ukoug

This blog post covers day 0 of UKOUG 2011 — Sunday, 4th of December, 2011. Since there were so many of us from Pythian at the conference, I’m adding my name in the blog post title. I think I will be doing it for all conference posts as I think I’ve been doing for some [...]

I went to lots of good presentations over the three days.

Day 1:

• SQL Tuning – Kyle Hailey
• Clonedb – Me (not counting myself in the “good” list, just placing myself in the timetable)
• OakTable Talks
• Emerging Trends in RAC – Julian Dyke
• Upgrading your Cluster to 11gR2 – Martin Bach
• Learning about life through business and software – Cary Millsap

Day 2:

• NFS Tuning – Kyle Hailey
• OakTable Talks
• RAC Attack – Organized by Jeremy Schneider (I spent the rest of the day helping out here)

Day 3:

Just finished my session. What a nightmare…

I was surprised anyone turned up as it was a late change to the schedule and there were some great sessions going on at the same time. Check out the photo.

It was kinda OK, until I got to the demo, which I screwed up. That was really disappointing because it really was the crux of the session. I thought I saw the issue and tried to salvage it, but it failed again so I gave up and moved on. I would like to say it was an OK recovery from a disastrous demo, but that would be a lie. Flipping crap.

I tried to come up with a witty title but after only first day at the UKOUG conference, OakTable Sunday, my brain is already a little fried…

So yes, last Friday evening I received an email from Oracle Corp informing me I had been nominated for and been accepted as an Oracle Ace. I’d just accidentally blown away some of my slides for a presentation I’m giving this week and I was a bit weary of the whole community thing, so it gave me a real lift. It would have given me a lift anyway, but the timing seemed very nice – it re-invigorated me and it also meant that I could now mention my Ace-dom at conference. Endlessly. I never won prizes at school so this sort of thing goes to my head. Sorry.

I missed the OakTable day because it was the 10th birthday party of nephew number 1, but I did make it back to Birmingham in time for the ACE dinner. Mark Rittman provided evidence of my presence here. I was already full of cake and trifle before I arrived, but the waitress didn’t seem to understand, “I’m not eating”, so I was *forced* to stuff myself again. Many thanks for the organizers of this event.

A couple of slots opened up in the UKOUG schedule due to cancellations and a message came through the OakTable mailing list asking if anyone could fill them. Alex Gorbachev and myself stepped up to the plate.

This means I’m now speaking about Clonedb on Monday at 11:05 in the Media Suite. See here.

The downsides to this are:

My good friend (and personal hero) Cary Millsap is doing a series of one day classes around the world — Mastering Oracle Trace Data. One of them is conveniently scheduled in Birmingham Thursday next week right after the UKOUG Conference. It’s not far from the Birmingham ICC where the UKOUG Technology and Business Suite Conference [...]

With only a few days to go before the UKOUG conference this year I’m preparing my presentations. I know pretty much what I want to say and, for the IOT talk at least, it is not as if I do not have enough material already prepared – some of which has been on the blog posts and some of which has not. (though it did strike me that I could just fire up the blog and walk through the thread, taking questions).

My big problem is not what to say – it is what not to say.

I think I’ve posted before about how deep a good DBA should dig into solving issues, as opposed to fixing them as soon as possible and moving on to the next urgent task.

Well, a friend of mine, Neil Chandler, has just posted on this topic, giving his reasons why you don’t run a 10046 trace on production. Neil raises some good points about how difficult it can be to get permission to do something as intrusive as a 10046 trace on a production system as well as the fact that most problems can be solved way before you get down to the level of tracing. Especially if it is not your job to go around solving the problems that have stumped the in-house team, which is the lot of many people who are recognised as being very good with Oracle.

One of the coolest things in Oracle 11g and onwards is a functionality called XDB Repository Events. Most of you probably know that based on XMLDB functionality in the database, the database also can be used in a File server kind of way by enabling the XDB Repository HTTP/FTP or WebDAV functionality via DBMS_XDB. XDB

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