OSWOUG Event in Portland

I’m on my way back home after spending the day in Portland for the OSWOUG (Oregon and South Washington Oracle User Group) event. As usual (mostly) I’m writing about conferences and events I’m attending, especially if I had a good time.

It all started a few months ago when I met Jon Wasserman at the OUG leaders summit organized by Oracle in California. We chatted for a while and he invited me to speak at one of their events. The event was scheduled for today (September 12),and Jon and I corresponded regarding the topics. He gave me 2 slots, so we chose 2 sessions: “Basic Datatypes – Deep Understanding” and “Dealing with the Optimizer Complexity”. The first one is about the internals of the basic datatypes, including performance and storage related issues. The second one is about the relatively new Optimizer features that provide a lot of functionality but require some more skills from the DBAs when it comes to tuning or performance issues.

Once we finalized everything, I booked my flights and everything and I was ready to go. I got here yesterday evening, Jon was waiting for me outside of the airport and we went to have dinner in Portland. It was really nice, the place was small and quiet, the food was good and the company was great.
In the morning we drove to the event. It started at 10:45 with Clay Jackson’s (Quest) talk about challenges when moving to the cloud. It was funny because a while ago I wrote a blog post about the same topic containing most of what Clay said (but not all). However, my post is still in draft mode and I’ve never published it.

After Clay’s talk it was my turn to present my first presentation. It went well and I finished on time (unlike the last couple of times). I had to finish on time because my session was just before lunch and I didn’t want anyone to hate me for being hungry.

After lunch we heard Jared Still‘s (Pythian) session “Free Oracle Performance Tools”. The session was a long list of different free tools available online, written by many different Oracle experts out there. I’m definitely going to check out some of them as they seem really cool (and they have to be really good coming from people like Tanel Poder, Cary Millsap and others). I also realized that Jared interviewed by about a year and a half ago, which was quite entertaining.

After the coffee break I presented my second session which was the last one for the day.

The entire event was great, it was intimate and very friendly. I managed to talk to quite a few interesting people and I enjoyed it a lot. The fact that everyone stayed till the end and even asked questions after the last presentation means it was a success.

Thanks everyone for showing up, thanks Jon for inviting me and I hope to see you sometimes soon.