Hotsos – Day 3 – Wrap-up

Sorry I didn’t blog much yesterday but I ended up having some things to take care of in the morning that I wasn’t expecting, both presentation-related and not. In the end, I didn’t manage to attend very much. I feel I’ve let everyone down 😉 One of my friends sent me an SMS to ask if I was okay because there’d been no blog!

I didn’t attend anything much before my presentation. I tried to attend Jared’s Normalise for Performance, but had to take a phone call just as he started! By the time I was finished with that, he was almost done.

I felt my presentation went reasonably well. Of course, when Cary Millsap came up to the podium just before I started, that added to the pressure a little 😉 but he seems like a very generous and warm man based on a short meeting and when he did chip in with contributions they were very positive.

It was a tough call because there was so much detail I could have included, but it wouldn’t have been enjoyable to listen to, so I tried to keep it light, give an overview of the tests I’d done, some of the mistakes made and what little I’d managed to uncover as a result. Interestingly, quite a few people told me afterwards that they liked the mention of the PCTFREE mistake best. I think they felt it added a human edge to the story, so I was pleased about that. People seemed to get quite a few laughs too.

We kicked off with Mogens Norgaard distributing a few free beers to the attendees. (I owe James Morle and Mogens a debt of thanks for helping me out with that. Cheers!) This was to tempt people away from listening to Jonathan Lewis next door. It seemed to work out pretty well and you should remember that if you’re ever deciding whether to come and hear me speak or not! I also took an opportunity to have a pop at the English members of the audience, which is always welcome and probably raised the biggest laugh.

However, perhaps I shouldn’t have included graphs in the presentation because they only gave Mogens and opportunity to go ‘Wow!’ and walk to the front of the hall to take photos of my beautiful graphs. He’s a character, that Mogens chap! There will hopefully be one or two interesting photos to post later ….

All in all, I felt it went well from a presentation perspective, but I’m not sure I included the correct information in some cases. For example, I should have included some of the Orca graphs, particularly for the Run Queue, but wasn’t sure I’d have time. For anyone who attended, take some time to read the paper. It might seem long but I don’t think it’s a difficult read in any sense. I’m certainly interested in taking the tests further and you’ll hear about it here if I do.

I was particularly pleased that Bob Sneed liked the presentation because I enjoyed his micro-benchmarking presentation the day before and I’d already heard about him through my time at Sun. I expect we’ll stay in touch with each other on the testing front.

Next up was Cary Millsap on Capacity Planning. I really like the way he presents and you can tell he’s taught a lot of people. He uses analogies well and there were a couple of really useful things in there for me personally. There were a couple of challenges from the audience which added interest to the presentation and I’ll be taking a look at the models that Cary mentioned, particularly the Magicof2++.xls model. I’ll definitely make a point of attending his presentations in future when I get the chance.

Then it was on to the raffle draw and farewell and by now I was ready for nothing more than several beers with some friends I’ve met this week. As usual, that’s been one of the best aspects and there are a bunch of people that I hope to catch up with at future conferences – you know who you are! That’s the reason why I just popped down to see a few people at breakfast before Jonathan Lewis fills their heads with information and ideas for the rest of today and I head off to the airport. Here’s the last picture – Jonathan Lewis signing Shrek’s copy of Cost Based Oracle – Fundamentals whilst the Oracle Sponge looks on.

I’d love to think I’ll get a chance to come back and present again next year, but maybe just one presentation to ease the background stress a bit so I can attend even more presentations and drink even more beers with new friends. I might need to buy a new camera though 😉

That’s all, folks!