MOTS Day 2

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ September 20, 2010

I’m now in San Francisco, getting started with OpenWorld. But before I start blogging OpenWorld, I guess I should post a few highlights of the second day of MOTS (last Friday), since I wrote a bit about the first day.

First of all, the whole event was really incredible. Carol Dacko did an amazing job putting it together! The sessions, the food, the chances to have drinks with Oakies (and talk about things like European sports and Chicago politics), and of course the U of M football game tailgate party — everything was great!

Oracle vs SQL Server Deathmatch

Here are just a few session from the second day that I remember:

Jeremiah Wilton had a session about Oracle vs SQL Server Deathmatch. He did several awesome things, like running both databases on a single server with the same load generator on both to make them compete for resources. The goal was to determine who was stronger. He also ripped out a data block from each and stuffed it into the other’s datafile. :)
Robin Sands had a session about using industrial engineering principles for managing large database environments; it was great to get some insight into what problems are encountered and what things are important in big environments.
Tanel Poder continues to think of incredibly clever tricks. Before starting his in-depth session about logging, he opened SQLPlus and typed “select * from top”. What happened next was an Oracle database version of unix “top” – inside sqlplus, complete with screen refreshes!! Very cool.

Tanel Poder - top in SQLPlus

On Friday night, Charles Schultz and I were going to try making a RAC cluster in EC2 (after hearing Jeremiah Wilton talk about it a bit)… but unfortunately Amazon didn’t think that I was worthy to use cloud computing. I tried to sign up for EC2 but it didn’t work. On Saturday morning I finally received an email saying my account was activated… but by that time I was already leaving for Chicago! (Don’t know why it took them 6 hours to do that!) Maybe sometime over the next few weeks I’ll try again.

And as I mentioned before, we wrapped the whole weekend up with a big tailgate party in Ann Arbor, two blocks from the football stadium. I personally wasn’t able to stay for the football game because I had to drive back to Chicago and catch a flight to San Francisco. But I stopped in for the pre-game party – and it was great! Perfect way to wind down after two slightly exhausting days of learning.