Time really flies!, it has been several weeks without updating the Blog, due to the fact that consultancies have been keeping me busy most of the day, and what free time I had left I have been dedicating to the preparation of my presentation for the PEOUG Day 2009 that finally took place yesterday.
My participation in this event was thanks to the invitation of Miguel Palacios, president of PEOUG and new Oracle ACE. Even though my time was quite tight I decided to accept the challenge, and although the presentation lasted an hour -which may seem short for the audience- for the exhibitor it usually represents a lot of hours to invest in the organization and development of the visual material to present, the good thing is that this is the initial cost and after this the material remains and can be used for future presentations.
The day of the event I left home earlier than usual, but I still ran into a brutal traffic, courtesy of the girls of the Phoenix Squadron, who know as much about traffic control as I do about Informix, but even though they did their best effort (better luck next time, girls ) I managed to arrive just when Miguel started with the welcoming remarks, and then Tom Kyte presented his Keynote The Best Way. The room was completely full, hundreds of people listened with great attention to the words of this almost mythical character in the Oracle world.
An hour later Tom had concluded his impeccable presentation to the applause of the attendees, including myself of course, who count myself among his most fervent followers. The moral of his presentation is that there is no such thing as “the best way to ….”, because in the end it all depends on what you are trying to do.
There were a couple of hours left for my presentation, so I took the opportunity to talk with old friends and some alumni of Oracle University courses, and then I headed to the room I had been assigned. I went in and found that the presentation of Juan Camilo Ruiz titled Become Fusion Developer with no Java, and listening to him I was convinced that Java is not my thing, things have been simplified a lot but it is still not as easy as Oracle Forms for example.
As my time was approaching, I still kept the hidden hope that after Juan Camilo’s talk the room would be empty and my audience would be reduced to a couple of cats (4 if we count the cameraman and the hostess), after all at that same time Francisco Muñoz was presenting Oracle Database Advanced Security Options, so when Juan Camilo left and I took his place on the podium, great was my surprise to see that people not only did not leave but continued to enter and there was even a good group of people standing at the back of the room. So I resorted to the infallible Plan B: the old trick of taking off my glasses and thus taking advantage of the fact that, thanks to my astigmatism, I would only see a blurry and therefore harmless audience .
Without further ado, I proceeded to begin my presentation, titled Bad Coding Practices, impact and solution (which you can download now). I must admit that the audience was very receptive and as I was showing some examples of the audacity and boldness to which some of our programmer friends can reach, the listeners remained attentive, noticing and celebrating the sarcasm that from time to time I introduced, according to me in an underhanded way.
Towards the end, the hostess was signaling me to finish my talk, but the truth is that my presentation did not start at the agreed time, for reasons beyond my control, and it was only fair that they gave me the full hour, so even though I consider that democracy is not perfect, I took advantage of it and asked the audience if they wanted to leave, fortunately people voted in majority to continue the session and as vox populi, vox dei, we went ahead and a few minutes later everything had concluded satisfactorily. In short, I believe that both the audience and I left happier than when we entered, which is already a not inconsiderable achievement, unless better opinion.
After having some lunch on the fly, I continued with the event and attended Miguel Palacios’ presentation titled Implementing Oracle Streams, and then came back again with Tom Kyte and All about metadata. As I listened to Tom develop the topic, my doubts increased as to whether he was referring to a client of mine, Acme Corporation, which was going through the same problems: not using referential integrity, not using constraints not null, storing dates as number and not as date, etc., thank goodness they are already reversing this way of working, because as Tom demonstrated with some very representative examples, lacking constraints seriously limits the optimizer and therefore not only the integrity of the data is at stake but also the performance of the applications.
Then I attended the presentation by Francisco Muñoz, Logging or nologging and finally the Keynote Top 10, no 11, new features of Oracle database 11gR2 by Tom Kyte. Then, the closing of the event, a toast, some raffles and I asked Tom Kyte to autograph a copy (it was not pirated of course) of his book Expert Oracle, which I am now auctioning on eBay, what? did you really believe that, as I am going to auction it, I have it well kept in my night table, just above the Bible, hahaha.
Jokes aside, and in conclusion, I have the impression that PEOUG Day 2009 was a resounding success, except for Oracle’s presentation, Oracle LMS as Value Added Service, which touched on issues related to licensing, a topic that we – the end users – do not call much attention, surely if someone from Sunat talked to us about the advantages of being up to date with our taxes it would have had the same magical effect . I am not saying that we should start evading taxes and use pirated Oracle, in fact Sunat owes me a whole salary in overpaid taxes and the first thing I check with my clients is that they have the correct licensing, but this was not the right audience, place or time to deal with this issue-my modest opinion of course.
So much for my report from the scene, until next time!