First things first: It was a great event!

Many thanks to the DOAG staff for offering and organizing it, great job!

Top-Notch speakers and Oracle Celebrities with so many great presentations that I really felt sorry to be unable to clone myself in order to attend multiple sessions in parallel 🙂

Let me mention just a few that I attended:

There was Graham Wood with his talk DB Time-based Oracle Performance Tuning: Theory and Practice

One key point to take away: DB Time is time spent by foreground processes in the Database Layer and Performance Tuning actually means reducing DB Time

Another very interesting presentation was Kyle Hayley’s about Instant DB Cloning

One goodie here: Check out clonedb with MOS Note 1210656.1 or this article http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/clonedb-11gr2.php

It went on with Larry Carpenter talking about Best Practices for Data Availability and Disaster Protection

One highlight was the 12c New Feature Application Continuity here, that makes failover really transparent (much better than ancient TAF did) to applications

On we went with Julian Dontcheff’s Upgrading to Oracle 12c

I was really pleased to meet him in person for the first time since we have had some contact over social media before – that’s one of the best things about these conferences 🙂

One highlight was the option to do upgrade to 12c (not just recompile!) in parallel.

Then came Joel Goodman with his presentation about RAC Global Resource Management Concepts

Take away: When you want to get a clue how Cache Fusion works under the covers, check out GV$BH, especially the STATUS column – or even better: Take a course from Oracle University about it 🙂

Mark Scardina then almost convinced me that it may indeed be useful do create Server Pools with his talk Why and How You Should Be Using Policy-Managed Oracle RAC Databases

Especially, you can control the start order and priority of services when servers get scarce (after a crash, e.g.)

My own presentation about Materialized Views & Partition Change Tracking almost filled room 2 and got strong applause, so I consider it a success 🙂

Key point is here

Very instructive talk followed by Mike Dietrich about Working with Multitenant Databases in Practice

You can download the slides from his blog. One highlight: In 12c, you have Full Transportable Export/Import which is a combination of Transportable Tablespaces and full export – very cool!

We saw a great presentation also by Kai Yu about Achieving Availability and Scalability with Oracle 12c Flex Clusters

and I was glad to meet him in person there! One key point: Flex Clusters need Flex ASM, but Flex ASM can also be used by Standard Clusters

Markus Michalewicz did a great job with his presentation about RAC 12c Best Practices – if I should recommend only one talk, this would probably be it.

One out of many key points was the recommendation to install Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a Cluster for any deployment; may it be a Single Instance Database or an Oracle RAC Database.

Then I went to Frank Schneede to hear about 12c New Features for Data Warehousing

One goodie: We have partial indexes available now for partitioned tables – local and global!

Very good – as usual – was also Christian Antognini with Query Optimizer 12c New Features

Enjoyed especially his demonstration of Adaptive Plans in 12c

A DOAG highlight was also the Data Guard Expert Panel – felt honored about the invite to join it together with a legend like Larry Carpenter 🙂

Oracle University was present at the DOAG Conference not only with Joel Goodman and me as speakers, we have had an OU booth also there:

Here you see Volker Enkrodt, one of our Sales Consultants, happy to answer customer questions about OU offerings and certifications.

All in all a great conference! Looking forward to DOAG 2014 already 🙂

My dear colleague Joel Goodman and me will present at the DOAG (German Oracle User Group) Annual Conference 2013; I’m already excited about it 🙂

Apart from seeing presentations by top-notch Oracle Experts, I’m also looking forward to meet people in person that I know already from social media activity. The complete program is online here. My personal choice of presentations (a pity that I can’t see all) is

Day 1 (19-NOV)

DB Time-based Oracle Performance Tuning: Theory and Practice by Graham Wood, Oracle

Instant DB Cloning by Kyle Hailey, Delphix

Session Keynote: Best Practices for Data Availability and Disaster Protection by Larry Carpenter, Oracle

Upgrading to Oracle 12c by Julian Dontcheff, Accenture

Keynote by Andy Mendelssohn, Oracle

RAC Global Resource Management Concepts by Joel Goodman, Oracle

Why and How You Should Be Using Policy-Managed Oracle RAC Databases by Mark Scardina, Oracle

Thinking Clearly about Performance by Cary Millsap, Method R Corporation

Day 2 (20-NOV)

Materialized Views & Partition Change Tracking, my rifle, pony and me

Arbeiten mit Pluggable Databases (Oracle Multitenant) in der Praxis by Mike Dietrich, Oracle

Exadata Database Machine – Die Konsolidierungsplattform by Malthe Griesel, Paragon Data GmbH

Statistics Gathering 101 by Wolfgang Breitling, Centrex Consulting Corporation

Achieving Availability and Scalability with Oracle 12c Flex Clusters by Kai Yu, Dell Inc

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 12c Best Practices by Markus Michalewicz, Oracle

Neue 12c Features für Datawarehouse by Frank Schneede, Oracle

Day 3 (21-NOV)

Best of Oracle Security 2013 by Alexander Kornbrust, Red Database Security GmbH

A Presentation of Sorts by Julian Dyke

Session Keynote: Simplify Consolidation with Oracle Database 12c by Patrick Wheeler, Oracle

Experten-Panel: Dataguard hosted by Matthias Mann, Christian Trieb

Instrumenting Oracle CPU activity: The Missing Link by Craig Shallahamer, OraPub

Query Optimizer 12c – Was ist neu? by Christian Antognini, Trivadis AG

Oracle Partitioning fuer Einsteiger by Hermann Baer, Oracle

If you plan to come to this event, this hotel is closest. Make your reservations early. Hope to see YOU at the conference 🙂