Reporting from InSync09 in Sydney

It’s the second day of the InSync09 conference in Sydney — the first large-scale conference in Australia that combined user of all Oracle applications such as E-Business Suite, Hyperion, Siebel and all others that Oracle has bought in the last years. There is quite a bit of sessions on SOA and Fusion technology.

Official number of attendees is 550 but it definitely feels smaller. Perhaps, because quite a number attending only one of two days.

There are very few sessions going into technical details and I think my presentation yesterday was as technical as it could get at this conference even though it was more “shallow” than my typical presentations. My talk was titled “Making Oracle E-Business Suite Highly Available”. The idea of the session was to advocate for being reasonable when implementing HA solutions.

I suggested to start with defining the requirements and formalizing the SLA’s as much as possible and identify the gap between expectations and the budget. If the gap is significant, it’s a recipe for disaster. Having the SLA formalized, start walking the design path from the simplest KISS approach (Keep It Simple Stupid) up to the most complex architecture with Extended RAC and/or Data Guard with automated failover. In real life, the solution is typically somewhere in the middle at the point of the balance between SLA’s and budget limits. During presentation I covered Oracle E-Business Suite specifics and how to adapt it to use *efficiently* in HA implementation scenarios.

I have also given an interview after my session and it should be published soon on “sometube” soon but I haven’t seen the results yet.

I have met lots of old friends here at the conference and made quite a few new ones. The evening yesterday was terrific fun while gambling with virtual money — especially at the end when they removed the limits on bets. Unfortunately, I think my last beer was one too many (more like three to many) and today I definitely feel the results of that. The good news is that I don’t anything today and can take it easy goofing off.

I’m getting very late for the IBM keynote (almost missing it) about dynamic infrastructure. I have the funny feeling I know what they are going to talk about — I did recently review of strategic database platform direction for one client here in Sydney (AIX/Power6 vs Linux/x86) and it’s definitely wasn’t IBM’s win this time and I should say as in most other cases these days. Ok… batteries are running now — stay tuned.