Miracle Open Oracle World

Mooow.

This is a Shameless Plug.

I'll blame it on the credit-crunch: I was looking at a slow-ish week with a few documents to review, a few meetings left-right-centre, and especially a lot of boring car-commutes.

What saved me was a brief chat with Anjo Klok from Miracle Benelux. There were a few spaces left at the Miracle Oracle Openworld (Moo?) Event in Lalandia.

So, Im writing form the back of a minivan on my way to the Event. and to justify my use of the Miracle Taxi Service (MTS), I should give the good folks at Miracle some free publicity.

Here is the Banner


There are a few aspects that make this event unique:
First, the quality of the speakers and presentations. Secondly, there is the relatively small scale of the event. It is about the size of a good UKOUG SIG meeting, and offers a good opportunity to mix with the speakers. Mogens, the organizer, deliberately did not provide a speaker-lounge, hence the Gurus cannot hide from the hoi-polloi. Ample opportunity to harass them with questions.

Oh, and dont mention it to your manager, but the Danes also know how to throw a party, or two.

More later!

Birmingham UKOUG annual conference

If you can attend just one Oracle event per year: Come to Birmingham.

Despite the logo, the event is more then just a party:

The size of the event makes it unique and the provides a huge range of topics and speakers.

And if the bean-counters question the need for membership-fee and participation-effort, then question them on the amount of licensing- and consulting fees that need to be paid annually to this large software vendor....

Because if your employer is spending millions per year in licensing, they should at least make sure they keep checks on what other users do. A Usergroup is an excellent opportunity to discuss and argue with colleague-victims who are held hostage by the same vendor.

"The Conference" is one of the Largest and Best Organized non-Oracle-Oracle events (e.g. not organized by Oracle, but still about Oracle) on this side of the Atlantic.

Why do I really post this?

As always, the blogosphere is asked to plug, to promote and to web-Link this event into the search-engine rankings (the request went out weeks ago, and I am probably the last, fashionably late, blogger to put in an entry... But hey: there might be drinkies again at the blogger-event).

See you in Brum!

UKOUG 2008 Bloggers Assistance.

It is that time of year: the UKOUG is on with the Organisation of the next Big Yearly Conference. And as this is the 25th edition, it may just be Extra Feisty.

The call for papers is out and can be found here: http://conference.ukoug.org/




As always, the blogosphere is asked to plug, to promote and to web-Link this event into the search-engine rankings (the request went out weeks ago, and I am probably the last, fashionably late, blogger to put in an entry... But hey: there might be drinkies again at the blogger-event).

To be honest: This one is Worth It!

It is one of the Largest and Best Organized non-Oracle-Oracle events (e.g. not organized by Oracle, but still about Oracle) on this side of the Atlantic. Another good one is the SIOUG in Slovenia[link]: surprisingly Large Event and in a very nice location (yes, I was there last year, and it was Great Fun).


Time to go over my project-notes from this year to see what I can bring to the party. I had several ideas in the last months, but none of them are very "nice". But then, that is what user-groups are for maybe: Calling a Spade a Spade ?

"Upgrade Nightmares"
Indeed, why do we do it each time? why do we take the bait and the FUD each time and go through these Painful Upgrades...
My Cost+work saving tip for today would be: If you are still on 9.2 or even 8.1.7.4, and are considering to upgrade (as you should) why not show real balls and wait for 11.2 to come along?
If you have to go through the pain of an upgrade, you might as well
go to the highest possible version and be done for at least the next 2 years...

"Is my Diaster (re)Covered?"
Well... yes, but... (Oracle will never say No..)
If and Only If you took all the right precautions, and after you have managed to DIY the recovery all by yourself, Then the jovial Oracle representative is ready to share in your success!

If you had failed, then that is exactly what would have happened:
"YOU and only you, the miserably non-manual-reading, non-certified,
non-budget-spending, non-patch-applying DBA, would have Failed".
It could not possibly be the fault of those expensive Oracle products, could it?
Actually, let this narrow-escape be a lesson to you:
In future, you will need to buy more (licensed options) of these products just to make sure you show your total determination to spend your whole budget on their products.
BTW: the long winding small print on all Oracle products (the screen with the "I agree" button)states the equivalent of:
"Any disaster will still be your responsability..."


Right.
Those titles should get me in the "good book" of someone (whoever pays for my UKOUG budget), but probably not in the book of Oracle... hmmm.

In short:
If you want to know what works and what does not work with Oracle Products and Tools, then come to the UKOUG conference. The information you can get there is about as good as it gets.

See You There!