Friday Philosophy

Later this month, on April 17-20th, I am presenting again at the Norwegian Oracle user group (OUGN) spring conference {modern browsers will allow you to translate any Norwegian if you need to} . I loved it last year, as you can see from my third-day post on it. I’ve been lucky to attend some very good conferences over the last few years but those three days at the OUGN conference last year were, I think, my favourite single event to date. If you are within striking distance of Oslo and can negotiate the time out of the office, I would strongly recommend the event. If you can’t negotiate the time, heck, take a holiday and go anyway

This FF is a bit of a follow-up to the one I posted last week on PL/SQL skills and a comment made by Noons on how much knowledge you need to be an OakTable member.

I have a question to answer and I would appreciate other people’s opinion. Should there be more intro talks at conferences? If so, should the experts be giving them?

This Friday Philosophy was prompted by a discusion between some OakTable people about did we think “good” DBAs should know PL/SQL? Not all the tricks, bulk processing, using all the built-ins, but able to write PL/SQL with cursor loops and some exception handling that could eg cycle thorough tables and archive off data or implement some logon trigger functionality.

My response was “that depends on the age of the DBA”.

If you had asked me that question 15 years ago I would have said Yes, a good DAB would and should know PL/SQL.
If you had asked me 10 years ago I would have said I’d hope they would and most DBAs I respected has some PL/SQL skills.
If you had asked me 5 years ago I would have sighed and had a little rant about how they should but the younger ones don’t and that is wrong.

This has been a good but tiring week. It started with the UKOUG TEBS conference where I saw lots of people I know, a few who I didn’t but now do and I had good times in pubs and restaurants. One evening culminated in my singing part of “Two out of Three ain’t bad” in the style of a munchkin with Nial Litchfield in a pub at 1am, which I am sure he woud rather forget about – so if you know him, ask him about it. For me that was the indicator to go lie down in the dark and sleep. Irrespectve of drunken singing, I must had talked about 20 topics with 40 people over the conference, exchanging ideas, tricks and war stories.

How many of you have read the Oracle Concepts manual for the main version you are working on?

This is a question I ask quite often when I present and over the last 10 years the percentage number of hands raised has dropped. It was always less than 50%, it’s been dropping to more like 1 in 10 and Last year (at the UKOUG 2011 conference) was the nadir when not a single hand was raised. {Interestingly I asked this at the Slovenian User Group 3 months ago and something like 40% raised their hand – impressive!}.

The annual UK Oracle User Group Technical and E-Business Suite conference is fast approaching and rather than just say “hey everyone, I’m going to present at a conference” I thought I would say why I present at conferences (and SIGs (and any opportunity I get) ).

A couple of weeks ago I was making my way through the office. As I came towards the end of the large, open-plan room I became aware that there was someone following behind me so, on passing through the door I held it briefly for the person behind me {there was no where else they could be going}, turned left and through the next door – and again held it and this time looked behind me to see if the person was still going the same way as I. The lady behind gave me the strangest look.

The strange look was reasonable – the door I’d just held for her was the one into the gentleman’s bathroom. *sigh*

I was at the SIOUG annual conference in Slovenia this week (and a very good conference it was too) and I was watching a presentation by Christian Antognini about how the CBO learns by it’s mistakes. This was of course mostly about adaptive cursor sharing and cardinality feedback. Chris was also able to share a few tid-bits about 12c enhancements in this area. I can’t go into details, but basically it looks like the CBO is going to not only enhance those two features but there is a new one where the CBO can change the plan on the fly, as the same query progresses.

I know, the usual phrase is “Life Outside Work” but I like to think that, no matter how much we may like our jobs, our overall life is the key thing.

I’m spending a lot more time in Central London at the moment due to current work commitments. A few weeks ago I was having a quiet stroll through the streets and had what I can only describe as an odd moment:

I looked around and found I was being converged upon by 5 or 6 people walking slowly and aimlessly towards me – all from different angles, all only vaguely aware of their surroundings, all looking like they were making straight for me. I instantly thought of one of the scenes from “Shaun of the Dead” {A cracking film, go hire it tonight}.