IOUG RAC Attack! — Day 1 by Alex Gorbachev

I should say that I had interesting experience this evening — a tornado warning in downtown Chicago.

The alarms went off as soon as we tried to get out of the restaurant. Below is a year old example but it sounded exactly like that + it was much darker — like if the skies fell on us:

We had to turn back and were stuck in the pub for another hour or so sipping Guinness while the mother-nature had some fun around us. Funny, looks like it decided to come back now — skies are falling again with heavy rain, clouds and lightnings everywhere. The thunder is very loud and sirens went off again — can’t even sleep. But I digress so let’s get back to the overview of the day…

I love small classes! I mean small rooms with all chairs taken when people are close to me as I present and close to each other. The audience today was exact fit for the room — 20 people could fit on the chairs around the desks and few more (organizers and presenters) next to the back wall. What I like about small classes is the intimate atmosphere in the room. I also like live speech where my voice delivered natively without electronic distortion keeping all the beauty of the Russian accent (some people *still* noticed bits of German influence there).

The only small problem was the location of the stand where a speaker hosts the laptop — it was in the middle of the room. That felt somewhat odd and I kept running between the middle of the room and the stage (well, or the place where it’s supposed to be). I used to the fact that I have another view on my laptop screen — speaker’s view with next slide/motion and my reminders. I also had to do several demo’s on my RAC cluster and I obviously needed the keyboard badly for that. I should apologize that 8 people had to observe my back instead of my face for some time and I also couldn’t see how they were taking the material but I tried to look back from time to time and as soon I did that — I could see confirming nods so thanks for that!

My session was scheduled after lunch and all attendees made it back which is a good sign (thanks to good presentations from Dan Norris and Edward Whalen). The lunch break was a bit short so I delayed the start by few minutes getting my RAC cluster up and running for the demo so that I don’t loose precious time during the presentation.

I’m pretty satisfied with the results — I was able to reproduce all eviction examples I planned from the first time and I had to skip only few demos at the end (I suspected I wouldn’t get there). Anyway, I covered all the material except those last few demos (well, the audience will have labs tomorrow and I can play with it) and quick look at the few script internals and sources but that was handed over as a home work.

I should thank the audience once again for their attention — it was pretty deep session and 90 minutes time-span made it tough to keep concentrated. I think the majority were following me very closely and didn’t loose the track. Actually, I love 1.5 hour slots — it gives me just about right time to cover enough details and dig comfortably deep into the topic compare to 45-60 minutes slots.

I saw lots of interest in RAC Connection Management during the round-table discussion at the end of the day and I’m looking forward to the high demand for my tomorrow’s presentation titled “Connections! Connections! Connections!”. It would be mostly other attendees tomorrow but my presentation will be available in proceedings and I will be doing somewhat similar session on the RAC SIG Web Cast on September 11th (right, what can be a better day for failover scenarios than 9/11, pardon my sarcasm).

OK, back to my slides and demos for tomorrow — can’t sleep anyway… It’s going to be fun day and I’m looking forward to it.