Yes, the second posting in a row about Oracle User Group Conference Impressions, can’t help it 🙂 Straight after the fantastic DOAG conference in Nürnberg, the Oracle circus moved on to Manchester for the UKOUG annual conference, which fulfilled the high expectations and turned out to be another great event!

I attended so many very good presentations that it’s too much to cover it all here, so let me just mention some of the highlights.

Andy Colvin’s talk about RMAN in Oracle Database 12c – Top New Features was instructive, although I knew the new features before. Particular useful is for example the full SQL capability that RMAN has now.

The live demo (I like that!) that he did about Table Point Recovery failed at the first try but succeeded at second try. Things like that never happen during the preparation for some reason 🙂

Larry Carpenter is always a show and his presentation about Oracle Active Data Guard: Next Generation Data Protection was again great. Love it when he says: „I don’t like Data Loss!“ Data Guard has again big improvements in the current version, probably the introduction of Far Sync Instances that enables Zero Data Loss across any distance is the most important new feature here.

Marcin Przepiorowski (I gladly call him Marcin, because it’s almost impossible to pronounce his last name) also presented about Data Guard, and I attended his talk about Using Data Guard Broker at the Oak Table World that was run in parallel. You may know that I am also always recommending to use the broker, and that is probably also what we are talking about here at the social event in the afternoon 🙂

Marcin standing backwards to the camera, on my right side is a smiling Osama Mustafa and the guy with the bottle of beer is my good friend Philippe Fierens. Thanks for your company, Philippe!

The Data Guard Round Table saw me again sitting together with Larry Carpenter as in Nürnberg before, and Larry answered again almost all the questions, making my presence so much easier 🙂

Another interesting Round Table was about Engineered Systems, where I finally met Jason Arneil in person. You see him here on the right side and Joel (Crocodile Dundee) Goodman in the middle

Joel and I have also been at the RAC & Grid Infrastructure Round Table, where Joel explained a good deal about Flex ASM and Flex Clusters to the audience.

My own presentation was again as in Nürnberg about Materialized View & Partition Change Tracking, but this time with another T-Shirt:

One little nerd’s anecdote: I was sitting next to Jonathan Lewis in the speaker’s lounge after my talk when I received a tweet from him, apologizing that he wasn’t able to attend although he announced that he would do it.

I turned to him and said: „Yes, I was missing you in the audience!“ and he was totally baffled to get talked to before he realized that it was me 🙂

My good friend Iloon Ellen-Wolf presented at the Oak Table World about What a DBA needs to know about APEX – very needful information as I think.

You see her in the middle of the next picture, showing The Three Musketeers from Oracle University:

My friends Iloon Ellen-Wolf, Joel Goodman and me were waving the OU flag with several presentations and round table talks.

Tom Kyte did the last presentation on Wednesday about the things he learned at the event:

He is not only a bright technical expert but also a very good entertainer on stage! Need to adopt something of it, but that will be hard… One thing he learned: Live demonstrations are dangerous! I agree, but that’s also the fun of it 🙂

Many thanks to the staff of the UKOUG for making this great event possible, I felt honored to be a part of it!

Also, I’d like to thank my friends Iloon, Jan, Philippe and Joel for giving me good company during the conference – really appreciated it! Hope to see you soon again at another conference 🙂