AUSOUG Perth Conference 2011 Day Two

The final day at Burswood was just as enjoyable as day one. Well done to all the AUSOUG committee!

I started with two APEX talks – first, Scott Wesley on APEX 4.1 Security. Personally I very much enjoyed the unique presentation style. You can experience it for yourself here. After that, Mark Lancaster from Queensland gave his analysis of the changes from APEX 4.0 to 4.1, and commented on a number of new features that have been added or improved.

Just before lunch I caught “Tips and Best Practices for DBAs” by Francisco Munoz Alvarez, who spoke less about actual DBA tasks (as I was expecting) but more about the “soft” skills – attitude, professionalism, working in a team, delegating tasks, and automating everything.

After lunch Vinod Patel moderated a discussion panel comprising Debra Lilley, Tim Hall, Connor McDonald, Penny Cookson, Chris Muir, and a guy from Oracle (whose name escapes me for the moment) – and they were plied with many questions about the art of presenting. It was encouraging to hear what they had to say, both about their success and their failure stories. I think I got away with taking this photo without them noticing 🙂

I took in Graham Wood‘s final presentation, a live demo of Exadata. He demonstrated how blazingly fast it is for loading huge amounts of data in a very short time (e.g. 500GB in about 10 minutes IIRC) and running horrible queries even faster (e.g. multiple full table scans with self joins, running in mere seconds). It was very impressive, although it did highlight that to get the full benefit of Exadata, some queries may need to be rewritten. For example, a big report you’re running now might get a modest x10 or x20 speed improvement on Exadata, but after rewriting you could get on the order of x100 to x200 speed improvements! If you don’t believe me, go ask Graham yourself 🙂

The day ended with Connor McDonald‘s talk, A Year in Purgatory – Diary of an 11.2 RAC Upgrade. It held a lot of promise, but unfortunately I was called away to an emergency at work so I missed most of it. I was quite disappointed to miss that one. By the way, Connor is now blogging – at connormcdonald.wordpress.com. Finally!

I’ve enjoyed each AUSOUG conference since 2000, and this year was one of the best in my opinion. It was great to catch up with colleagues, network with Oracle nerds and professionals, and get inspired by a variety of talks on topics I’m interested in.

In addition, the last few years I’ve also presented. This has been a good experience which I intend to continue. I hope that with practice I’ll get much better at it.

AUSOUG Perth Conference 2011 Day One
Write REF CURSOR to file

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published / Required fields are marked *