\nMy Unconference presentation slot was at 10:00 and in addition to Kevin Closson’s 9:00 slot being cancelled, I noticed that there was absolutely no one in ‘my room’ so it looked like a presentation fell through due to lack of attendees 🙁 Not a promising start and there definitely needs to be an improvement to how Unconference presentations are advertised to the wider community of attendees but I said the same last year.<\/p>\n
By the time my presentation was ready to start there were three people there and I knew them all 😉 John Beresniewicsz is one of the main-stays behind the various new 10g performance features and has helped me out many times via email, so it’s always good to see him. Marco and Jacco and I seem to be glued at the hips, so it wasn’t a surprise to seem them either but it was still much appreciated. As the presentation continued, more people turned up and more familiar faces! Probably about 10-15 attendees by the end, but I didn’t count. (Although no Paul Vallee or Alex Gorbachev or Tim Hall or … all of whom were slacking off in the lounge when I popped in there straight after my presentation. Thanks, guys! LOL)<\/p>\n
At one point there was JB, the ‘legend’ that is Graham Wood (thanks to Andrew Holdsworth for that label!) and Andrew Bulloch who is also a complete expert on the OEM Performance Pages (amongst other things) so it was a) quite daunting to say the least; and b) very difficult with such a small audience not to talk to them directly. It’s a very difficult thing to be careful not to ignore some of the other attendees and I’m not sure I achieved that, so apologies to them if I didn’t.<\/p>\n
I think the presentation itself went fairly well but, as usual, due to lack of preparation and the fact that I get a bit over-excited when talking about this stuff, I managed to forget one of my key messages by not taking a proper look at the Historic view. The fact is that I could talk about this stuff for hours<\/em> so if I get in most of the key messages I’m usually fairly happy and I think it was like that yesterday. JB was taking a few notes, so hopefully there might even have been some ideas for improvement in there 🙂 I learned a few things too and he made me see one of the screens in a slightly different way than I had previously.<\/p>\n Oh, and there should be a few pictures from Marco later, so I’ll post here when I see them ….<\/p>\n So, feeling relatively happy after that, I did a quick interview with Alex<\/a> in the OTN Lounge then Marco, JB and I headed over to see Graham Wood take his place on the Real World Performance Group’s Q & A session. It was a veritable flurry of activity when we turned up as, in no particular order ….<\/p>\n 1) JB was reading the daily conference paper and noticed that there was a little break-out box with Blogger Tips from none other than Doug Burns, Oracle ACE. (I wrote them a while ago when an email circular was sent out and I was still an ACE.) Which re-inforced Greg Rahn’s growing suggestions that I’m a ‘Media-type’ or was that ‘Media Whore’ or some such thing. Until we turned over a few more pages and noticed a complete article about Oracle Closed World with yet-another-photograph of Moans Longballs Nogood! How on earth does that man get his photo in so many places?!?!<\/p>\n 2) Maria Colgan from the Optimizer Development Group came over to introduce herself and point out that she was ‘gutted’ that I hadn’t attended their In-Memory Parallel Query presentation. Sorry, Maria, but you can trust I’ll be reading and linking to any White Papers when they come out and at least you didn’t have to watch me walk out on your presentation half-way through, unlike some people I could mention.<\/p>\n 3) We finally received the confirmation texts about the final day of Oracle Closed World, with Uri Shaft presenting on Counting (more on that later.<\/p>\n I thought the Q & A was better than usual this year – there seemed to be a good range of questions including one I asked about whether Parallel Query Statement Queuing should be seen as a replacement for parallel_adaptive_multiuser. When it was answered, there was general shock and horror from the panel at the thought of people using the ‘far too aggressive’ approach PAMU follows. See, Mr. Kyte, I told<\/em> you it was horrible 😉 I pre-fixed my question with ‘Try to answer this without talking about Exadata!’ which failed miserably, but I was just trying to highlight that lots of us still don’t have such configurations, something that I feel Greg is going to keep teasing me about. (His parting words to me on leaving conference was that they should perhaps set up a web-cam so I can watch things running 🙁 )<\/p>\n There was a nice section at the end, too, when the panel were asked about their favourite performance tuning result and whether they blogged and what books they might recommend. Greg Rahn pointed out that he does blog at structureddata.org<\/a> and that he thought he blogged some good stuff even if he didn’t post as frequently as certain media types such as …. (I think we’ll just draw a discrete veil over the rest of that sentence!) But he was tripped up because, as the other panel members were asked, none of them blogged but one suggested that he tells Greg stuff and Greg blogs about it instead! Hey, Greg, at least my material is original<\/em>. LOL. I sense some jealousy going round that Real World Performance Group – you’d better watch your back! 😉<\/p>\n