I have never made it to UKOUG as I have been to mean to take time out from contracting. This year was different. I have been booked in for the first 3 days and this is my half-time report.
It is big, very, very big with, I think, 6 parallel streams ongoing at the same time.
The age range is pretty wide with many of the visitors aged 40 or over. (that suits me fine, being in that category myself).
The breadth of talks is tremendous, with everyone giving their best and obviously having spent much time on their presentations.
I am not sure how much business the exhibitors gain though. Perhaps it is just a good means of getting their names known.
The presentations. The one that I did not like was spoilt for me by the constant reference to his peers ( ‘I was talking to Jonathan’, ‘Connor is here’, ‘Tom said to me’). No names no pack drill
Carl Dudley spoke very well on Flashback features, although it was a bit confusing as to which was available in each release. He was very well prepared and had some very good examples.
Tom Kite was another who obviously has much experience and had prepared some good examples. I heard his talks on encryption and ‘the best way’ and enjoyed them both very much. Jonathan Lewis was very professional as well.
The Tuesday morning keynote speech was about Exadata and that does seem a major leap forward in technology (for Oracle at least). Bad news if you work for Terradata.
I attended a talk by Slavic Markovich about protecting the database from sql injection attacks. Quite interesting but it lost me a little towards the end. I was interested about the concepts and will be viewing his site (Sentrigo) to check out some of his downloadable (is that a genuine word?) scripts.
Patrick Hurley talked about Data Pump and whilst I don’t think there was anything new to me it did remind me to write a wiki page at work containing sample parameter files for various types of expdp/impdp jobs. He started off a bit nervously but got into his stride well and I am sure could have talked for much longer. A very good session.
The best talk I have seen so far was from Pete Finnegan on security basics. I have done some work recently on setting up procedures for the production databases (which I may post soon) but he reminded how much there was still to do. My first job when I get back is to ensure that the *.ora files do not have world read on them.
Off to a talk on clusterware from Alex Gorbachev now. More to follow tomorrow
