Went to the keynote and five presentations. Keynote was a lot of show, but not much to bring home. Two presentations regarding database migration assistant for unicode, and Real Application Testing were relevant, but so uninspiring and lacked the extra stuff that it was like attending someone reading from the manual. Not much of a take away there either. Also went to a presentation on PL/SQL - Divide and Conquer, modularizing your code. I had hoped to hear more from Bryn Llewellyn, Oracle, but it was really Martin Büchi from Avaloq that had the whole show. Lots of usefull info, interesting real life case on how to structure enormous amount of code. Will remember this next time I get a chance to work with developers and have to look into refactoring of PL/SQL. It does seem to be something one can apply elsewhere in any large environment. Bryn is an excellent speaker, by the way. The two were clear that they did not want to sell consulting or anything else, just to share some goals and passion. I liked that, Bryn talks in way that could fool any DBA into write some code; wish he had a bigger part of it.
Next presentation was of course the highlight of the day. Cary Millsap talked about skew. I’ve heard some of this before, but again there was something new to learn and reconsider. A reminder of how skew occurs in many levels and groupings and is really the reason why he and most of us has a job. (Just that Method R gets the job done sooner, I think). Cary is the best presenter I can think of in the Oracle world, and made the room laugh many times at a potentially boring subject. Two of my friends heard him speak for the first time and was impressed. One of them considered to skip the remaining presentations for the day so the day would have a good ending. Couldn’t have made a better compliment myself.
I finished of with a presentation regarding best practices for Oracle on Windows. I’m not much a fan of best practices, but this was a full packed check-list on what can go wrong on Windows; a unix/linux guy would suspect that there is enough to keep you busy. Very useful to use later since I have been sent to windows land on an assignment for 6-12 months.
I also met briefly Dan Norris from Oracle and Alex Gorbatchev from Pythian; two guys I’ve been following on Twitter for a while. Always great to see people IRL once in a while (MOW 2011 and Hotsos 2008 in that order). These guys remind me why I like working with this (the database), people outside, especially the open source java cool coding guys, wonder how can one have a life at all working with a comercial database that is anything than simple and inexpensive. Lots of smart people work with this and create an atmosphere beside the work - e.g. OOW has become a great event. Since they don’t compete in my market it does not cost much to write this; but Method R and Pythian are two companies I admire; they create and share a lot with others, and appearantly have lots of fun at work and outside.
Now breakfast, no time to spell check. Love my new android tablet, by the way.
Update:
-Breakfast over, some spell checking done.
-Power tip for the Android tablet: Check the Wi-Fi disconnection policy, set it to disconnect when screen is turned off; battery lasts much longer.
-I remember that I met a smart guy on Rac Attack yesterday; Martin Nash. From UK, good for us we have such experts we can ask to come over to OUGN.