C14 OakTable World Las Vegas

If you haven’t yet made the decision to attend COLLABORATE 14 – IOUG Forum in Las Vegas taking place on 7-11 April, 2014 at the Venetian Hotel, this might just help you to make the call. You know you want to be there.

OakTable Network will be holding its OakTable World for the very first time during the COLLABORATE conference. While it’s a little bit last moment, IOUG was able to provide a room for us to use for the whole day and we at OakTable quickly put the schedule together. The agenda is selected by the OakTable speakers on the topics they are really passionate about. As history shows, this is generally what your also want to hear about.

The history of OakTable World comes from the underground event started by Mogens Nørgaard during Oracle OpenWorld somewhere around 2007-2009. After several years of success and growing popularity, the even has become knows as OakTable World run during OOW12 (link) and OOW13 (link) and was a huge success. Last year, we have also run OTWUK13 around UKOUG TEBS 13 conference in Manchester. Needless to say it was a success.

Thanks to many good companies sponsoring the events all those years — you know who you are. This year, the sponsor is really IOUG who managed to find a room for us. I’ll probably gather few usual suspect to print special t-shirts again so stay tuned for that update — I wanted to get the info out-there ASAP so that people could plan attending.

The up to date schedule is in Google Calendar. You can also sign up to the calendar feed using XML or iCal feeds.

Embedded schedule is below:

Note that we have two hours of TED-style lightning talks with or without slides. Each talk is 10-15 minutes when the author shares an innovative perspective relevant to the database industry. The talks are the mix of technical and non-technical topics. It’s been first attempted at UKOUG conference in 2011 and 2012 I believe and were very popular and well attended.

You will hear about some specific technologies or methods that are under-utilized, about provocative approaches to database tasks we have at hand, about disruptive trends and about totally non-technical things that will make you a better IT professional — stories of someone’s life or professional career. It’s usually entertaining and thoughts-provoking. I strongly recommend them.

As you can see the speakers for the rest of the day are stellar. Frits Hoogland of Enkitec Europe fame comes to C14 all the way from Holland and he will start the day by getting very very very deep inside Oracle execution code. Frits will demonstrate live use of Linux GDB debugger techniques to diagnose and troubleshoot very complex scenarios when you really need to understand internal of certain database operations. You really need your brain fresh for this session so scheduling it first thing in the morning is the only reasonable time to reduce the risk of your brain being fried in the first 15 minutes. Hardcode folks will love this.

Next goes Kyle Hailey with Agile Data story to teach us about modern techniques in making Oracle database deployment, cloning and things as easy as deploying a Linux RPM package with YUM. Moved to 3pm, Graham Wood from Oracle will be presenting Unreal World Performance use cases themed after popular Real World Performance Tour (but without two other amigos) with fresh look at bad practices of managing connections to Oracle databases — time for a refresher on those very popular RWP Youtube videos.

Unfortunately Jeff won’t be able to be here. We might still get some of his books. However, we have Gwen Shapira presenting on loading Twitter data into Hadoop and analyzing with complete live on the spot demo!

Late Karl Arao addition is also on the schedule!

Here are the schedule for the Lightning Talks. The schedule might change slightly between two slots (and we still have one slot to be confirmed):

Lightning Talk Part I:

• Kyle Hailey – “Importance of Data Visualization”
• Jeff Needham – “Hadoop Myth-Busting (plus books giveaway)”
• Tim Gorman – “Eagles and Seagulls” about being an independent IT consultant
• Kellyn Pot’vin – “Finding Your Path”

Lightning Talk Part II:

• Jonathan Gennick – “Seven Ways toward Better Writing”
• Kellyn Pot’vin – “Snapclone with DBaaS in EM12c”
• Graham Wood – How Hardware Timings Affect Your Oracle Database Performance
• TBC

Lightning talks details are in the events details in the calendar if you open the event. Remember that there might be some last minute changes so I recommend simply signing up for the calendar feed on your mobile device you carry with you at the conference.

Also, there will be the OakTable folks and other crowd hanging around that room for the whole day so come over. I think it would be a good experiment to reintroduce couple things that Mogens had back in the old days:

• FIVE-MINUTES-OF-FAME – Any attendee can get up and present a technical solution (5-minute time limit) to the group for admiration.
• FIVE-MINUTES-OF-HELP – Any attendee can get up and pose a technical problem (5-minute time limit) to the group for help.

Well, that’s the news. If you are excited — post here in the comments that you are coming, share this on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and what not. Looking forward to see as many of you there as possible. As Tim Gorman said — “more fun than a barrel of drunken DBAs, is the un-conference formerly known as “Oracle Closed World“, now known as “Oak Table World“.” And this year we are in Vegas!