Looks like this day is going to be no different than most days at conferences–start early and end late.
This morning started at 7am (!) with an ODTUG SIG Leaders breakfast meeting. The meeting was a great opportunity to provide ideas to Mike Riley, the ODTUG SIG VP, as well as other leaders in the group. We have lots of great ideas and will be working to make the SIGs serve their members’ needs better in the coming months. If you have ideas for the SIGs, particularly the Development DBA SIG, please contact me so that we can improve the group.
One significant note–I finally got a chance to meet Mark Rittman in person. He’s relatively famous, especially in the Oracle BIEE space, and has one of the oldest (and currently very active) Oracle-related blogs.
As this is the first day of the conference for most people, the first session of the day is the main general session and keynote for the week. The keynote speaker, Ted Farrel, is a VP in the Fusion Middleware division, specializing in development tools. I think everyone can tell he is a very technical person and clearly spends quite a bit of time writing code–something unusual for VPs at Oracle.
I also attended Eric Evans’ (Hotsos) with the longest title ever: “Oracle Code Instrumentation, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Properly Scoped Trace Files”. Eric did a great job introducing us to the DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO interface and also the CLIENT_ID functionality available in many different programming environments including ODP.NET, OCI, JDBC, and PL/SQL.
I missed the 1:30pm sessions due to a conflicting meeting with a customer.
At 2:45pm, I attended Tony Catalano’s (TUSC) session, “10g New Features to Impress Your Coworkers.” As usual, Tony gave a dynamic presentation that kept everyone engaged and gave a lot of information on some less-used features of 10g. I’m not sure you can really use the word “new” in discussing 10g any more, but it was good information nonetheless. Of course, as there hasn’t been a major database release in about 2 years, it’s not really Tony’s fault that he hasn’t gotten to talk about new things.
At 4:15pm, I gave my first session of the conference, “High Availability Options for Oracle Database”. As anticipated, there weren’t many DBAs here, so turnout was a little low. Interestingly, several developers attended just to get familiar with some of the architecture for the various options. Oh, and then I thought that I started at 4:30pm, so I went until 5:30pm by accident…oops.
After my session, I got to carry out my duties as a SIG leader and conducted the ODTUG Development DBA SIG meeting. We had a short SIG agenda to cover things related to how to provide better communication channels for the SIG. After the “SIG business”, we had some great discussion on SIG future direction and some good technical topics like software configuration management, DBA tools, and possible technical sessions for future conferences as well.
Ending the day with a good dinner with friends is always a nice conference treat.