The Opryland complex is huge! You could walk for 30 minutes and still not get where you need to be. I got lost, so I couldn’t get to my room in time to write this yesterday!
Fortunately, there are these “Ask Me” booths where you can ask for directions. I tried Oracle questions, they stared funny at me.
12 concurent sessions throught the day. This makes it really hard to choose to which one to go to, especially when almost everything related to Oracle interests me.
So I made my decision and went to “RAC & ASM best practices” presented by Kirk McGowan of Oracle. I wanted to see how far the documentation / common sense was from what will actually work. It wasnt that far from the docs, which is good. It means Oracle got it right.
Then at lunchtime, the IOUG RAC group had this great idea of having a RAC story-telling meeting during lunchtime. So I grabbed the boxed lunch and rushed to the room. The room was full of people, hungry for more information about RAC, looking to find whether they were the only ones having problems.
The problem I have with these meetings is that all we can talk about is best practices/general information. It’s extremely hard to talk specifics without pen and paper or without a sqlplus session to a RAC database. It was still exciting.
Having an exciting morning with RAC, I needed a break – I chose something that I knew, but I wanted to hear more about. I wanted to hear from someone who has worked with it – a development session about CLOBs, called “Large Issues With Large Objects” by Michael Rosenblum of Dulcian, Inc. Some info on best practices. Some warnings on strange cutting at 4000 characters when using sql functions with CLOBs, and some tricks to write less code. Educational.
After this session I had to go to a meeting with my opponents. I will be taking part of the closing debate of IOUG with a topic “Oracle on Linux or Commercial UNIX”. We had a pre-meeting, trying to probe each other’s arguments. Should be fun, almost like in court. “The defense has no more questions…”.
Finally, at the end of the day during the closing event, the mayor of Nashville showed up to remind us that in addition to the mini-city we were in, there was the rest of Nashville available to us to discover.
Finally, as if this wasn’t a long day already, the vendor Exhibitor show went for another 2 hours. As usual, all the funny little things they would do to attract interest.
I am looking forward to Tuesday’s sessions.
2 Comments. Leave new
Great blog, Christo. It really gives me a taste of what it’s like there. Keep it up please.
Cheers,
Doug
Cristo,
It was really nice talking to you at Nashville! And thanks for your remarks about my presentation
Michael (Misha)
P.s. The doc about possible problems with /3Gb – 297498.1. Interesting, isn’t it?