OUG_Ireland – Bread, Beer & Playing with the Big Boys

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Learning, sharing & a small dose of fear – Last week was the OUG Ireland conference 2016. It is the second time I’ve been to the Irish Oracle user group conference and this year it had grown from one day to two days – and that was a great success. The expanded 2-day event, as initially sized, booked up with several weeks still to go. More places were made available – and they all filled as well. You could tell this, at least in the sessions I attended – they were all busy and many were full. The whole event had a busy feel.

I was doing two quite different session. The first was my overview of the core Oracle technology, a broad-brush, broad-appeal session. At the other end of the spectrum, the second was about the details of context switching between SQL & PL/SQL, the impact it can have and the improvements in 12C to help reduce that impact. People are becoming more aware of this aspect of calling PL/SQL from SQL and also the potential to lose your point-in-time view of the database, which many take for granted. I actually dropped the loss of point-in-time view out of the talk as it made the session too long – but someone asked directly about it! So I spent the last 5 mins I’d left for Q&A talking about it. If I repeat the session somewhere, perhaps I’ll add those slides back in and just talk less rubbish about me earlier on.

Oren Nakdimon actually mentioned one of the 12C improvements (PL/SQL in the WITH clause) in his excellent talk on the first day “Write less (code) with More (Oracle 12c new features)” including one aspect I had missed. So I stole his material and added a slide into my deck for Friday. I’m glad I referenced him on that slide – as he was sat in the front row in my talk 🙂

(as an aside, this is my second time at OUG Ireland and the second time I’ve met someone from Israel who I shared beers with & spent quite a bit of time with – just one of those quirky coincidences in life. Oh, and I met his wife Inbal too and we had a chat about translating Sci-Fi from English to Hebrew! It’s not easy, but Klingon is easier to handle than you’d think).

See, no beer! (it’s inside the podium…)

My other talk was on the first day and it was the one where I cover the core Oracle technology in a single presentation slot. It’s a bit of a Big Ask in 45 minutes but I tend to throw in less anecdotes or stories than normal in order to cover the material. However, this time I could not resist the temptation to include one, in order to continue the unfair myth that I can only present with a beer in hand…

I got a lot of great feedback about this talk, several people checked that they would be able to get the slides afterwards (they have been sent to the organisers and they should be put out in due course – but I can send anyone a copy), I got a few more questions during the conference, I spent about 30 minutes talking to one chap afterwards (about a very “interesting” project he is on where sense does not seem to be prevailing) and a lot of people said they enjoyed it. For a speaker, there is no better result and I was quietly happy. I might go as far as to say I was jolly chuffed.

I managed to get to a fair few presentations by others at this conference too and I did not see a bad one in the DB or Development stream. Jonathan Lewis and Joze Senegacnik were as excellent as ever (I think Jonathan was particularly on form) and I was reminded at how good Carl Dudley is at this presenting lark. I missed out seeing my Polish ORA600 counterpart, Kamil Stawiaski, due to a clash for one session and presenting at the same time as him on the other. But I got to have beer with him and his friend Adam Bolinski and a good few chats.

On the topic of Beer, as well as being forced to have one in my presentation on the first day (cough!), we had an excellent “presenters beers” on Wednesday evening before the event, organised by Brendan Tierney. Brendan had us meet up, on a foul and wet evening, at a pub with it’s own micro-brewery (so I was able to avoid Guinness which, I have to confess, outside of the Guinness Museum is Not My Thing) and my nephew Tim Hall’s (oracle) wife, Debra Lilley {they are not really married, but sometimes you wonder at the bickering…}, organised an excellent Oracle Ace meal on the Thursday night. I had to drop out early though as sleep deprivation was killing me (and only got worse for the final day – that was one of the noisiest hotels I have ever stayed in and I won’t be rushing back) but I did get to share the taxi back to the “Hotel Of Random Noise” with Debra (she was flying somewhere at early-O’clock the next day) and catch up.

I actually see the social side of conferences as just as important as the technical side. I have made some good friends with people at these technical meetings and the more you know people in the user community, the more you get out of it.

Well, Officer, It’s yeast… Honest… Honest!!!! Argh!

So I’ve mentioned the beer. What about the bread? Well, I make sourdough. I have a pot of “starter mixture” in my fridge, which is a live culture of yeast in a slack dough mix. It’s alive (sorry, “It’s ALIIIIIIIVEEE!”), it needs looking after. It is, basically, one of the most boring pets you can have – but at least it never needs to be taken to the vet or does its business on the carpet. There are a few of us bakers in the Speaker Circuit. Jonathan is another one and so is Joze. And Joze also has a yeast colony pet in the fridge. We talked about our sour-dough pets at a conference last year and, as a result, Joze bought me a little bag of powder – dried mixture, stuffed with yeast. I’m going to start up a new jar of dough mixture, sourced from this powder. I’ll do a post about what happens.

There is one aspect of being given a bag of dried dough when on conference. You have to take it home. In your luggage. In my case, hand luggage. And in November, for the first time ever that I can remember, they decided to check my hand luggage. What if they did that this time?
“Is this your bag, Sir?”
“Yes”
“Is this plastic bag of a pale, dried mixture yours, Sir?”
“Yes Officer, but it’s OK it’s yeast!” – Bright Smile.
“Yes, of course it is Sir. Come this way.”
“But it’s just yeast and flour, it’s nothing dodggy!!!”
“Of course it is not Sir, and now my colleague here will now examine places you don’t want examining for more such samples”.

It added an extra level of excitement into what is usually a dull experience of international air travel.

The “rose” between two “thorns”. If Thorns means “The Best”

So that was the dose of fear? No. I did two talks at the conference but I had one other duty. At the UKOUG Tech conference last December, Jonathan Lewis hosted a Q&A session on the Cost Based Optimizer. We had Jonathan, Chris Antognini, Maria Colgan and Nigel Bayliss, with myself and Neil Chandler as Masters of Ceremony. ie, Question Wranglers. It worked really well, with some genuine-but-known questions to start until the audience warmed up, and they warmed up.

Jonathan decided to repeat this format in Ireland and he asked me to reprise my role, which I was delighted to do. I’m more than happy to fire in the questions to the experts, so long as I’m here at the side and they are there up on the stage.

One of our experts for Ireland had to drop out due to only being there on the Thursday. Jonathan asked me who can fill in. No problem, we have skills across the agenda, “Dave” can help. Dave said yes…but then no, it turned out Dave could not do it. So I was asked again who could fill and we got Jessica – but Jessica had to leave early. You can see what is coming, can’t you? We were out of replacements. A panel of 2 does not work really, you need three or more. So, I was promoted to Panel. Oh cr4p!

Alan Kelly stepped into the breach to be Question Master (Personally, I don’t know whether to thank Alan or not! But for the sake of the session, thank you Alan) and I joined two masters of the art on stage. Don’t get me wrong, this is not false modesty, I’m pretty good at this stuff. But I’m “Pretty Good”. Calm, Breath, Relax…

It was fine. Jonathan and Joze handled the tricky couple of questions and let me talk when I had stuff to add and the whole session was a hum-dinger. How do I know that? Well, the session was for 45 minutes at the end of the last day, on a Friday with all the usual pressures to get away and get home. And yet, despite that, we finally closed the session down after 90 minutes. I have to confess, I’m deeply proud of the fact I was able to play an active role and not just sit there.

All in all, I had a fantastic time and I think it was a cracking conference. Can I come next year? (Only, next year, can I keep to being Question Master! Alan can have a go up on stage)