OOW09 Session#4 DBA 11g New Features

For all those who came to my last of my four sessions - 11g New Features for DBAs - I appreciate your taking the time. It was a pleasant surprise to see about 500 people showing up at a lunch time slot on the last day of the conference.

Here is the presentation link. I hope you enjoyed the session and found it useful.

OOW09 Session# 3

I just finished the third of my four presentations - SQL Plan Management. Considering it was at 9 AM on the last day of the conference, right after the big Aerosmith concert, I was expecting a lot less crowd. But, to my pleasant surprise about 150 brave souls turned up. Thank you all. I hope you found it useful.

Here is the presentation material. While you are there, feel free to browse around. And, of course, I will highly appreciate if you could send me your comments, either here or via email - whatever you are comfortable with.

OOW09 My Session#2

Today I delivered the second of my four sessions - "Upgrade Case Study: Database Replay, Snapshot Standby and Plan Baselines".

For those you attended, I thank you very much. Here is the presentation.

OOW Day2

Why do you come to Open World? I'm sure we will get all kinds of reasons, as many as there are stars in the sky. Some predominant themes are - getting to know more about the Oracle (or related) technologies by attending sessions, reconnecting with old friends and building networking. Of course, getting freebies from the Exhibit Halls, I'm sure, can't be far behind as a motivator.

I come to OOW for all those reasons as well. But high up in my list is the visit to the Exhibit Halls. No; not for the tee-shirts that do not fit me and graphics I don't really dig. I visit the demogrounds and exhibit halls to know about the products and tools that I should be aware of. Where else would you find 1000+ companies advertising the products at one place? Sure, I can call them and find out; but ho do I find them? OOW exhibit halls are prime "hunting" grounds to look for new ideas and tools that I should be interested in; or at least be aware of. I can not only look at the tools; I can actually get some relevant technical facts in 5 minutes which might take weeks of scheduling and hours of marketing talk. And, if I decide the product is not relevant; I can always walk away. I have the privilege of walking away; they don't. If I call them to my office, "they" have that option; not me :) If I find something attractive, I can always follow up and get to know more.

Oracle demogrounds are even better. Not only I can meet Oracle PMs there; but the people who never come out to the public world - developers, development managers, architects and so on. These unsung heroes are mostly the reason why Oracle is what it is now. I meet the known faces, get to know new ones and establish new relationships. They hear from me what customers want and I learn the innards of some features I am curious about.

So, I spent almost the whole day yesterday navigating through demo grounds and exhibit halls. I could cover only a small fraction. In between I had to attend some meetings at work. Going to OOW is never "going away". I wish it was.

OOW09 - RAC Performance Tuning

For all those who came to my session - many, many thanks. There is no better sight for a presenter than to see a roomful of attendees, especially with people standing near the walls. The fire marshal was not amused probably; but I was grateful. The harrowing incident of a blue screen of death on my PC - not just once but twice - just before the presentation was about to start was enough to throw me into a panic mode; but the third time was a charm. It worked. Phew!

You can download the presentation here. And while you are there, look around and download some more of my sessions as well.

Thanks a lot once again. I'm off the keynote now.

ACE Directors Product Briefing '09

One of the most valuable benefits of being an Oracle ACE Director is the briefings by Oracle Product Managers at the Oracle HQ. This year the briefing was on Friday Oct 9th at Oracle conference center rather than the customary Hilton Hotel.

While I was a little disappointed at the coverage of the database topics, I quickly recovered from the alphabet soup that makes up the netherworld of middleware and tools. However, a surprise visit by Thomas Kurian to address questions from the audience about the various product roadmaps was testimonial that Oracle is dead serious about the ACE Program. That proves the commitment Oracle has made for the user community - very heartening.

As always, Vikky Lira and Lillian Buziak did a wonderful job of organizing the event. Considering about 100 ACE Directors from 20+ countries, that is no small task. Perhaps the highlight of the organization was the detailed briefing sheets Lillian prepared for each one individually, down to what car service one takes and when - simply superb! No amount of thanks will be enough. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Vikky and Lillian. And, thank you Justin Kestelyn - for kicking off and running the event year after year.

Open World 09 Starts

Oracle Open World 2009 has officially started with the User Group sessions today. I am presenting a session today. I started off by registering and getting my cool Blogger badge holder, hanging off the even cooler ACE Director lanyard.

I went off to the first session of today on the IOUG bucket - Workload Management by Alex Gorbachev. Alex is one of those people who know their stuff; so there is always something to be learned from there. Alex successfully demonstrated the difference between Connection Load Balancing and Server Side Listener Load Balancing, with pmon trace to show how the sessions are balanced. It sheds light on the question - why Oracle is not balancing the workload.

If you didn't attend this, you should definitely download the presentation and check it out later.