Day 1: OUGN 2011 - the geek cruise

I've kept attending the OUGN conference ever since I moved to Oslo in 2006. It's always been a nice conference, this year, though, it turned out to be an utter success! The foreign speakers in combination with the possibility of meeting most of my former colleagues made the conference really exceptional for me.

The settings were perfect. At Open World or the UKOUG the participants are usually spread across the city after the presentations. Here, on the other hand, everyone happens to be on a boat 24/7. And it is by talking with the other Oracle professionals where I usually get the best out of the conference.

My presentation was the first after the keynotes. Going on after Tom Kyte made me a bit nervous, which in combination with excessive amounts of coffee made my presentation somewhat shorter. Apart from talking too fast, I think I have delivered an overall good performance. When talking later to some people attending, I was assured they got the main message. Moving databases doesn't need to be complicated, use RMAN and other things you know to get the work done.

Next to follow was Audun Hoff from Oracle, presenting on Exadata. Not much of news here, but it was interesting to see the numbers of compression they got for Hybrid columnar compression at NAV.
You can even get HCC with the Exadata, for which to use I had always assumed the Advanced compression license was necessary...

Finally, I attended Doug Burn`s presentation on SQL Monitoring...
I've used SQL Monitoring before - mostly for DWH tuning - but here I was served with a lot of excellent new tips. Did you know you could make an html file from sqlplus including the flash stuff and everything? Doug held an outstanding presentation, you could really see he loves SQL Monitoring!
The day ended up at the bar...  Lots of old colleagues and new ones

True to my own habits, I once again used the opportunity to talk to people with Exadata experience. It's always interesting to find out how other companies manage to get the best performance out of this machine.

The highlight of the evening was Doug Burns answer to my question if I should attend his presentation on statistics and partitioned objects the morning after. "If you are interested in Tom Kyte's presentation you should rather see that one" - was his reply.

Thankfully, I didn't follow his advice, which I'll explain further in the forthcoming post on day 2!