UKOUG Management and Infrastructure SIG

I attended my first UKOUG event on Tuesday.  Martin Widlake chairs this SIG and does a fantastic job of making everyone (including newcomers like myself) feel very welcome. In fact once I’d got over my usual shrinking violet impression, I found everyone to be welcoming and particularly knowledgeable.

This SIG contains a broad range of presentations, and doesn’t delve too deeply into technical discussions despite Martin’s enthusiasm to talk about stats collection to all and sundry.

It kicked off with a presentation on profiling people using the Birkman method. It wasn’t to everyone’s tastes but they always pique my curiosity. I use it as a way to discover how other people perceive me, and I’m usually surprised on where I’m placed in these profiles.

After a brief coffee break we were into ‘Provisioning of Oracle Database Clusters using OEM’ by Rob Zoeteweij. Personally, I found this the most useful presentation of the day. The main reason for this was the relevance to my current place of work. We have a huge issue with ensuring CPU patches are applied across a massive estate. Using OEM to automate the application of the patches may just be the way forward.

We then had an Exadata 2 presentation from the Oracle guys. This wasn’t quite the sales show that I expected but it wasn’t too far from it. Lots of graphs showing how much quicker Exadata 2 was than everything else without really explaining the nuts and bolts of it. Every time that I wanted to ask a question such as…what does the SGA actually hold – blocks, psuedo blocks…hedgehogs? how does AWR report back on IO that’s being filtered before it gets to the database? .. I had to remind myself this was a Management SIG and so I bit my lip and kept quiet.

After lunch James Anthony spoke around some security implementations, but I have to admit he lost me for a little while. Maybe it was the post-lunch wind down.

At 3 Martin took to the stage and attempted to cover Database Statistics gathering in about 60 minutes! Now if ever there was a subject that lent itself to a longer more detailed investigation, it’s probably stats gathering. BUT… I thought he did a fantastic result. If anything he was hampered by his own enthusiasm to answer every question in enough detail to provide a rigorous answer.

At 4pm a group of us headed to a local pub to continue our discussions over a relaxing pint or 5. Doug Burns turned up at around 6pm and I then spent the next 2 hours watching the Doug and Martin show as they both attempted to outspeak each other. I managed to get a couple of words in sometime around 7:42 if I remember rightly!

Anyway. Thanks to Martin for the invite to the SIG and a thoroughly enjoyable and informative day.