OOW has been great and I'm reaching the limit of how much information I can consume for a while. I'll probably spend some weeks or months reading and understanding presentations. Time to go home and practice what I've learned. I'm not even going to try to report dutifully on every session today. Just say that I've been to Real-World Performance Questions and Answers, Oracle Database Optimizer: Tips for Preventing Suboptimal Execution Plans, Looking Under the Hood at Oracle Clusterware 11g Release 2, and Under the Hood of Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Fault Tolerance. The first one was great fun, 3 of 4 had more than 20 years experience in this field. The youngest "only" 8. Greg Rahn revealed they have a "secret": they try to solve complex problems with simple solutions. Graham Woods advised people to ask Why? and understand what you are doing before you actually change anything in production. Simple guidelines, but since many are not following them it needs to be repeated.
I'm not going to say much about the two following, again useful content and I have to look again at the mysteries of Clusterware. Also Maria Colgan showed as she did yesterday she is an excellent speaker. She is invited to next year's OUGN conference, which according to Bryn is the world's best user group conference. Looking forward to it.
Back at home I've had many discussions regarding ASM, it is surprising what people can get religious about. One former coworker stated that Oracle has no right to implement a volume manager... I've never had any good arguments for migrating to ASM. If the DBAs at the site like it, I chime in with things I like, simplicity to name one. If not, because "any datafile should be verifiable with ls or dir", then I usually back off from any discussion. In the last presentation of the conference by Alex Gorbatchev from Pythian I learned quite a few reasons to go for ASM, like you have more integrity checks and efficiency if you use ASM. I'll probably stay away from heated discussion until I've read everyting from James Morle, baarf.org, ASM-gurus like Alex; SAN- and Unix-admins don't give up easily.
This was first time at OOW. Was it worth it ? Absolutely. I got served more than I could eat, met a lot of smart people whose blog posts and tweets I've been reading for years; i.e. great networking opportunity, and had great fun. Learned a lot, now I know what other SSF-travelers are talking about.
Thanks to everybody who stopped for a talk or sent a smile in my general direction. Going home looking forward to see wife & jr.
