So yesterday was the UKOUG Northern Technology SIG in the Renaissance Hotel in Manchester.  This SIG combined the: 1. Database, 2. RAC Cloud, Infrastructure & Availability and 3. Systems streams into one.

I was approached by the committee a couple months to present, so I offered to present about Exadata Patching or Upgrading Grid Infrastructure.  The latter got accepted, so I knew I was definitely going to attend this SIG.

So the morning of the SIG, I took the 15 minutes or so taxi ride to the hotel (Manchester being my home town 🙂 ) and arrived in good time to have a cup of tea before the morning sessions began.

Patrick Hurley kicked off the day with the ‘Welcome & Introduction’ session in Neil Chandler‘s absence due to family emergency (hope everything is OK Neil).  Next Dominic Giles from Oracle gave the Keynotes session, which the take away from me was:
1. Oracle are investing a lot effort into a) REST APIs and b) Docker
2. Quite a few under the radar features in 12c
3. 12.2.0.2 planned release is end of 2017 with features like OLTP fast cache, support for NVRAM, merge partitions online, AD integration and more but I’m not quoting (Oracle Safe Harbour and that 😉 )

Next was the Vendor awareness sessions, good idea UKOUG.  I like this, thumbs up, just need to get Version 1 up there 😉

Next was Michael Hartley from Oracle who gave an Oracle Support session.  Something he mentioned that I didn’t know, you can in MOS analyse your inventory for patch conflict by uploading text output of your inventory and it will check for conflicts for a given patch.  Pretty cool, I will need to try this out and do a blog post on it 🙂

It was then a half hour coffee break before the stream presentations began.  So I took this opportunity to recheck my slides and make some minor amendments.  Before jumping in to my first stream session ‘Execution Plan Stability & How to Get Creative with SQL Profiles & SQL Plan Management’ by Nigel Bayliss from Oracle.  Quite a good session with my take away being the advice of replacing SQL Profiles with SQL Baselines Plans, so it’s not just a temporary fix but one that can withstand time because new better plans can evolved and be accepted.

Next was a pretty decent lunch, which I got the time to catch up with my ex colleague and good friend Mohsin Patel from Auto Trader.  Then it was fast approaching time for me to present my presentation of ‘Upgrading Grid Infrastructure in 5 Simple Steps’.  So I headed off to my room to setup and get ready.  I was worried I might have been presenting to 1 or 2 people because Jonathan Lewis was presenting at the same time about ‘Getting Rid of Indexes’.  Luckily I had what looked like more then 20 people, which was pretty good for a SIG, so I was pleased.  Presentation went well I believe, with the audience engaged and listening.  Just a few questions at the end and then my duty was done and I could then sit back and enjoy the rest of the SIG.  Thanks to those who attended, my slides will be up on this blog in next few days.

I then stayed in the room I just presented in to listen to Pete Finnigan‘s presentation on ‘Oracle Incident Response & Forensic Analysis’.  This session was a bit of an eye opener and made me realise, we all need to look into security a bit more then we do.

The next session was by Chris Buckel aka FlashDBA: Why Your Database Runs Slowly (& How to Fix it).  Quite enjoyed this session especially the demo of the poor guy who had to go round collecting plastic balls from each person in order, then randomly and then finally everyone throwing them at him, sorry I meant the bag to illustrate sequential, random and flash I/O 🙂

The final session of the day I attended was by my colleagues Chris Slattery – Oracle IaaS “Where the Rubber Meets the Road”.  Pretty good session and I was surprised with the comment of Oracle having 116 Oracle Cloud services! 😐

Then it was the social drinks sponsored by Oracle, got to catch up with Joy Marshall and Martin Widlake.  All in all, was a great day.  Many thanks to UKOUG for putting together a great SIG and thanks to all the speakers.

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Thanks for reading

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)