UKOUG - Northern Technology day (and the rest)

Today, the day after the UK oracle user groups first Northern technical day. Didn’t have time to add this yesterday, as I had to catch the final light of the day playing golf, to unwind from the day.

Yesterday started, ironically on Wednesday night, arriving a little late to meet the Geordie, the Scotsman and the only Southerner (or is that East Midlander). No, this is not the start of a regional joke.

I think the idea of the pre-‘technical day’ briefing was to go through the presentations and order for the day. NOT. Actually it was to get as much booze down in as little time as possible. Unfortunately, for my lateness I was several gallons behind – and that was just consumed by the Geordie.

As for the day, Niall’s two presentations were incredibly polished and professionally presented (as always); Apples to Oranges (comparing oracle in UNIX and windows) gave some food for thought and areas to go away and test yourself; ‘Oracle SE Real Application Clusters’ provided insight into Nial’s experience with installing RAC and also provided invaluable information to try it yourself.

Pete Finnigan presented ‘Many ways to become a DBA’ – the DBA role that is. He has an excellent web site highlighting all the issues with Oracle and provides solutions to these. My advice is to visit his site and check out your corporate database security. You will be very surprise (or shocked)

Joel Goodman, an excellent speaker and instructor for Oracle Education gave a presentation on Automatic Storage Management. He is a brilliant speaker and I could listen to him all day but unfortunately we could only provide 75 minutes. If you get the opportunity go and see Joel sometime.

The final presentation of the day, I had to chair, was Paul Langan from the University of Liverpool. He talked about his experience with installing RAC on Windows. When you put together the presentation from Paul, Nail and Joel you came away from some valuable information on installing RAC

Jonathan Lewis closed the day. The other stream was chaired by Lisa and to see comments by her please visit her blog.

Over 90 delegates attended the day, which is a good start for the future. A few colleagues of mine attended and some colleagues I used to work with were also there. I’d like to mention Neil Johnston who was attending his first visit to OUG and I hope the experience was valuable and enjoyable and I hope he will attend again and possibly, sometime, present at a SIG or conference.