OOW10

Yesterday I came back from my third Oracle OpenWorld. This year I was not on a bloggers pass, so I feel less obliged to cover the event. But I know there are people out there that like to read about my experiences and I still like it very much at San Francisco, so here is a small write-up about my experiences at Oracle OpenWorld 2010.

The event started at Sunday, but later than usual: 12:30 PM I think, instead of 8:30 AM in previous years. For the first time I had to wait in a queue to register and receive the conference pass. I also received an Oracle Develop t-shirt, a conference book and the Appreciation Event wristband, but to my surprise no bag. The guy behind the counter pointed at the screen that said what he was allowed to give, and the screen said nothing about a bag. It felt strange, because except for Frits Hoogland, everybody seemed to wear that bag. Not really a problem, since I have enough of them at home. But I did not want to carry the stuff with me all day, so I decided to go back to the hotel and drop the book and t-shirt.

The sessions I saw on Sunday differed much in quality. I especially liked Cary Millsap's lesson in how to prepare for and deliver a presentation. Very inspiring. Even though I knew all content about messed-up apps already, because they are on his blog as well. I also like Richard Foote's presentation about indexes and Chris Muir's one on load testing APEX applications. In the evening, all ACEs and ACE Directors were transported to a very nice boat for a trip on the bay, with nice food, conversations and magnificent views of San Francisco by night.

On Monday I visited four sessions, which were all pretty good. First a live PL/SQL Challenge by Steven Feuerstein, with some interesting questions. No prices here, but Steven had created a secondary challenge for the people present at Oracle OpenWorld, where I won a second place and a 100 dollar Amazon gift card. Thanks Steven! Another session I enjoyed was Lucas Jellema's and Alex Nuijten's Xenogenetics session, about some use cases for using Java in PL/SQL, among others. In the evening I visited OTN Night, mainly for some food :-).

Tuesday I went to Oracle Closed World together with Frits Hoogland, where I saw a very good presentation of Kyle Hayley about Visual SQL Tuning with his Embarcadero product. The steps I intuitively take to solve performance problems with my explain plans and tkprofs were nicely illustrated with graphs. Pick as a starting point the table with the best filter predicates, then join down (to details) and then join up (to master tables). When visualizing all that, it becomes obvious. At Closed World I received a t-shirt which I wore on Thursday. This generated quite some comments ("Is that from Mogens? He is a funny guy.") and even from strangers who liked the "Meat.Beer.Explode." phrase. I returned to my hotel pretty early to do some preparation for my own session and in the evening I went to Ruby Skye for the Oracle Benelux Party.

Wednesday was my own presentation called "Oracle Database 11g's Result Cache". At Hotel Nikko in the Bay View room. This room was on the 25th floor and had a magnificent view of the bay. The session went well, and I was exactly on time. Unfortunately, I heard later that not everybody could see the SQL*Plus screen well, even though I had specifically asked the guy at the back of the room if he could read it... I received some interesting questions at the end, which I will try to answer in some future blogpost. Next up was the Bloggers Meetup, which was fun. And afterwards, Roel Hartman, Jacco Landlust and his girlfriend Margot and me went to the appreciation event, where I saw Don Henley, the Black Eyed Peas (slow start, but great ending) and two songs of the Steve Miller Band.

On Thursday I only saw two sessions, of which I really liked one. It was Jože Senegačnik's session called Query Transformations about all kinds of transformations the cost based optimizer performs when hard parsing queries. These transformations are visible in the 10053 trace file, which I rarely use. The session was great because it fitted great with what I already knew, but there were lots of interesting little details I did not know. After gathering at the OTN Lounge with some fellow ACEs and skipping the wrap-up party, I headed back to my hotel.