The last day started with a master class Key features of redo by Jonathan Lewis. You need quite a good reputation to gather a large crowd to listen on such a subject. Well prepared with good slides, lots of real-world experience together with questions from the crowd made it to a time well spent in the auditorium. He didn't get through all the slides, but that did not matter since we had two hours filled with entertaining learning.
At 11:30am I attended the presentation Falling in Love all over again - OEM 12c Performance Page Enhancements; you can guess by reading the title who gave the presentation. Clearly this was a presentation Doug loved to give, and he praised the new improved functionality and interface. He made some comparison to other methods of tuning/analyzing a performance problem; a subject I still find interesting. The presentation was for the most part a live demo with SwingBench and virtual machines, no Death of PowerPoint after three hours of sleep. The only problem I have with these features is that many customers around here do not purchase the managements packs needed for all the fun. But I hope more people will understand the necessity of having this software. I had to leave the presentation early because of a board meeting, really a lunch with the sponsors. Doug, if you read this, now you know why two of us left early, not because you did less than splendid.
After lunch there was a talkshow with the main sponsors and with Jonathan Lewis, Maria Colgan, Stephan Janssen, and VP of EMEA Andrew Sutherland, hosted by board member Alice Rossman. Alice does this very well, by now it has probably dawned on her that she will have to do this every year. I like to hear stars in the Oracle sphere talk about what matters outside the office. Andrew Sutherland was the other Scottish funny guy. Think we should make sure that we have at least two of them every year, it is something with their humor; their special love for the Brits and that accent.
Staying up late with good company several nights in a row makes you tired. I attended only one session after lunch. Using PL/SQL Hierarchical Performance Profiler with Bryn Llewelyn. I'm not writing much code these days, but knew this is useful and something I want to know about when I need it. Bryn speaks very clearly in his presentations and easily engage in discussions afterward.
The feedback we received throughout the conference was vey nice, the level of the sessions and choice of content. Making a program like this is much more than sending emails to a lot of famous people. We need to find a variation on subjects, verify against feedback from last year and also have content that pushes the members forward. Making the program in itself takes a lot of effort, but clearly paid off.
This year we had hands-on labs. Not all where successful, others had a great turn out like RAC Attack. We learned a lot from this, and I believe that a one day conference in Oslo before the main conference will be repeated. We also invested in the new Java track; it was a good start, made some new ground we can build on further.
I had a great conference and feel pride that so many foreign speakers want to come and present at OUGN. Since we are not scaling back I expect to see most of them again together with other genius. We might have some logistic challenges like a larger ship.
Personal ambitions for next year is convincing the rest of the board that we need to find some way to have Cary Millsap from Method R, and one or more from Pythian (like Gwen, Alex and Yury). We also need to encourage more Norwegians to present user cases.
Finally, I want to thank my employer Keystep Consulting for letting me spend many hours otherwise billable in order to prepare for the conference. I am proud of the team there and being part of it.
