RMOUG 2010

I attended, (and presented) at RMOUG this year and although it wasn’t as much of a “class reunion” as I expect, (seeing everyone that I’ve worked with at previous companies) I still did meet up with some previous coworkers and met some really great new DBA’s and Developers. It may just have been me, but I decided with the recession, attendance was down and I just need to help and promote it more along with everyone else! 🙂

My presentation was on parallel execution and no one seemed to notice it was my first presentation- which is a good sign. It wasn’t as solid as I would have liked- I’m just one of those people that either says something absolutely brilliant or ridiculously IQ’less, so my main goal was too keep my IQ deadspots as minimal as possible during my presentation, (keeping them to conversations in the main conference area where my brain is overwhelmed with too many distractions- yay me, now I only sound like an idiot in front of Oak Table folks! :))

As for the presentations that I enjoyed, there were a number of ones that made a solid impression on me, (and a list of new features to try out in my new 11G environments!):

• Robert Freeman’s Advanced RMAN Backup and Recovery
• Jean-Pierre Dijcks, 11G In Memory Parallel Execution
• Cary Milsap, Method R-  (My personal choice for tuning!)
• Mike Messina, 11g Partitioning and Advanced Compression

Muphy’s law, I missed a few presentations I would have liked to have attended due to duty calling, (darn Blackberry, we can’t get away these days, can we?) but I left with a few new tricks to try that I think we end up my sleeve.  I really wanted to see Jean-Pierre’s other presentation on 11g dataloading for data warehouses and have a feeling that I will be finding every bug in the new 11g parallel auto settings, (and he’s going to hate what I’m going to have to do to ensure my environment performs optimally with 11g with parallel….sigh)  His presentation was solid and he had folks asking him great questions that I felt were given too much of a “sales pitch” answer, but at least he gave the best answers he could to the questions at hand.

Cary Milsap’s presentation on method R was high level and enjoyable.  I was first introduced to method R by Dan Fink years ago, but we only worked together for a short period of time and due to his great skill in tuning, it inspired me to research what he referred to as “method R” tuning on my own.  It’s a very logical approach to tuning vs. many other techniques.  The aspects I’ve been able to utilize, have served me well, so anyone who gets a chance to see this presentation should make an effort to attend.

Robert Freeman is easy going and easy to listen to.  He had some great new features for RMAN in 11g to share with us that makes me want to upgrade to 11g faster just so I can start utilizing them.  The idea that I can take an incremental backup, apply it to my level 0, so that I would have the same requirements to restore as I would if I were restoring from a standard full backup is a feature that would sell my manager on incrementals.

Mike Messina, Mr. Freebie of TUSC.  You are never bored in his presentations.  They are always incredibly interactive-  tons of questions, input from the audience and discussions on the features.  He rewards his audience’s contributions with prizes of mugs, t-shirts, mousepads and even luggage tags-  and they love it! 

I really wanted to speak with Alex Gorbachev and Cary Milsap, along with talking with Robert Freeman longer than I did, but there always seems to be a shortage on time, too much to do, too many people that you want to visit with, that the new folks you need to make an effort to speak with can drop off the list, (plus I chicken out, knowing that if my brain is going to make the choice between being brilliant or being IQ’less, it’s going for the latter… :))

I want to recognize all the folks that were so kind to me as a new presenter this year- 

• Patty Charlebois, a long time presenter who gave me all kinds of advice and was so patient with my nervous chatter at the presenter’s reception. 
• Tim Gorman, for always being so personable and talking to me-  folks actually told me this week, because he talks to me, that made them decide that I must be “alright”… (OK, so I’m too honest some times… :))
• Randy Cunningham, for sharing funny stories about my “partner in crime”, fellow DBA at my last two companies.  Randy’s one of the few people that knows my quiet, reclusive, fellow DBA and also is aware what a great DBA he is!
• Carol Dacko, another long-time RMOUG DBA who put up with my nervous chatter and gave me words of support.
• The DBA/Developers that I’ve worked with, work with that came and supported me- Rajesh, Benny, Jim, Rhonda, Steve and Charles.
• And Nevin Hahn who gave me great feedback after my presentation, was a DBA that had a lot of similar topics to discuss and was a friendly face in many of the sessions I attended!

I’ll post my slides and white paper for my presentation soon.  There were some valuable queries in the presentation, (mine was definitely not high level in the slides with all the technical details spoken!)