RMOUG 2008 is Over

The time is flying here and two days of RMOUG Training Days 2008 have gone. In a nutshell, what a great conference! Well done RMOUG and special thanks to Peggy King!

It was very nice to see a bunch of old friends and meet new ones in person including Jeremiah Wilton and Tim Gorman.

I liked the lunch organization — everyone was seated and nice food served — way better than standing buffet. The area with the tables was also used for the breakfast and this is where the keynote was done — excellent idea to combine those together:

My expectations of conference quality have been fully confirmed. I’ve seen several excellent presentations and, unfortunately, missed few ones as well. I enjoyed Tim Gorman’s presentation about CRS and I finally got to see Daniel Fink’s session on analytical queries against Statspack schema. Dan provided good introduction to analytics to start with and later applied it with nice examples of Statspack reporting. 1.5 hour format was very good for that topic.

I attended a non-technical presentation by Jonathan Gennick about writing Oracle books. Interesting to know how publishing industry works and what authors often go through.

The highlight of the day was controversial presentation by Moans No Balls Longgood. One girl finally revealed his true name:

Back to his presentation. It was actually more like a round table discussion about current state of database performance tuning. Apparently, we don’t tune right, never had and never will. Daniel Fink pointed out that Oracle wait interface is actually useless. Jonathan Lewis was proving that Statspack is a useful performance tuning tool in the right hands. Finally, Graham Wood made a point that new Oracle 10g performance tuning method, based on DB Time and powered by AWR, has the best of both Statspack and wait interface with 10046 trace. Actually, if someone want to call this session a presentation then presenters should be Jonathan, Dan and Graham. Well, we can at least thank Moans for moderation and some would be especially grateful for the presents from Denmark. Very heated discussion and I enjoyed it. At least, everyone agreed that silver bullets is an evil idea.

The conversation on performance tuning moved slowly to the RMOUG reception event where each could have few free drinks and some could manage to have quite a few of them:

I have a proof that Graham adopted some vegetarian habits — I know that there is someone that would appreciate that info:

The evening moved to the Hyatt restaurant where I had a chance to show how Russian Hussars drink shoots. One dane managed to repeat it quite well. The only small detail forgotten – it must be done standing:

I should say that hussars skills are not only how to drink shots but how to look good next morning and danes can do that. Man definitely has some military experience to look that good next day:

We had quite a snowfall overnight with significant temperature drop. That caused roads to turn into skating rinks. Fortunately, my first presentation was at 9:45 so 1.5 hour drive didn’t cause much havoc — I even had some time to go through my slides before presentation. This was presentation on RAC connection management and I was able to finish it on time — 60 minutes slot was much better for it than 45 minutes I had on other conferences. I think it went quite well – event noticed that many attendees were taking notes.

I was slightly tired after my presentation but I really wanted to see Riyaj Shamsudeen’s session about myths of redo, undo and commits in Oracle. I’ve been on several conferences where he presented and never managed to go to his session. Now was the chance and I wasn’t disappointed — it was good technical session and I enjoyed his style of using Power Point. As Dan Fink say’s, Rayaj has a very good way to use visual tools to illustrate the topic presented. Well done Riyaj!

After lunch I spent some time refreshing my memory on my next presentation – RAC Load Testing Adventure. The presentation itself went well but there were fewer people than on previous one. Perhaps, because the conference was wrapping up already — my session was just before the last one. I did see some of the faces from my previous session so it means I did good enough that people were ready for another speech.

After two presentations, I was exhausted. I couldn’t really make the last presentation of the RMOUG — I planned to go to Babette’s session on Oracle 11g Data Pump. Furthermore, I had to get ready for the trip to the mountains and had to catch up with other participants. Of course, the best place to discuss trip’s details would be in the pub and the closest one was Hyatt Bar.

The highlight was a present for Moans — the Survival Button:

Hm… How does Youtube comes up with related videos? ;-)

That’s it for now. I took few days off for skiing and it goes very well — perfect weather and excellent company. I should be back home on Monday — I hope I won’t have to do any shoveling.