Miracle Oracle World 2012 Recap

I ended up so wrapped up in everything going on when I returned home that I never did get my Miracle Oracle World 2012 post out on my blog, (bad DBA Goth Princess!:)) so here it is!

Miracle Oracle World, (aka MOW2012, hashtag #MOW2012) is a yearly event held by Mogens Noorgard and his company Miracle, (http://www.miracleas.dk/ ) at Hotel Legoland in Billund, Denmark each year. This year was no exception and I was thrilled when Mogens asked me while in attendance at RMOUG’s Training Days if I would come to Denmark and do my presentation on EM12c, (then let me choose one more topic to speak on, which turned out to be ASH Analytics.)

I’d never been to Denmark and it sounded like a wonderful opportunity, but there were clashes in schedules personally and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to attend at first, but Tim was adamant about me going to MOW this year and stayed home to take care of responsibilities so I could speak in Denmark.

Upon reaching Copenhagen, Mogens picked me up at the airport, (still impressed he was able to locate me in the chaos that is any airport!) and after a short time to recover from the long fight at Mogen’s house, I loaded up into the car, driven by Mogens and accompanied by Cary Millsap, his wife, Mindy and their five year old daughter, Cat.

I have to give a lot of credit to young, Miss Cat. She was so well behaved and content to just ride along, watching movies and playing games, etc. She’s very close to both her parents and was quite enjoying her *special* trip to Denmark. It’s a 3 ½ hour trip to Billund from the town near Copenhagen where Mogens resides and the trip was pleasant, good conversation and humor when Cary attempted to calculate the miles per hour of the windmills by circumference, length and speed of the blades.

Upon arriving in Billund, we toured the Hotel Legoland for a bit, but I was glad to have the Millsap’s drop me off at the house at Lilandia and let me recuperate. Lilandia is a huge waterpark across from Hotel Legoland with what looks like small cul de sac’s of houses, different sizes and designs. The one I was in was four bedrooms and I was to share my room with Heli Helskyaho, who I was so looking forward to catching up with since I hadn’t seen her since RMOUG training days! My fellow house guests were Alex Gorbachev, Christian Antognini and Jonathan Lewis.

Most of the folks attend the party house and I heard it was quite the event, but I won’t lie, I tried to catch up on some sleep after being up for 36 hrs straight! Not much jet lag but I was up and spoke to Jonathan when he came in at around 8pm, Alex when he showed up at Midnight and then chatted with Christian when he was up at 2am working on his presentation slides. Jet lag is a funny thing… 🙂

I did get enough sleep to be up and ready before 7am and Jonathan happened to be up at the same time. He asked if I would like some company on my walk over to the conference site and I was happy to have such an excellent fellow along for the 1 mile walk. As much as I enjoy Jonathan’s presentations, there has got to be something said for one on one discussions with him. He can converse on any number of subjects and we were at the hotel Legoland in no time at all.

I appreciate Cary Millsap and his daughter, Cat allowing me to sit with them at breakfast. This helped alleviate some of my separation anxiety from my own children just watching Cat interact with her father. I ran into Oyvind Isene from Norway’s Oracle User Group, who I’d had the pleasure of meeting last year at Oracle Open World and he was someone I could always count on to put up with my incessant chatting for the two days of the MOW conference… 🙂

Choosing sessions was more difficult for me than I think for most other folks at the conference. The thing that really impressed me about MOW was that it was a mixed platform conference. This doesn’t mean there were a few MySQL sessions scattered among the Oracle, but that there was a full set of SQL Server presentations. For me, having as many years in SQL Server as I do Oracle, it was a real treat. I missed out on a few I would have liked to attend, but as always happens, conflicted with others I had promised attendance to. To attend Ron Crisco’s session, (someone I had spoken to and emailed with working with the Method R tool suite, but had never actually met…) meant I missed Thomas Kejser’s “SQL 2012 OLTP Improvements” session. This went on for most of the day even my own presentations competing with a few sessions I wanted to attend.

Christian Antognini’s “End to End Response Time Analysis” was engaging- anything to do with waits and response is going to interest me. His data was flawless and everyone in the room left with a few more ways to address performance challenges after seeing his examples and demos.

I then attended Dan Norris presentation on Exa-environment platform integration techniques. Dan didn’t have a large crowd in his session but this did allow for the conversation to be very specific between the attendees and Dan, which in turn satisfied those that attended his session greatly. Dan has a lot of experience and insight and I was impressed with the level of interest from those that had questions about Exa* products.

I proceeded to attend a SQL Server session next by Alexei Khalyako on SQL 2012 High Availability and Disaster Recovery. I hadn’t worked in this area of SQL Server for a couple years and was quite impressed with some of the new features Microsoft has introduced into the SQL Server product, including Availability Groups Multiple Secondary’s for HA and DR, Advanced Replication and new clustering features.

The next session, by Thomas Kejser, I found very intriguing. It was Hadoop and Big Data vs. Datawarehousing from a SQL Server perspective. I’ve heard plenty of presentations and read a number of papers on it from the Oracle side, but really enjoyed hearing a view of it via SQL Server world. The data behind the presentation was accurate and Thomas is a solid presenter, so the session was one of my favorites. I made enough of an impact, (can you say mouthy?) that Thomas came over promptly after his presentation was done and we continued to talk in a small group about big data and what options DBA’s had to handle it, no matter what the platform or technology choice.

My ASH Analytics session was at 4pm, last session of the day and it went as well as I could have expected. I was missing my demo for this session, the server I’d set it up on was down for maintenance, (I know, why did I trust a server to be up or even available??) I’d already run into the complication when I discovered much of my data I had been collecting over the last couple months missing from my external drives. I unfortunately didn’t realize this until I went to enter all of the data I thought I had, on slides just two weeks prior to the conference. I came up with challenges recollecting this data as my current EM12c environments are on 10g RAC databases. Anyone who has attempted to use ASH Analytics on a 10g environment will learn- it’s not going to happen. You can install the package to bring up the ASH Analytics page, you just won’t have any data in 95% of the panes, so nice try. Lucky for me, I was able to capture most of the data I needed to come up with a presentation just in time- still not the quality I would have liked.

Of course, my ASH Analytics session was attended by Cary Millsap, Alex Gorbachev, Uri Shaft, John Beresniewicz and other folks, many on the DBA God list… 🙂 I still appreciated their time, I was thrilled to have them attend, even if it was not my best session. Afterwards, we talked for quite some time, (missing demos have a tendency to grant that time… ) and Cary asked if I would like to attend his “Mastering Trace Data” Class that he was giving the next day. The opportunity to take it offsite was on the table for me, but to take it in person was too much to pass up, so I agreed.

The afternoon ended with after-first-day-conference drinks at Hotel Legoland’s bar while waiting for dinner to be served. Heli Helskyaho had arrived at that point, was happy to see her, (and this also meant I was no longer the only female presenter at the conference! :)) I hung out with her, Oyvind Isene and Christian Antognini, speaking to many others throughout the time there until they informed us dinner was ready.

Dinner was a fun affair, great food, great company and again, Cary and Mindy Millsap’s daughter, Cat was well-behaved, (more so than some of the adults? :)) Alex Gorbachev, along with our common banter, discussed his recent election to the IOUG Board of Directors and had a good conversation about RMOUG’s relationship with the IOUG.

Post dinner, Heli Helskyaho and I went over to the “Party House” which was four doors down from our own. There was eating and drinking, although not as much eating and drinking as the first night, as I heard there was a roast pig that I chose to miss to catch up on sleep. We spent most of the evening talking with John Beresniewicz, Tuomas Pystynen and Uri Shaft. There were many others, but so many, I gave up on remembering faces, let alone names. Alex Gorbachev took my “hoppy” beer off my hands at one point and replaced it with red wine, which turned into my drink of choice for the evening.

The second day started with a lovely breakfast with Heli, Tuomas Pystynen, Jonathan Lewis and others. I took the first hour off, prepped for my EM12c presentation in a quiet location and it was worth the time. My session was in full attendance and I was content with the outcome. The Q&A was not as intensive as my RMOUG session, but the questions were well thought out and discussion was actively participated in. The presentation was well received and only makes me more anxious for KSCOPE 2012 in San Antonio come June!

I attended Cary Millsap’s “Mastering Trace Data” class for the rest of the day. This was a great refresher course for me after taking the extended class over a year ago and reviewing the book used for the class back in December. Cary goes over the basic information so that anyone can easily utilize the Method R tool suite along with offering clear reasons to trace, showing how having this knowledge can make us better DBA’s.

The conference ended with a speech by Mogens Noorgard, awarding participants and those that came up with a creative way to explain the huge pool that had been a hit with the sauna partiers at the party house to Lilandia management.
Dan Norris had arranged with Mogens that I would drive back with him and his group. It was a good drive back to Malov, Denmark, near Copenhagen. His friend Anne is lovely, easy to talk to and Tuomas Pystynen is fun to be around, (except for those salted, black licorice fish candy he bought and had me try! :))

I spent the last 24hrs at the Yellow Mansion, home of the Oak Table. Dan, Anne and Tuomas made sure I arrived at the airport on time to catch my plane and upon arriving at my connection at London/Heathrow, I entered the lift and heard a familiar voice. Looking over the crowd entering, I noticed Mark Rittman and yes, the person that was missing at MOW was on her way to Calloborate in Las Vegas- Debra Lilley. We shared a few words, hugs and kisses, then I was off on my last leg of my flight home to Denver.

My only regret regarding Miracle Oracle World is that I didn’t have more time in Denmark. Upon returning, viewed some of the pictures Dan Norris’ friend Anne took in Copenhagen after they dropped me off at the airport. Even one more day in the city would have been wonderful!