Its already Saturday again. UKOUG is over. The weather here in Holland isn’t much better than it was in Birmingham but somehow I miss the X-mas atmosphere. So what did I enjoy or dislike during this years UKOUG conference? The wifi was a minor bummer, but the rest was up on high standard as always. Good quality presentations as should be expected.
On Monday, I really liked James Morle’s Virtual Insanity presentation and realized that I should investigate some more regarding the internal workings and stuff going within virtual machines and the part they play when running Oracle inside it. I hope I can pick up the presentation slides from somewhere. There were a lot of items/topics in that presentation that I will have to look up regarding internal hypervisor methodology.
Mark Drake’s presentation Overview of Oracle XML DB in Oracle Database 11g
run out of time, which could be a bit expected due to the fact that he tried to give a general overview on Oracle XMLDB architecture and its history. Apparently he prepared thoroughly, I really enjoyed it, but he had approximately 80 slides. The XMLDB Developers Guide nowadays counts for more than 900 pages of material and it is undo-able to touch all those topics. For a non-native speaker this probably would not even doable… Would have liked a small demo in there somehow… Afterward Mark told me that they were thinking about posting the XFiles app onto the apex.oracle.com website, but were a bit scary what would happen if anyone could upload files as the wanted (ehhh stuff like viagra, etc, spam…). I thought a bit about it. Maybe it is easy to prevent by allowing only certain MIME types, like “txt” files…although…
Among others, I got to Sue Harpers Oracle SQL Developer: An overview and new features presentation, on Tuesday. I was impressed at the level of functionality SQL Developer has nowadays. I had a bit the impression that “they” have look towards Toad to much, although this isn’t a mortal sin, but I think that they should keep pinpointing towards their own community. The APEX functionality is a great asset and a good example of what I am trying to say. One on my wish list would be more connectivity. Please WebDAV connections would also be greatly appreciated…
What I my mind counts a bit for SQL Developer also would apply on David Peak’s (BTW great) presentation Oracle Application Express 4.0 – the latest & greatest. I mean I can imagine that most people use subversion or such, but wouldn’t it also make sense to use functionality that is already in the database, like the content management / versioning capabilities of the database (yeah I know I am preaching here for active use of XMLDB functionality) or the ACL security methods… Its in there, so why not use it? Instead of building some of the stuff completely from scratch…
Mark Bobak’s presentation on Wednesday was concise and straight on. Although maybe a bit light weighted, I really liked that one. I hope he will beef it up a little for its rerun during the Hotsos conference next year, some extra demo’s would be cool, some dumping memory probably overkill…
James Morle and Tanel Poder’s The Oracle Wait Interface is useless (sometimes) combined presentation skills were fun. They interacted really cool on stage. The demonstrations shown were very interesting, if not only that they demonstrated that it is “easy” to hook into the oracle wait interface from the outside. Combined with OS hooks this could make a really really powerful tool for the future…
…and that was it…
Time really flew by this year, before I knew it we were drinking our last beers in the pub and most of us left that same Wednesday. Three days is a bit short, if you were used to more, but as always the quality of 90% of the presentations was superb and I really liked the ones I picked out. I had the chance to add some extra Miracle Holland training days in Birmingham (Tanel Poder this time), but decided, at the last moment, against it. I would have probably been wrecked of all the information overload. It was cool to see all the usual suspects once again, like Doug, Alex, Lisa, Moans, Dan, Tanel, Frits, Roel, Tim, Thomas, etc, etc, etc…and the Guinness was fine too btw (really like it, if it is served properly).
Hopefully until next year in Brum 🙂
