OUG Scotland DBA SIG

An enjoyable day, but it flew by. Having not had much sleep last night through worrying about the first time I was giving this particular presentation, I’m glad I was able to present in the second slot of the day because I knew I’d be flagging later on.

The most enjoyable aspect of Scottish events is that I’m bound to see a few friendly faces from previous sites that I haven’t seen for a while and today was no exception. Unfortunately I had even less time to say hello than normal so it was nice to get a quick chat and a coffee before proceedings started with Thomas Presslie’s introduction and the usual Support Update from Oracle. That contained a few issues that are quite relevant at my current site and I could see one of my colleagues taking the occasional note. We’re at the start of a project to implement Grid Control and Audit Vault, so I was hoping we might find when some 10.2.0.4 database and GC components might be out for AIX, but still no word. On a related note, it was very useful to be able to talk to those from other sites who’d been through successful GC implementations – just what a User Group event is for – sharing ideas and experiences. I’d already heard that GC 10.2.0.4 is a significant improvement on 10.2.0.3, but hearing someone else who had lived through some pain until they upgraded to 10.2.0.4 was a very useful conversation indeed.

I was in the next slot and I was surprised I was worried about the presentation before-hand. I know I’m often worried, but I’ve spent so much time with these tools lately. I suppose it was because I planned to spend most of the time on demonstrations, which are always likely to go wrong 😉 I was aware that I was trying to cram a lot in, too, even though it was a longer-than-usual one hour slot. I wasn’t very happy with it in the sense that there were things that I planned to cover but didn’t, so it could definitely use more work, but I definitely felt in a presenting mood, enjoy the subject and so I think my enthusiasm carried the presentation. I certainly heard some very encouraging comments from a few trusted reviewers afterwards and had a couple of fascinating questions and later conversations, which is generally a good sign. I suppose it was a relief it went well, but I can see definite scope for improvement. I’ve subsequently heard from a couple of people that they feel inspired to download some software and play around with some of the tools for themselves, which is probably my favourite reaction.

After what seemed like a very short coffee break, we were into the first of Joel Goodman’s two presentations of the day, on Database Vault. This is likely to be part of our overall implementation but we’ve yet to decide the for certain. Even in the unlikely event that we don’t use DV, Audit Vault uses DV itself, so we need to know about it in any case. I’ve seen quite a few of Joel’s presentations in the past and because he teaches so many courses, he’s always got a deep knowledge of the subject and this was no exception, but you can only really touch on things in an hour. Useful, though.

Then it was a shot lunch break of two cigarettes and a chat with a colleague and suddenly it was time for Joel’s next presentation, on Audit Vault. That was one of my main reasons for attending, but I’d agreed I’d get some time with Peter Robson to talk a few things over, so I asked my colleague to check it out for me and settled down for a long interesting chat with Peter and Thomas P and someone else who likes the OEM Performance Pages too.

That was it, though, because I had to get away by 2:30. A short, tiring but fun day and a few slides to look through this evening. Back to normal work tomorrow.