It is now evening after the first day at the AUSOUG Conference in Perth, Australia. This is my first time attending AUSOUG, and I have found it much smaller and more personal than others I have attended. The food has been excellent, and more importantly (because I really needed it) there was lots of coffee out when I got there and for several hours after.
I was fortunate to present right after the opening session, so I could relax and enjoy the rest of my day. There were some interesting questions and audience participation near the end of my presentation (on LDAP and Oracle Application Server), most notably dealing with the issue of having a set of employees in one group and “moving the entire group of employees” within the LDAP Directory.
The exhibition hall was open all day, so I went there between sessions. No matter how many times I tell myself that I don’t need more stuff, I always find things at the exhibit hall that I want. Today, I picked up a red Red Hat hat.
In the morning I attended Richard Lawson’s presentation, “Traveling through time with Grid Control”. He demonstrated a basic overall approach to using and implementing Grid, and showed some of the advantages they have seen using it. He also highlighted some of the features (such as RAC provisioning) that he hopes to employ in the near future.
Lunch was scrumptious, but there was such a long line-up (I don’t do line-ups too well) that I decided to take advantage of the situation and go to the back-massage chair. After all the traveling, I was quite stiff, and the chair gave an amazing massage. When it was over, there was no more line-up for food. Bonus!
After lunch, I attended Raymond Payne’s presentation “Are you Ready for Fusion? A Practical Guide to What you should know”. I’m beginning to think it might start getting called “Oracle ConFusion” as there is so much misunderstanding of it. Earlier in the day, I had an interesting discussion with Raymond and John Garmany about using Oracle Directory Integration Services to co-ordinate LDAP information between OID and Active Directory, and some of the challenges involved.
Connor McDonald’s presentation on “Moving Data Quickly” was informative, entertaining, and fast-paced. Naturally, it included the gratuitous family photos. I managed to spend some time catching up with Connor at the end of the day, but declined to go for beers, as I was under the mistaken impression that when I got back to my hotel room, my missing luggage would have shown up.
Gavin Soorma gave a presentation on RAC (“It’s Real Easy”), with emphasis on making sure you do your upfront planning. He took us through the components and layers of products that needed to be installed (and the order), to get RAC up and running.
My final session was Duncan Mills’s discussion of the new Oracle 11g JDeveloper. Duncan Mills has been a presenter at our Ottawa Oracle User Group’s (OOUG) DBA/Developer Day and I wanted to hear him speak, as those of us within OOUG did not get to attend many sessions during the day of our big event. Sadly, jet lag had caught up with me and I had a hard time focusing. I did have a chance to catch up a bit with Duncan during the after-hours networking event.
On a personal note, I called the airline to find out why my missing luggage was not here yet (yesterday it was only 24 hours behind, according to the system records). Apparently Melbourne clears about 500 (yes 500!) missing bags per day. But they clear them only when there are no passengers in the terminal. Good thing I picked up a Toad T-shirt today!
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