UKOUG Conference 2005 : Day 0

It's Monday morning at about ten to seven, and for the first time in three years at the UKOUG, I've actually had a good night's sleep. My plan to go out on Sunday night and get trashed has obviously worked, so now it's just a chance to catch up with emails and update the website before getting some breakfast and taking a look at the stand.

Yesterday was the Oak Table day, and it was surprising just how many people would be prepared to be at the ICC for 9.30 for a full day's worth of full-on technical presentations. I went to the two Jonathan Lewis ones in the morning - the second of which, on PGA memory management, was particularly relevant for myself given some of the work we've being doing on very large ETL batch processes - but for me the best one of the day was by Graham Wood, on the evolution of time-based tuning from Oracle V2.3 through to 10g.

I've never been to a Graham Wood talk before and he's the guy behind much of the new diagnostics stuff (ADDM, AWR and so on) in Oracle 10g. The talk took us through the various Oracle versions since 2.3 - with additional info and corrections from Mogens and Anjo at the back - and how the approach to tuning has changed over time as more instrumentation has been made available. I know for some people this might seem a bit of a lightweight topic but for me it was pretty interesting actually, kind of what I came to the event for, a bit of history mixed in with some technical stuff. Very worthwhile.

Following on from the Oak Table presentations Jon Mead and I popped into town for an hour and then it was down to All Bar One for the SIG Chairs and volunteers' free bar. As I mentioned before, this fitted in with my plans quite well as I thought the only way I could get some sleep last night was to have a few drinks and stop worrying about getting some sleep (if you know what I mean) so in the end I spent a very good few hours with Jon, Doug Burns, Andy Johnston (SIG Deputy), Andrew Clarke, Chris Dunscombe, Tim Dexter (the XML Publisher product manager) and, later on in the evening, a few guys (and Charlie) from the company.

That's it for now. I'm chairing Sten Vesterli's PL/SQL talk at about two-ish this afternoon, other than that I'll be at a couple of talks and then on the stand for the rest of the day. I'll post again tomorrow after we've had the bloggers' dinner.

See also : Doug Burns on UKOUG Day 0