Oracle TagFest - the last word
REM - Country Feedback
'Crazy, all the lovers have been tagged.'
idiot's guide to Oracle installation
Not many things make me laugh out loud. Especially about Oracle.
With enough preparation, a Siebel installation (Next-Next-Next) could use a similar technique which is something I would dearly love to accomplish.
UKOUG agenda
Monday 3 December
Get up very early and drive to Birmingham.
09:40-10:30 '30 years at Oracle' - Tom Kyte. I own a couple of Kyte's excellent books and various sources report he is an excellent speaker.
10:40-11:00 Visit a few stands. A quick game of 'spot the colleague' and ask 27 different companies 'How can XYZ help me grow my business ?'
11:15-12:00 'Siebel Keynote' - David Mills. Possible sales and marketing fluff alert. Need to sit at the back adjacent to an aisle to allow a potential rapid escape to 'Oracle RAC versus Oracle Data Guard - which should I use for Disaster Recovery and which should I use for High Availability ?'.
12:25-13:20 'Under the Covers of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus' - Mick Bull/Lisa Dobson. I would like to learn more about Oracle's Business Intelligence tools. Plus I have an innate weakness for presentations titled 'Under The Covers...'
13:15-14:15 'TimesTen: Anatomy of an In-Memory Database' - Chris Jenkins (Oracle). Curious to hear more about this technology.
14:15-15:15 'Remote Hand Held SFA solutions need housekeeping - Ian Keleher/Nicola Burrows (Gallaher). A verbose and hardly compelling title but I have worked with this customer so I might get a mention on the Credits slide.
15:20-16:25 'Oracle 10g: RAC Tuning Tips' - Joel Goodman
16:45-17:30 'Siebel Marketing and Marketing Analytics' - Ben Wales
17:35-18:35 '11g new features for DBAs' - Tom Kyte. This has better be worth it. I am missing 'Siebel Networking', free beer and prawn volavons for this !
Back to hotel to dump marketing literature, USB memory sticks and complimentary gifts from Quest Software.
Shower, brush teeth, apply deodorant and slip into something more comfortable. Head over to the Pitcher and Piano to gatecrash the Oracle bloggers meetup.
Oracle Open Underworld
I decided to save Oracle Corporation lots of money by not attending Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Initially, my manager spent a lot of time trying to dissuade me but as soon as he uttered the words 'Billy Joel' and 'Prince', I immediately volunteered for some billable work in Sunderland to help pay for Doug's complimentary red sleeping bags.
Doug Burns, Tim Hall and John Scott seem to have a real problem conquering jet lag while Mark Rittman just does 'the British thing and goes down the pub'. While I don't travel to the States that often, I did attend a Microsoft training course in Seattle last year. As I don't sleep on planes, I do recall being quite tired when we disembarked and slightly annoyed when my colleague volunteered to navigate and let me concentrate on driving.
However, after checking into the hotel, having a walk around the lovely harbour and getting something to eat, I remember feeling pretty good. In fact, after a couple of drinks, I was ready put my Amex card behind the bar but my colleague insisted on dragging me back to my bedroom screaming 'But we must go to bed at 22:09'
Anyway to OOW; Oracle Apps Lab launched Oracle Mix which is a version of an internal Oracle networking site (which I am ashamed to admit I only discovered recently) and there is a short discussion about Oracle's gradual adoption of such networking and community tools. I must say I preferred the name 'Connect' to 'Mix' but still, if anyone wants to link up, you know where to find me.
Andrew Clarke has a typically British and impartial review on Larry Ellison's opening keynote while Eddie Awad has recorded some fun micro-interviews with Oracle staff and bloggers alike. Interesting to put a face and voice to people I only know from their Internet presence.
The other announcement thus far of note is Oracle VM. Virtualisation is a strong growth area (I meet lots of Siebel customers deploying or planning to use VM) and this is an obvious market for Oracle to enter to complement Enterprise Linux.
analyzing cdos
I thought it would be interesting to analyze the number of postings by month from 1997 to August 2007 to the Usenet newsgroup comp.databases.oracle.server.
However, I was wrong.