the flag!

See you all next time!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : The Journey Home

I left the hotel bar with Martin, Chris and Neil and after an abortive attempt to get an airbus, we got a taxi to the airport.

I was convinced Dublin Airport was one of the few airports that don’t want you to unpack your laptops from your bag so I didn’t and my bag got flagged. I have no idea where I got that idea from, but I felt like a dick. 🙂

We then went to get some food and wait for our respective flights, whilst discussing our favourite movies…

When it was my time to board I said my goodbyes and headed to the boarding gate…

All three seats in my row were full and all three of us were of a “fuller figure”, but fortunately the row across the aisle was free so I got to “upgrade” from a middle seat to my own row. Happy days!

The flight home was about 45 minutes, then it was a taxi ride home to complete the journey. Wrap-up post to follow!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : Day 1

I arrived at the Gresham Hotel, registered and went straight down to the first session of the day…

First up was Maria Colgan presenting, “What to Expect from Oracle Database 12c”, a quick romp through the cool features in Oracle 12c (12.1 and 12.2). The room was full so I had to listen form the corridor, with my head occasionally popping round the door to see the screen. Maria’s sessions are always great value, so definitely get to her if you can.

Next up was Marcin Przepiorowski with “Direct NFS for DBAs”. I’ve used this for some time, but only because Kevin Closson made me. 🙂 Marcin worked through some of the pros and cons and gave a bunch of numbers and graphs to prove is points. Graphs mean science! 🙂

I then moved on to Christian Berg with “Doing Oracle Analytics this way? STOP IT!”. We are transitioning to Oracle BI for the on-prem warehouse associated with our Oracle Cloud Apps stuff. I’m not part of the project and I don’t understand any of this stuff, but I just want to understand some of the vocabulary. I’m definitely understanding some more of the words now. 🙂

Next up was Martin Klier with “42 facts for Grid Infrastructure, ASM and RAC”. This was a quick-fire introduction to RAC and ASM. I’ve used both for some years, but I still find it really cool to see a summary like this, from someone who can actually do it for real.

Then it was me with back-to-back sessions. I brought my underwear, but forgot my pointer, so I had to borrow one from the mighty Maria Colgan. Thanks Maria! My first session was “Put your feet up and have a REST. Take a Tour of JSON Support in the Oracle Database”. The second was “It’s Raining Data! Oracle Databases in the Cloud”. Both sessions got a good crowd and I really enjoyed them. Judging by the reactions on Twitter some of the audience appreciated them too. 🙂

After my sessions I went to Gerald Venzl with “Supercharge Your Code to Get Optimal Database Performance”. He had the word Java on the title slide, but by his own admission it applied equally well to any programming language that interacts with a database. He discussed a number of things like the impact of commits, set processing, array processing and bind variables etc. For some of the points he did live demos to show the impact of getting it wrong. It’s exactly what you need every developer to hear before they are allowed to develop against a relational database. I think Gerald has spotted a gap in the market and is positioning himself as “The New Tom Kyte”, so from now on he will be known as Gerald Kyte… 🙂

Kamil Stawiarski with “Back to the basics: TABLESPACES… but a little bit low level style”. In this session he spoke about how different operations affect the contents of the datafiles on disk. Not the data you can query from SQL, but actually what is written (or not) to disk. He demoed it, by performing the operations in SQL and displaying the contents of the datafiles using a little C++ utility. It’s important for people to understand this stuff from a space-manangement perspective, but also from a security perspective. Just because you’ve deleted the row, it doesn’t mean you can’t read it from the datafile (assuming you are not using TDE) etc. 🙂

After the last session we got together for drinks. The queue was pretty big, so I went across the road and checked into my hotel, then came back and got a pint of Guinness. We headed off to the ACE Dinner at Rustic Stone, which was quite fancy. From there we moved across to a local bar and I was “forced” to have another Guinness. Then it was back to the hotel, where Christian “forced” us to eat rather expensive chocolate. I ended getting to bed really late. It was a really fun day at the conference and the evening. 🙂

Let’s see what tomorrow brings… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : The Journey Begins

There is something about early starts that get me so nervous I can’t sleep properly. As a result I was awake before my 05:00 alarm, which gave me plenty of time to get ready. That was good because I hadn’t packed up laptop bag, which was also acting as my overnight bag. 🙂

The taxi ride to the airport was pretty standard, but I did have a conversation about Roza Bal in Kashmir.

I only had hand luggage, so I didn’t have to wait for the bag drop and security was mercifully quick. They did an explosives test on my phone, but ignored my laptop, cameras and huge power bank. Go figure…

Boarding happened on time and there was a gap in our row, so I was able to get the laptop out, which is always a bonus. The flight took about 40 minutes and was generally uneventful.

The journey from Dublin Airport to the conference venue was pretty simple. The AirLink Express takes you straight to the Gresham Hotel, so no drama there.

It is easier and cheaper for me to get to the OUG Ireland events than it is to get to London events. 🙂

I arrived, registered and went straight to the first session, but that’s another blog post! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2017 : See You There!

I’m speaking at this years OUG Ireland event! (agenda)

I booked my flights a little later this year, so the flights are super-expensive, about £38 return. 🙂 I’ve also booked a night in the Holiday Inn. That’s right, I’m staying for both days this year! 🙂

Both my sessions are on the first day, so I will have the second day to relax and mingle. 🙂

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2016

oug-ireland-2016

Early tomorrow morning I will start my journey to Ireland for the OUG Ireland 2016 conference.

I’ve got back-to-back sessions in the afternoon on database consolidation and analytic functions. I was invited to a panel on the Friday also, but I had already booked my flights before that invite, so sadly I had to decline.

This year is going to be another day trip for me, with the flight costing a gigantic £27 on ChavAir. 🙂

See you there!

Cheers

Tim…

OUG Ireland 2014

As you probably know by now I was at OUG Ireland yesterday.

It was a pretty early start for me. I needed to be up by 03:30 to get a taxi to the airport, but fear of missing my flight meant I was awake from about 01:00 onward. My taxi driver wanted to talk about some rather strange stuff during the ride. A conflicted individual I guess…

The Ryanair flight across to Dublin went smoothly enough. There were 18 people on a 737, so I’m guessing that flight didn’t cover the staff costs, since I paid £30 for a return flight. Once at Dublin I took the AirLink bus for 10 euros, which dropped me outside The Convention Centre Dublin.

I headed straight for the RAC Attack table at the Oracle stand, where I met some of the conference organisers and of course some of the RAC Attack Ninjas. I pretty much spent the rest of the day there, speaking to anyone and everyone that came within a three yard radius of me. 🙂 Thanks to Mina Zadeh for getting the ball rolling on organising this! I hope we will be able to do this every year. Even if people don’t want to spend time during a one day conference doing the RAC installation, it acts as a good focal point for people to come and chat about RAC and any other Oracle technology that they are interested in. Kinda like a “meet the geeks” thing. 🙂

It was good to meet up with Debra Lilley again, as it must have been at least 9 days since I last saw her. Thanks for my little brass Ganesha!

My first presentation of the event was “An Oracle DBA’s Guide to WebLogic Server”. I felt really nervous at the start of this presentation. I’m very quick to tell people I am still a newbie and this is very much sold as, “What I wish I had been told in my first hour of learning WebLogic”. Even with that in mind, there is always a niggling doubt that people might be expecting something different, which feeds into the insecurities and the inferiority complex. I think it went OK, but the nerves made me race a little and it might have freaked some people out with the pace.

My second presentation was on “PL/SQL : Stop making the same performance mistakes”. Being back on familiar ground felt good! I was really relaxed for this one and just went with the flow and enjoyed it. I had to miss some slides at the end because of the shorter time slot, but all the information is on my website, so it’s not that big a deal in the scheme of things. 🙂

Despite the jetlag, Tom was on great form during the day. He’s got a very British sense of humour and he handles having the piss taken out of him really well, so when he pulled out his phone I couldn’t help but comment on how massive it looked next him. I think it was a Galaxy Note of some description, but it looked like me using an iPad for a phone. 🙂 That prompted a comparison in hand sizes and I can now categorically state that my hands are smaller than Tom Kytes! That’s hardly surprising, since my hands are smaller than most humans above the age of 10 years old. After that bit of banter it was off to watch Tom do his thing for the last session of the day. I was in a playful mood, so I couldn’t help but heckle a bit. 🙂 This morning I got an email from him pointing to this Dilbert strip.

From there it was a quick trip to the boat/bar next to the conference centre for a farewell drink, then it was off to get my plane. Patrick Hurley was on the same flight as me, so we got to chat for a while at the airport. We’ve met a few times, but I’ve never really got to speak to him for that long before. He’s a totally cool guy! He is also a witness to the fact I drank a pint of Guinness in Ireland before I got on the plane home!

I got back into my house at about 23:00, so it was a very long, but very enjoyable day.

Thanks to everyone at OUG Ireland for making this event happen and thank you for inviting me. I’m hoping this will become a yearly entry in my calendar from now on. Thanks also to all the RAC Attack Ninjas and of course to all the attendees, without whom there would be no conference. Thanks to OTN and The Oracle ACE Program. It’s a privilege to be able to represent you folks at these events!

Cheers

Tim…