AUSOUG Conference 2008 in Perth — Getting Ready

Last year, I had very pleasant experience presenting at AUSOUG Conference 2007 in Melbourne. It was a long way from Canada but no regrets. Since I moved to Sydney more than a month ago, it’s much closer to travel and this year I will be presenting on both AUSOUG conferences — in Perth and at Gold Coast.

I arrived to Perth late Friday night and Saturday evening we had a very nice dinner with the bunch of Oracle ACE’s (and some of them ACE Directors). Local ACE’s were presented by Chris Muir, Connor McDonald and Penny Cookson. Tim Hall represented UK ACE’s while me being semi-local ACE from Sydney. Two of us were double agents — me and Connor are also members of OakTable Network. Seven is definitely a better number than 5 so my family brought number of lunch guests to 7. It’s been great to catch up with everyone before the start of the conference. Food was also very nice. Unfortunately, I had to hurry up at the end — my junior was falling asleep on the table as it was already close to midnight in Sydney timezone.

Back to the conference… My session is the first in the schedule — right after the keynote. The presentation is titled “Oracle ASM 11g: The Evolution”. It will be the first time I’m presenting on this topic and, surprise-surprise, it’s almost ready as I kept working on it on the plane and in the hotel yesterday. I know, I know — having your presentation ready two days in advance is unusual. Shame on me. But I’ll make it up and change the slides completely tonight and tomorrow morning — no worries.

Number of DBA presentations at AUSOUG conference is not very high and usually there is only one at a time so schedule planning shouldn’t be too difficult. However, there are some other session I want to attend from development track as well as business and maybe even (yeah… shame on me) Fusion. Perhaps, I could finally get what this Fusion is all about except collective name for all Oracle application software including flourishing variety of recently acquired stuff.

Besides the conference, I’ll be in Perth for the whole week and will be briefing several executives of companies headquartered in Western Australia about Pythian services. There are also thoughts about adding some DBA force to Pythian in Western Australia and if anyone is interested, I’ll be excited to discuss it. ;-)

I’ll be also very glad to meet everyone interested to talk about anything while I’m here in Perth so please feel free to call me up at 0412-444-950 and we can catch up during or after the conference.