Pickleball spielen

The Oracle User Group Ireland had its annual conference for 2014 at the Convention Centre in Dublin – which is a very nice location:

There have been many well known Oracle Experts speaking, as you can see from the agenda. Oracle University was represented by Joel Goodman and myself – we really enjoyed talking there and listening to the other speakers 🙂

The first presentation I attended was delivered by Tom Kyte, who in the absence of Maria Colgan delivered an Introduction to the New Oracle Database In-Memory Option. This extra charged option will probably be available with 12.1.0.2, which we expect to be released this calendar year. Safe Harbor etc. as usual. One key point that I took away here was that it is extremely easy to implement the In-Memory Option: Just set one initialization parameter and designate the use on the segment level with alter table e.g. Especially, the storage structure on disk remains unchanged and the whole thing is completely transparent for the application layer.

Next talk was delivered by fellow Oakie Tim Hall: An Oracle DBA’s Guide to WebLogic Server.

He tried to pack all the information that he wished he knew before he dealt with WebLogic for the first time into that presentation. Very useful indeed for starters, I suppose. There was no single key point here to highlight, instead we got a collection of small but helpful tips that I will definitely come back to when implementing WebLogic myself.

Next I went to Simon Haslam, who talked about What’s So Special about the Oracle Database Appliance?

Some key points here: ODA is definitely to be considered for rapid RAC deployment, especially for small to midsized projects with less demand for extremely good I/O performance. Also, it is probably a clever move to install it as virtualized platform based on Oracle VM, even in case that at first only databases are supposed to run there. This is easy to install initially (but an effort to change that after the fact) and has no negative performance impact.

Afterwards I did my own two presentations: Real-Time Query for Data Guard 11g in Action and Data Guard 12c New Features in Action

Many thanks to my dear colleague Mina Sagha Zadeh who took the picture and introduced my talk in the most charming and flattering way I have ever experienced so far 🙂

All in all it was a fantastic event in Dublin, kudos to the Oracle User Group Ireland for organizing and running it so well – great job!