ukoug

….Who plans the content of Tech15>
……Tips on submitting and abstract>

At the end of last week I was contacted by the UKOUG who asked me if I would agree to be on the planning committee for the annual technical conference this year – Tech15. Not only that but I was privileged to be asked to repeat my role from Tech14 and be the Lead for the Database area. I am of course happy to do so.

There are a few user group meetings coming up in the UK over the next week or two.

Note, you need to register to attend any of these, follow the links.

First is Club Oracle London, which are evening sessions held in London with 3 talks plus free beer and pizza. The next meeting is Thursday Feb 26th at 103a Oxford Street, kicking off at 18:30. You can register for this free event here and also see more details. In brief, Simon Haslam is talking about Oracle Database Appliance, Martin Bach on 12C new features the marketing guys don’t push and finally Phil Brown giving a virtualisation case study, how NOT to do it.

I think 2 years is long enough to wait between posts!

Today I delivered a session about Oracle Exadata Database Machine Best Practices and promised to post the slides for it (though no one asked about them :). I’ve also posted them to the Tech14 agenda as well.

Direct download: UKOUG Tech14 Exadata Security slides

As I mentioned in my last post, we tried to organise a thread of intro talks into day one and two of this year’s UKOUG Tech14 conference (you can see the agenda grid here). It was not complete but I thought I should pull it into it’s own post and add in what I would recommend from the overall agenda for people who are relatively new to Oracle RDBMS.

Monday 8th

I’ve done a very “brave”* thing. I’ve put forward a talk to this year’s UKOUG Tech14 conference titled “How Oracle Works – in under 50 minutes”. Yes, I really was suggesting I could explain to people how the core of Oracle functions in that time. Not only that, but the talk is aimed at those new to Oracle technology. And it got accepted, so I have to present it. I can’t complain about that too much, I was on the paper selection committee…

* – “brave”, of course, means “stupid” in this context.

As a result I am now strapped to the chair in front of my desk, preparing an attempt to explain the overall structure of an Oracle instance, how data moves in out of storage, how ACID works and a few other things. Writing this blog is just avoidance behaviour on my part as I delay going back to it.

An interesting experience I have had this year is being more involved in helping organise the annual UKOUG Oracle Technical Conference – Tech14. I fully intended to blog about things as we progressed, but it never happened got going so I did not.. But I thought it would be interesting to do a couple of blogs about it now, for anyone interested, as the conference itself approaches.

If you have never helped organise a conference or user group meeting then you probably think there is not a lot of work involved. You would be quite wrong. If you have been a volunteer at one, as in you have presented or chaired sessions, then you will have more understanding – but still probably fall short of the mark in estimating the effort involved. There is a lot involved.

I know, posts about up-coming user group meetings are not exactly exciting, but it’s good to be reminded. You can’t beat a bit of free training, can you?

On Monday 14th I am doing a lightning talk at the 4th Oracle Midlands event. The main reason to come along is to see Jonathan Lewis talk about designing efficient SQL and then he will also do a 10 minute session on Breaking Exadata (to achieve that aim I suggest you just follow the advice of the Oracle Sales teams, that will break Exadata for you pretty efficiently!).

Oracle Scene (the publication of United Kingdom Oracle Users Group) has published my article "Hadoop for Oracle Professionals", where I have attempted, like many others, to demystify the terms such as Hadoop, Map/Reduce and Flume. If you were interested in Big Data and what all comes with understanding it, you might find it useful.

A PDF version of the article can be downloaded here http://www.proligence.com/art/oracle_scene_summ14_hadoop.pdf

Today was the UKOUG Operating System and Storage Event. I was a tourist for this event, as I didn’t have any presentations to do. Added to that, I’m a grunt DBA, so I wasn’t too sure what would be waiting for me at an OS and storage event…

Thanks to the miracles of Google Maps, I managed to be late for the event, so I missed the first session. Why is it I can get to foreign countries on time, but I can’t get to something that is pretty much in my own city without getting lost?

UKOUG have extended the deadline for the Tech14 paper submission until Tuesday 27th May, giving people an extra weekend to get their abstracts in.

This is your last chance to get involved.

Cheers

Tim…