Speaking at Oracle Midlands on Tuesday 17th May

As the title indicates, I’ll be speaking at the UK Oracle Midlands event on Tuesday evening next week. Details can be found here (and that link should mention the next event if you click it in the future).

I’ll be talking about PL/SQL being called from SQL and how you can “extend” SQL by writing your own functions. That is a relatively well known thing to do but the potential impact on performance and the 12C improvements to reduce that impact are less well known. Maybe even more significantly, calling PL/SQL functions from SQL breaks the point-in-time view most of us take for granted with Oracle. More people are blogging and talking about this but it is still not widely appreciated. Is this a potential issue in any of your systems?

Joel Goodman is also presenting, on storage fragmentation. Joel is one of the best presenters on Oracle tech on the circuit and knows his stuff inside out.

I really love the Oracle Midlands user group, I’ve been to a few of the meetings and presented there one-and-a-bit times before. It meets in the evenings and lays on some free refreshements at half time (Samosas when I have been there!). It’s a real, dedicated, ground-roots user group. Annoyingly (for me) most of the meetings for the last year or so have been when I could not get up to the Midlands for them (it’s not a hard or long journey, it was just the timing was always wrong).

Red Stack are good enough to support/sponsor these events and do so with a light touch. You know they are there but it is not a hard sell, so kudos to them. Mike McKay-Dirden is the person behind these meetings and, with this being the 15th such meeting, I must take my hat off to Mike for running such a successful group.

So, if you are able to get to Birmingham (UK! Not USA…) on Tuesday evening, you should do so for an excellent, free learning opportunity. I hope to see some of you there!