Category Archives: General

OGB Appreciation Day : Thank you community ! (#ThanksOGB)

It was started by Tim Hall in 2016. This is a Thank you community post. There are so many experts posting on Oracle related forums, doing blog posts, sharing their scripts with everyone. All of you are doing a great job. I would like to mention three names especially:

Tim Hall : Tim is a legend ! I don’t consider something a new feature until Tim writes about it 😀

Jonathan Lewis : I don’t think there is anyone on this planet who has even once worked on a performance problem and hasn’t gained something from the knowledge shared by him on forums or in one of the blog posts.

Tanel Poder : His hacking sessions, blog posts and scripts are awesome. And ashtop is amazing man !

Thank you all of you. We learn from everyone of you. Keep rocking !

Presenting at Cloud day event of North India Chapter of AIOUG

I will be presenting a session titled “An 18 pointers guide to setting up an Exadata machine” at Cloud Day being organized by North India chapter of AIOUG. Vivek Sharma is doing multiple sessions on various cloud and performance related topics. You can register for the event here

https://www.meraevents.com/event/aioug-nic-cloud-day 

 

Sangam 15

This was my 6th year at Sangam and as always was good fun. We were a group of 4 people who were traveling from Delhi and we reached Hyderabad on Friday morning. Just wanted to keep a day for visiting Ramoji Film City and also wanted to avoid the rush that morning travel on the conference’s starting day brings. So after dropping the luggage at the hotel we hired a taxi and reached Ramoji Film City. It is a huge place and it is tiring to move around checking everything. But fortunately on that day the weather was very pleasant so moving around was good fun. We took a ride what they call as Space Walk and watched few sets where some movies were shot. Also they have a pretty good bird sanctuary over there where they have pretty good number of beautiful birds. Spending time there was nice and fun.

By 7 PM or so we were done with everything and started back to hotel. As it was dinner time already so we directly headed to Paradise and had some awesome Biryani.

Saturday was the first day of the conference. We reached the venue by 8:30 AM and the registration was pretty quick. Before starting of the technical sessions at 10 AM, we had plenty of time to move around, meet folks especially  who we know online but had never met in person. For me it was my chance to meet Tim Hall in person for the first time. Simply put Tim is brilliant. His website is an inspiration for many bloggers. It was great meeting Tim in person and striking few conversations about various technologies.

Also met Kamran for the first time in person. Been connected to him on social media for quite some time now. It was great catching up with you mate.

Had last met Francisco in Sangam 10 and this year got a chance to meet him again. The second question (first was how is job 😉 ) he asked me was “How is your blog going ?” So that calls for some focus on blogging again 🙂

Then we selected the sessions we wanted to attend and moved to respective rooms. I attended most of the sessions around database technology. There was good variety of sessions but I noticed that Engineered Systems part was missing. There could have been some sessions on Exadata, Exalogic and Super Cluster. That would make an interesting topic and would pull good audience.

Start of the second day looked little lazy but with time it caught up. There were some free time slots for me as not all sessions were of my interest. So got some time to chat around with folks there.

In the end there was an excellent motivational session by Dr Rajdeep Manwani that was enjoyed by everyone in the audience. The key take away was that you yourself have to do something about the things that you think need to be fixed. Blaming others for mess up in your life isn’t going to help.

That was the end of the second day and the conference. We met everyone around and decided to leave. Our 9 PM flight to Delhi was delayed by 4 hours and we had plenty of time to reach the airport. So once again we headed to Paradise for dinner. We were having dinner and Kamran and Markus also reached there for checking out some Biryani. Finished our dinner, said good bye to them and left for the airport. Flight was delayed little more and finally reached home at 4 AM next morning. Long day !

Read Tim’s take on Day1 and Day2.

 

 

 

 

Sangam 10

It has been almost an year since i posted something (useful) here. The last post was also a crappy one 🙂 . Well, it all boils down to sheer laziness 😉 . Now, i think the time has come to be regular again. Here i am getting a good start talking about Sangam10, i attended last week. It was a great opportunity to meet so many fellow Oracle professionals and most awesomely to meet & see Jonathan Lewis talk about Performance & Tuning. As expected the whole experience was amazing. It was a 2 day event where Jonathan was delivering 2 half day seminars on SQL Tuning and there were other break out sessions as well. We had planned to go a day in advance so me, Aman, Ankit & Neeraj reached Hyderabad on 2nd Sep.

Jonathan’s presentations were simply amazing. His knowledge about how things work (and why they work this way not that) is simply awesome.  He is an inspiration for newbies like us and there was so much to learn from him. Few of the quick tips that i picked up from him:

  1. Don’t believe what you read or hear. Make small test cases to test and confirm how things work & how they don’t. He said that he has around 2000 test cases on his laptop. Some of them ready to be fired on Oracle database 12g 😉 .
  2. Always document your findings. At a later date you only won’t be able to remember that something that you already faced and solved something you are stuck in. If you document things properly, you would always remember a bit of it and you can search it in a minute.

Also i got to meet & attend presentation of good friend Francisco Munoz Alvarez. I have been in touch with him since more than 2 years but this was for the first time i was meeting him in person. Also his presentation on how to become a good DBA was really awesome. Enjoyed every bit of it.

Two of my colleagues Vivek Sharma and Rahul Dutta were also presenting, so got a chance to see their presentations too. Vivek talked about developing scalable applications and Rahul’s presentation was about developing a EBS reporting solution using Oracle streams.

I attended some part of Mark Rittman‘s session also. I am not much into data warehousing but Mark is such a respected name so wanted to be present in his session 😉 .

I also met and attended one of the presentation of Iggy Fernandez. He talked about 52 weeks in the life of a database. I couldn’t attend his other presentation on reading execution plans as Vivek was presnting in the same time slot.

Overall, it was an amazing experience and i am already looking forward to attending Sangam (or whatever it would be called 😉 ) 11 !

Read Aman’s post about Sangam 10.