UKOUG Northern Server Technology Day

It’s taken a while to blog about Thursday’s event for two main reasons

1) Sadly and quite annoyingly, I managed to lose my bag whilst collecting my car from the MOT test centre. It had all of my notes from the day, bills to be paid and important work notes in it. It’s a bit of a nightmare because I really can’t remember exactly what was in there. I just know some of it was more important than my notes from Thursday!

2) It’s my Mum’s 70th birthday today, so I took her away to a hotel last night, to get her out of the house and have some fun. As a result, I didn’t have internet access for a whole 30 hours. What a strange experience that was, but one I’ve thought about trying out for a while. I can’t say I feel massively refreshed as a result, but I didn’t exactly miss much either 😉

Anyway, here’s as much as I can remember about Thursday.

In the past couple of years, I’ve started to be able to enjoy the social side of user group events more than I have in the past. It’s not that I’m unfriendly as such (depending who you ask) but maybe it takes me a while to get into the swing of things. So I enjoyed turning up at registration and seeing a fair few friendly faces. I think there were bad traffic problems that morning, so it took a while for all of the attendees to turn up, but Jonathan Lewis got things under way just after 10. I was on first, but the rooms for the two streams were decided based on a show of hands about the degree of interest in each stream, so I had to dash off to the other room at the last minute and get myself set up very quickly.

Having worried about it, I was reasonably pleased with how the presentation went. It was a small but very attentive crowd and I was pleased that both Jonathan and Jeff Moss were able to see the presentation for the first time because they have both been involved in it, either during the preparation or subsequently. It might have been because Jonathan had read the entire paper, so he had that fore-knowledge, but he was complimentary afterwards (and gave me a very nice introduction too, as always). He recognised that the best I can hope to do is mention a few high-level points and try to be entertaining. It’s like an advert for the paper, rather than a true representation of it. Personally, I just enjoyed myself, which is usually a good sign. I was a bit nervous at the start, but that soon passed.

As usual, Jonathan, came up with a useful piece of information. When I was at Hotsos, one of the attendees mentioned that they used PX to take advantage of direct path io operations and that maybe that was where much of the benefit came from moving to noparallel to parallel 2. I chucked that one at Cary Millsap mid-presentation and he sensibly replied – who knows? (or words to that effect). Jonathan wasn’t convinced either, but pointed out that I could use the hidden parameter _serial_direct_read to test this. I’ll try that later.

Next up was Jeff Moss’ presentation on compression and partitioning. I have a confession to make. Lisa Dobson had asked me for material for Jeff’s introduction. I suggested she could mention the fact that Jeff didn’t see himself doing presentations, but after a bit of encouragement had now done his first, onto his second, and it just goes to show you should give it a go. (I’m always trying to encourage others to join in.) I think that was my intention anyway. I didn’t expect it to get translated to ‘… so if he can do it, anyone can do it’! But, to be fair to Lisa, I was at least partly responsible. In the event, Jeff was fine, as I expected. I didn’t necessarily learn loads but he gave a lot of useful links to work he’s done in the area, for later use. Maybe he could have emphasised them even more during the presentation, but he mentioned them when Niall asked at the end of the presentation.

I’d planned to go to Joel Goodman’s ASM presentation next, but changed my mind at the last minute to Jonathan’s CBO presentation. I knew I would have seen a lot of this information before but, in the end, I’m glad I went because a) Jonathan’s a really engaging speaker and b) Upgrade-related issues have been significant in my recent past at work. Despite having seen much of this information before, there were still a number of things I learnt and I made more notes during this presentation than any of the others. Notes that I’ve lost 🙁

Next up was lunch and there were a number of subject-related tables, where people with shared interests could chat over lunch. I enjoyed this and I would say I learnt about as much through hearing other people’s problems and experiences with PX as I hope they learnt from me. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Next up was Niall’s RAC presentation, that I learnt a few things from because, whatever I know about RAC, I seem to keep working at sites that are about to implement RAC! Again, because of the lack of notes and the passing of a few days, I’m struggling to remember the details.

Last up was Paul Hancock of HBOS, on SAN storage. I’d chatted to Paul earlier about the PX presentation because he’d been at that and, in fact, had been at the first one at UKOUG a couple of years ago. To be fairly blunt, I detected that Paul was worried about his presentation and I think he has nothing to worry about at all and has every reason to be more confident (although his presentation skills were fine). He’s a really engaging speaker and I felt the content was pitched at just the right level for an Oracle audience. I certainly learnt a few things and I hope I see a lot more of Paul at future events.

Afterwards, a number of speakers adjourned for a few brief drinks before we headed off for our seperate flights and trains and it was great fun. We had a good relaxing chat but with the type of strong opinions you’d expect! (With only brief interruptions for Jonathan’s negotiations with a prospective client.) I must admit, it was a pain in the proverbial to have to leave for the airport so I’d like to thank Lisa, Niall, Joel, Jonathan and Lisa’s friend (whose name I can’t remember, but I remember seeing Tom Kyte discussing tracing with her at the Oak Table at last year’s UKOUG) for good company. If I’ve forgotten anyone, blame it on the Stella and senility 😉 I think Pete Finnigan, Jeff Moss and others were probably heading home by then.

Sorry for the usual sprawling, over-long nonsense and the lack of detail (curse those missing notes) but it was a day well spent. Now I’m looking forward to Edinburgh.