So after this fun “Moans The Magnificent” special guest appearance, straight off to my hotel room to prepare my demo session about interfacing via XMLDB functionality. I wasn’t happy with those “old” demo’s so started to fiddle around, dropped half of them and created 2 more complete one’s which made a bit more sense regarding being a coherent “use-case” instead of the old demo “just a SQL statement”. Maybe not the smartest to do, being only 2 hours before my session. I got really bit stressed when I pressed on “shutdown” instead of “hibernate”, while finishing up, 30 minutes before my presentation started. Of course at that moment those brilliant Windows wizards kicked in an showed a desktop with the remark “Installing 1 of 7 updates”. It felled like those updates took ages… With only 10 minutes to go, I rushed down, but luckily for me Joze Senegacnik was busy with a great presentation and hadn’t finished in time, plus there were a lot of questions from his audience.
Despite Riyaj Shamsudeen and Cary Millsap, with his great presentation “Thinking Clearly About Performance” (part 1 of 2), I had after a minute of 5 in my presentation slot, even some 10 up to 15 people in the audience, which honestly, wouldn’t have expected to attend, at least not in those numbers. I had already settled in my mind with a “explain me your problem and I will demonstrate” kind of alternative (also cool) presentation / demo’s. Having around 15 people in the room I had to follow some of the lines I had set out for this presentation. I will give this presentation as well during OOW on Wednesday and although I had cut those demo’s in half; I again run out of time. I guess I have nowadays to much to tell plus I got some good questions from the audience on which I elaborated with some extra info.
Afterward the last session I attended the reception with some appetizers and beverages. I had some good talks and / or listened in on interesting discussions from Kyle Hailey, Jeremy Wilton, Gwen Shapira, Daniel Fink and others. Most of them were performance related which makes such an event like MOTS different than the standard conferences out there. There is to much techie passion around to not discuss such like database administration, performance or other (Oracle) database issues. After the reception we all/most of us, went up to Carol Dacko’s hotel room to have a sip or two on those woody whiskey’s that were standing there or just some juice or beers… Didn’t make it that long though. At 20:00 hours the Central European Timezone was (still) kicking in and with a nice warm whiskey stomach feeling I went of to my room… Tomorrow at 09:00 hours my second presentation and then I can enjoy those last bits, 5 presentations I can choose from. Burdens of presenting. You will have to skip / balance stuff…but at least I have only heard good, really enthusiastic response from people that were attending. So that makes it worth while, despite having to sacrifice a few presentations or two yourself…
