Webinars

Reminder:

The webinars on “Smarter Statistics in 11g” are on tomorrow (Friday) at 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm. There’s a waiting list for the 6:00 pm event, so if you’ve signed up but can’t make it please delete your registration. (The event will be repeated on 10th June).  If you want to vote a better time for me to do short webinars there’s a poll at the end of the article.

 

 

I’m about to make a serious move into online webinars, and as a warm-up exercise I’ll be doing a couple of one-hour free events on Friday 17th May.

I’ll be talking through a Powerpoint presentation called “Smarter Statistics in 11g” twice, once at 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm BST, and again at 6:00 pm BST  (12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CDT) . Broadly speaking the first one is for the benefit people from the UK and eastwards, and the second is for the benefit of people from the US and westwards. This is just a trial run, of course, and if it works well I will be doing more of the same, perhaps three times per day to spread across more time zones.

John Goodhue (my O1 sponsor for the USA) is arranging all the mechanical details, and I’ll post links for registration when they become available – we’ll be using GoToWebinar as the supply mechanism, and we’ll be limiting access to 100 people (so if you do register and can’t attend, please remove yourself from the list; if you don’t manage to register for either event, you’ll get another chance later as I plan to repeat each event a few times.)

I’ll also be doing a full day paid event on 23rd May which will be my “Indexing Strategies” tutorial. This first full day event will be timed to suit the American audience – although anyone can register, of course – but we plan to have further events suited to other time zones. The URL for registration is now available – with an option to purchase a 30-day window to the recording of my “Oracle Mechanisms” presentation in Minneapolis.

Source Control

You may recall that I spent some time with the developers at the redgate offices in Cambridge (UK) a little while ago, looking at their Source Control for Oracle package. The product is about to go live, with a launch date of 12th March.

Because of the help I’ve given them they’ve offered my readers the chance of winning one of two 5-user licences for the product – provided I devise a strategy for picking the recipients.

So, to make it easy, all you have to do is persuade me that you really need or really deserve a copy. Write up a short description in the comments of the worst problem you’ve had to face because you didn’t have a decent source control system, or the  best use you think you could make of a source control system for Oracle.

I’ll get the redgate developers to read what you wrote, and they will be the final judges of the two most interesting, or possibly most horrifying, or maybe even the most entertaining, cases.

Entries to be in by 23:59 GMT on 11th March.

Update

The product has launched early !

You can find out more and see screenshots on this web page.

And there’s an online demo of the tool on March 14 at 16:00 GMT (17:00 CET / 11:00 EST / 10:00 CST / 08:00 PST), where you will be able to ask any questions. If you’re interesting in seeing it you’ll have to register at this “go to meeting” URL.

The closing date for entries is still 11th March, 23:59 GMT.

RMOUG Debrief

I’m back home after a very pleasant few days in Denver. As always the RMOUG conference was great fun, the location delightful, and the people were friendly, and the organizers did a great job of looking after the presenters and making things happen. It’s a terrific event – just big enough to have a real buzz, but small enough (I’d guess about 700 – 800 people) that you don’t feel lost in the crowd.

O-1 Again

I don’t often waste time searching the internet for evidence of my brilliance – but sometimes you’ve just got to do it ;) My O-1 visa (aliens of exceptional ability) was up for renewal, and the immigration authority decided to ask me for more evidence of the significance of my work.

In part, I think, this was because they had decided that Cary Millsap and Tom Kyte were colleagues of mine and therefore couldn’t be used as referees for Cost-Based Oracle. This put me into a weird “Catch-22″ situation – everyone I know that’s in a position to act as a referee is someone I know quite well, which means they’re just as much a “colleague” as Tom or Cary. So anyone I could ask to write a reference presumably wouldn’t be acceptable because I’d asked them!

In the end I asked the presidents of a number of international Oracle User Groups and editors of various magazines to make a statement for me – and they were all very helpful, for which I am grateful.

I also found a couple of dozen books and a handful of academic papers that reference my work – and that must have helped too. I also checked some salary surveys for the USA – it looks as if my fee income puts me somewhere between a top-rate gynaecologist and a top-rate surgeon (there’s got to be an analogy lurking there somewhere;).

Anyway, my passport arrived back from the US Embassy early this morning – so I’m ready for my next trip to the USA (California and Minnesota – 16th Aug)

Author, author!

It’s official – I’m writing a new book for Apress.

The working title is: “A look at the internal mechanics of the important bits of Oracle for people who aren’t planning to become rocket scientists but who do want to do a little more than just push buttons in OEM”. (I’m still working on making the title a little more catchy.)

Target publication time – some time in November.

O-1 Visa

Congratulations to Mark Rittman of Ritmann Mead who emailed me last night to tell me that his application for an O1 visa (“aliens of exceptional ability”) to work in the USA had been granted.

There aren’t many of us around in the Oracle field (in a quick google search the I found just one other holder from the UK in a facebook entry for a Hyperion specialist) and Mark is certainly an appropriate addition to the select band.

Visual Tuning

I’ll be doing a joint event with Kyke Hailey of Embarcadero in a few days time. It’s going to be a little unusual – a simultaneous webcast from opposite sides of the Atlantic – mixing my presentation about using a graphic method of tuning or designing efficient SQL with Kyle taking on the role of an active audience asking questions.

For more details and to register for this online event see this link

Update: the link now allows you to register to download the presentation and whitepaper, and to view a recording of the presentation. (See comment 7 below)

Top Ten

Sorry, this isn’t a posting about efficient ways of getting the first 10 rows from a result set – it’s a little note about Oracle Open World. I don’t brag very often, but sometimes it’s hard to resist.

I’ve just received an email about Openworld with the following content:

Testimonial

I’ve been too busy to respond to comments on the blog for the last few days – apologies to all who have contributed, I might had some time to catch up on Thursday when I get home – but it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to point people in the direction of a little article that gave me a warm feeling of a job well done.

Warning – if you don’t want to read a description of how truly amazing I am, don’t follow this link.

Qualifications

After I had described the way that I can do on-site, real-time, training in trouble-shooting for a group of DBAs I got a few email messages from American companies asking if I could do something of that sort for them.

The two commonest questions were: did I set a minimum number of days for a contract before I would fly to America, and was I allowed to work when I got there.

In the UK or Western Europe, of course, it’s easy for me to travel somewhere for just one or two days – I’ve done day trips to France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and several other countries before now when the client has been based close to an airport (or Eurostar train station).