Insync 2011 Day 1

Yeah, these posts are a little late, but boy - what a busy week it's been!

After a delayed flight from Perth (isn't that the norm?) I spent me late hours on Monday night tidying up my presentation. Unfortunately that lead to me staying up waaay past my bedtime, but nothing a fresh morning and a cup of tea wouldn't fix...

That, and a pretty sizzling conference intro by Dan Thurman! The introduction from Martin Power and Ian White was relatively brief, then John Bushell introduced Dan and advised us to sit back and enjoy. When Dan came out with his strut, Bill Paxton sounding accent and unwavering zeal, I think most of the audience was wondering what sort of cheesy slop were we in for.

It was however a very thought provoking display by a man who knew exactly who he was and how he was probably being judged. He tied in his thoughts and messages with the IT world quite well, no doubt with as much practice as he spends on his juggling and unicycling. Kudos to the user groups involved in bringing him over.

To the real content, however:
Tim Hall showed a decent group a new hidden way of cheaply cloning your database. The content was somewhat outside my area of expertise, but I enjoyed it regardless. I enjoy Tim's presentations and I'm glad he made it back to Australia.

Damien Bootsma from Embarcadero followed morning tea with a reminder to all about the best practices of capturing meta data for productive database development. That was pretty much his title, and while some of his messages may not have been new material for many, I'm never opposed to drilling into people the better ways of designing and managing your database.

Which is exactly what Tom Kyte did in his "Efficient PL/SQL" presentation before lunch. I heard a few people commenting afterwards that there wasn't the sizzle and awe they expected from and Oracle celebrity, but I thought Tom's message was loud and clear, and always needed. So many times do I see people coding without contemplating the messages Tom was delivering. I had seen a similar presentation from him before, but I didn't mind seeing it again and I hoped some of the newer Oracle people in the crowd took many notes!

After lunch I was torn between a database security talk by Victorian AUSOUG president Barbara Rabinowicz and 10 things I possibly didn't know about Oracle indexes by Canberra ACE Richard Foote. Tony Jambu somehow leaned me towards seeing Richard's show - which I must say was really interesting. A little esoteric, but I learned a few things to think about in future. Having met Barbara during the welcome reception later, I was a little disappointed I didn't see her security talk - but isn't that the peril of having many streams at a conference!

There was one more session before mine, and I ducked my head into Angus MacDonald from Oracle talking about what's next. I couldn't find the abstract, and it was quite hardware centric so I ducked back out to run through my "slides" before I was up.

I'll suspend commenting on my own presentation until another post - I'd like to go into some detail on things and not let it get lost amongst this commentary. The turnout was unfortunately a little low, I'm curious where all the people were - although Craig Shallahamer was on at the same time...

Afterwards I steeled myself for the final keynote of the day on cloud computing strategies by Roland Slee and Doug Hughes. I hadn't seen Doug speak before, and I liked his attitude. Let me suggest it was one of the least cliche Oracle keynotes I've attended ;-) I look forward to him coming to Perth soon.

As usual, the welcome reception was a welcome end to the first day. I found the right position to get quick dibs on the beer trays, although the food was a little exotic for my simple tastes. I formally met Barbara who was a delight to communicate with and get to know for the remainder of my time in Sydney. I also caught up with other interstate fellows such as Tony Scholefield & Tony Jambu - and we ended up deciding to meet up for dinner with some Oracle specialists who had earlier snuck away for a Sydney Meetup, which I meant to attend but got lost in the mayhem.

So we had a nice dinner with a group of very skilled technologists. I enjoyed some spanish cuisine sitting nearby Connor McDonald, Marcelle Kratochvil & Barbara. However Tony, Barbara and I thought we'd nick away afterwards to the IBM/RedRock party down the road. It had quietened by the time we got there, but it was a good opportunity to wind down after a very long day. Yep, that was only day one.