OOW - Tuesday - Sessions, Blogger meetup and Elton John

It took me a while to catch up with my OOW blogging. A lot of presentations to follow, a lot of things to do in the evening and a laptop with a battery life-time of less than two hours.

The sessions I followed on Tuesday...

Things you think you know (by Tom Kyte)
As we can expect from my mentor, an excellent session! Although I already heard some of the things Tom said, it's nice to see him busy on stage. The charisma and the way of explaining the things on the hand of "the things you know" ;-p makes it understandable for everyone.
Basically it comes to: "It's not the things you don't know - it's the things you know that just ain't so" (quote TK). Of course all these "things" had an example and "proof".

This slide I liked most:

It ain't so much the things we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's the things you know, that just ain't so or just ain't so anymore or just ain't always so.

Real-World Performance Roundtable, Part 1 & 2 (by Oracle)
Don't really know what to say about it... It was a high-level roundtable with indebt performance and tuning questions.
The most appealing question came from Jonathan Lewis concerning free-lists and the "implementation" in ASM. One part of the answer was that it was a bug and is solved in the latest version of Oracle.

The Next-Generation Self-Managing Database: A sneak preview (by Oracle)
There were two things that got my intention and are in my opinion something I would use if I already had it:
- Database Replay: capture workload in prod, replay workload in test -> analyze & report
- SQL Replay: focus on impact of change on SQL query workload; capture sql in prod., replay sql in test -> analyze, tune & create sql profiles

CERN: Building Real-World Solutions with Oracle Application Express (by Giovanni Chierico and Joel Kallman)
This was a really good session about a company developing mainly with JAVA before and recently changed this to APEX for certain applications.
A junior developer built in six months a good looking application with sso integration, charts, reports, customized stylesheet for touch screen etc.
They also explained "the good" and "the bad". As a conclusion they said they were really pleased with APEX and they should do it again. However they won't use APEX for all their application as they find that at a certain time (complexity of the application) it's better to go for a "full-blown" thing as JAva with as one of the most important features the object orientation.

Blogger Meetup
On Tuesday evening the Thirsty bear got unsafe by a bunch of Oracle Bloggers!
I really enjoyed to meet the guys in real life. I read their blog's often, but that's just "virtually", it was nice to get to know them in real-life. And hey, the pictures they have on their blog's don't always reflect real life faces! ;-) Oh, the picture on the right shows what you see when you get drunk!
You can find some more pictures here. Mark also blogged about the meetup here.


Appreciation Night with Elton John
After a few hours spending with our colleague bloggers, some of us headed to see Sir Elton John in the Cow Center.
It's amazing to see such an old guy (;-)) giving himself on stage and give 22.000 people a good time!
There was also too much good food! I find it amazing the way Oracle organized all this! I'm in the States and everything is "big", but sometimes I just find it "unreal".