The presentation deadline for UKOUG is 8 days away. I have been madly preparing for 2 presentations, one on my best friend (rman) and the other on my co-best friend (the physical standby). Both of these topics have been perennial favourites for me and many of my attendees. I find with both of these items, there is always something more to learn.
Pythian has quite the presence at the UKOUG show in Birmingham England the first full week of December. I fondly remember my first trip to Europe to attend the show in Brighton in 1992. I was traveling with a senior exec from Oracle and we stayed in a very posh hotel and naturally went first class on the train to Brighton. My first day in London was, as I had heard, a typical London day:
- raining
- jumper at Green Park
- small explosion at Victoria Park station
- coal miners’ march
What more could I ask for. I was there again in 1998 for the show once it had permanently re-located to Birmingham. One of my topics this year allowed me to hone my skills with the active database duplicate in 11g. Talk about a sweet piece of technology :). I have been around IT for 25 or so years and this is one of the best I have seen. Speaking of rman … if you are lucky enough to be using it with Enterprise Edition and multi-CPU boxes (do any single-CPU boxes still exist?), the speed of the product is huge when asking it to spawn multiple channels manually or setting a degree of parallelism. Kudos to the engineers/developers who put that together.
I hunger for the opportunity to cut my teeth on some of the new-fangled stuff coming from Oracle … especially Exa-this and Exa-that not to mention ODA. I consider myself to be a strong CORE DBA and take pride in the work I do in that arena. Is it possible to teach an old dog new tricks?
While at the Apple store recently I shared a “secret” with the folks at the Genius bar to the pleasure of yours truly and the woman I was working with … want to boot Lion on Mac in 32-bit mode? Hold the 3 and the 2 key when restarting the machine. I wonder if I held down the 1 and the 9 key if it would boot in 19-bit mode :).
By the way, to my amazement I did see something once when flying into London … London! Usually it is overcast and you can’t see anything until your plane drops through a very low cloud cover. I thought I saw David Gilmour walking out of Harrod’s from seat 22F on my Boeing 767 but am still not sure.
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