Today I received an automated request to provide feedback on the UKOUG UNIX SIG Meeting I attended last week. This reminded me that I meant to blog about it but forgot. So let’s rewind a week for a quick summary.
First up was David Phizacklea from Jumbo Contracting. The presentation was about Linux on Intel. To be honest I don’t remember too much about Linux but I do remember several enjoyable war stories and some good common sense advice on life in a DBA team. A good start.
Next up was Pete Finnigan and “The right way to secure Oracle” parts 1 & 2. To get more than 90 minutes of information from someone who knows their trade so well was a real treat. I particularly liked a comment that the “hackers” we are most at threat from are not traditional hackers but normal employees trying to do their job as well as they can, they don’t necessarily realise logging into the production database from Excel is the wrong thing to do.
Then we had a presentation on the IBM POWER7 processor from Christopher Hales of IBM. This was well delivered and had just enough pretty pictures to keep me interested. And how they get more than a billion “things” on a single chip I can not begin to imagine. The mind boggles.
Last but not least we had Jonathan Lewis talking about bind variables, NULLs and some coding advice and tricks. This was well presented and good information. The best bit was at the end when Jonathan fielded questions from the audience. A chance for him to show off his deep and varied knowledge of the database engine and a chance for us to get even more from the already well executed event.
Well done UKOUG.
And now I must go rethink that statistics gathering strategy!
ORAganism 