www.xmldb.nl Posts

December 7

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…

December 1

I am presenting since 2007. My first “appearance” was in Birmingham and as Alex Gorbachev said in one of his blog posts, this conference is special for me. Probably also due to the X-mas atmosphere outside; everything has a comfy and warm look and feel (despite the weather). From time to time, I ***SPAM*** people with a small token of “Thank You”. “Small” is actually not that true, in this case you could kill someone or something with it. Its a “thanks” for time spend to clear some stuff up for me and or supported/pushed me in taking the extra mile (despite my lack of confidence, thinking I had it not in me). Anyway…

Since 2006, my token of saying “Thank You” to some people; I give away totally useless, but also a typical Dutch traditional present. No, not stuff to smoke, also not Dutch liquorice (candy), but wooden clogs. Some of those “spammed” people even dare to show this – LOL – like Alex during his Hotsos presentation in 2008 (see: “The Latest OAK Table Member“). Holland isn’t very preserving regarding its traditions, so this is also my way of keeping it alive.

On a side note, regarding “alive”, Alex lost his clogs due to the Australian customs service, apparently they thought clogs are actually “alive” and therefore he wasn’t able to move it back from Australia to Canada… Ehhh? I wonder what is more “alive” in Australia that fits this definition…

I wanted to give Doug some clogs as well, but due to the time pressure I wasn’t able to bring some originals during the UKOUG Conference in 2008. In all I was lucky enough that year, due to the fact that I met Mario who actually wanted to meet that Doug fellow…

A good prank needs some decent preparation after all !

November 30