{"id":804,"date":"2006-04-26T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-26T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/?p=804"},"modified":"2006-04-26T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-04-26T12:00:00","slug":"real-world-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/26\/real-world-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"Real-world Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

People in our industry like to talk about ‘Real-world Systems’ or sometimes say, of course in the real<\/span> world.<\/p>\n

Yeah, right. If computer systems were the real world, they would have to visit a bank on three seperate occasions just to get some old statement reprints; have to spend a couple of hundred quid on a replacement windscreen because of a stone; or go to three hairdressers to find them all booked up. On a Wednesday morning?<\/p>\n

My day of errand running plus a little time to check my presentation has turned into errand-running to no great effect 😉 Good job I have no work to do on the presentation. Well, until I read this in Mark Rittman’s blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“I’ve done this myself actually – the OLAP tuning presentation I gave at the Desktop Conference was pretty much a highlights package for the accompanying paper, but without the paper to hand, you just end up skimming over things that people aren’t all that familiar with, just keep referring to thing that you then don’t properly explain and demonstrate. What I learnt from that, and I think this would have been good advice for the speaker, would be to cut right down the amount of things you cover, but then for the things that are left, demonstrate it, explain it, don’t just refer people to the paper. I kept thinking during the talk – “show me, don’t just tell me” and I think in the end, the guy probably had an excellent paper, but you’ve got to do it a bit different for the talk, it’s a different type of communication.”<\/span><\/p>\n

(Demonstrate it? Explain it? That sounds familiar)<\/p>\n

You know, he’s right, up to a point. This is what’s been bothering me about the slaves presentation. It’s based on a big paper and so it’s difficult to decide what to include. I never expected or tried to include everything, but deciding what to leave out can be a tricky business if you’re too close to the paper. I felt I got it a little wrong at Hotsos 2006 but when I looked at it this week, I thought it looked okay. Now I’ve changed my mind again 😉 The good thing is that I know the whole paper so well and have given the presentation before, so I still have some time to fine-tune it. I would have even more time if I hadn’t promised to eat and drink with a bunch of alcoholic geeks, but it would be simply rude of me to turn them down now. I only hope they know that Barcelona vs. AC Milan is not optional.<\/p>\n

So I might end up looking like I’ve been dragged backwards through a hedge, but I think the presentation should be okay. Even if it’s not, there’ll be plenty of interesting presentations for me to attend anyway. I’m gutted that I’m going to miss Niall’s Windows\/Linux presentation because I’ll be speaking at the same time, but I expect I’ll see it in Birmingham later this year.<\/p>\n

Well, I’d better start getting my act together to go to the airport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People in our industry like to talk about ‘Real-world Systems’ or sometimes say, of course in the real world. Yeah, right. If computer systems were the real world, they would have to visit a bank on three seperate occasions just to get some old statement reprints; have to spend a couple of hundred quid on… Continue reading Real-world Systems<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":840,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/08\/how-many-slaves\/","url_meta":{"origin":804,"position":0},"title":"How Many Slaves?","date":"March 8, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Parallel Execution and the Magic of 2That's my second presentation, at 2:15 today. I've thought long and hard about this one and hope I've made the right decision. I was concerned about how to encapsulate a 50+ page paper into a one hour slot. I hate presentations which are full\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 5 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1626,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/21\/graham-woods-hidden-features-presentation\/","url_meta":{"origin":804,"position":1},"title":"Graham Wood’s Hidden Features Presentation","date":"February 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Just a super-quick post to highlight the availability of Graham Wood's Hidden Features presentation that I enjoyed at UKOUG 2010. I felt it was one that lots of people could pick up one or two tips or reminders from, just from the slides, but couldn't track it down. Graham's been\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1632,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/12\/symposium-2011-my-presentation\/","url_meta":{"origin":804,"position":2},"title":"Symposium 2011 – My Presentation","date":"March 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I think the best approach here is to focus on the technical details of the mistake first and then follow with any whining, self-justification or philosophy. The mistake I made in my presentation was to suggest at least twice that simply adding a new partition to a composite partitioned object\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 4 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1077,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/06\/presentations-completed-and-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":804,"position":3},"title":"Presentations completed and to come","date":"September 6, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Yesterday was the developer training\/seminar that I mentioned in an earlier blog. It was okay I suppose but I made a bad decision to drop analytics because I didn't feel I could do them justice in the available time. Then I finished half an hour early \ud83d\ude41 Based on verbal\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":864,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/17\/typical-timing\/","url_meta":{"origin":804,"position":4},"title":"Typical Timing","date":"February 17, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Just when I was about to hit the Hotsos submission deadline (or rather, it was about to hit me), I managed to catch a cold from my other half, so I've been laid up in bed for the past couple of days. It hasn't been too bad actually - thank\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1530,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/14\/oow-2009-tuesday\/","url_meta":{"origin":804,"position":5},"title":"OOW 2009 – Tuesday","date":"October 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Another good day although it didn't go quite as I planned it, but that's part of the fun of a good conference. Should I mention at this point that I have a cold? I certainly noticed it this morning \ud83d\ude41I got moving eventually and my first session was \"The Life\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}