UKOUG Conference ’23 If you missed my day 1, you can view it here. Last night was the UKOUG Evening Celebration ’23, and although it finished at approximately 11:30pm, it took the team and board a couple of hours to pack up, debrief and have the traditional late night takeaway as some of us get too busy with the event, we don’t get a moment to eat properly or at all Due to the late night, I skipped the first session and arrived for second session, however decided I’d used the hour to go over my presentation as I was presenting later in the day. I had then planned to attend Kerry Osborne ..read more

UKOUG Conference ’23 Up bright and early, so I could get to the venue before the delegates. On arrival, I could see the UKOUG team had been busy getting all the branding up ready for the event : The foyer to the main keynote area Ozone was ready for all the delegates to congregate: Come 8am and the registration was open; it didn’t take too long for the area to fill up with lots of delegates, eager and ready to enjoy the conference (I hope): Without our sponsors (reminder in case you don’t know, I am a UKOUG Board Member), we couldn’t put the conference on. It’s with their support we are ab ..read more

Introduction Since 2007 without fail, I have attended the UKOUG Conference in some capacity. Initially only as a delegate, then speaker as well as volunteer, and more recently as board member in the position of the Tech Member Advocate. Also as an Oracle Ace Pro, I have the benefit of being invited to the Oracle ACE Adventures, which are trips before or after conference courtesy of the Oracle ACE programme, to reward Oracle ACEs for their contribution to the Oracle community. So today was about travelling to UKOUG Conference ’23, which this year is at Oracle’s headquarters in the UK at Reading ..read more

If you missed my day 1, you can view it here. I know it’s been 3 weeks since my last blog post , just been extremely busy, but with many people asking me when am I going to finish the series, “the suspense is killing me”, it gave me motivation to just get it completed! Oracle CloudWorld Registration Oracle CloudWorld actually starts on the Tuesday but you can register from Monday, so after spending the morning on bid work, I headed over to The Venetian Convention Centre, where the conference was held. I would use the Las Vegas Monorail daily, and on route I would see The Sphere, it would ligh ..read more

If you missed my day 0, you can view it here. Due to bid work, the day was consumed with that, with the evening attending the Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event at the Commonwealth. Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event The Oracle EMEA Partner Reception Event was for all Oracle Partners across EMEA, which I believe approximately 150-200 people attended. We were hosted by Stefan Diedericks from Oracle. I attended this event last year, however this year was different as Stefan was hosting the “Oracle Europe Middle East and Africa Partner Award“. We were proud to be finalist in the “2023 Oracle ..read more

Introduction Similarly to last year, as an Oracle Ace Pro, I’m very fortunate to be able to get a complimentary ticket to Oracle CloudWorld. Again, with my employer Version 1, covering travel, accommodation and time, which I am very grateful for, I was all set to attend Oracle CloudWorld 2023. This year was slightly different in the sense, that I had a major bid before, during and after, which impacted my ability to blog in a timely manner. So apologies this blog series is a couple weeks late. Better late than never! The Trip Saturday the 16th September and the journey begins! Since last OCW ..read more

Chipset switch to AMD So back in September 2022, I noticed the Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M switched to AMD, where as the Exadata X9M On-premises and Exdata X9M Cloud @ Customer remained on Intel. More details in my blog post here. It come as no surprise the whole lineup has now switched to AMD! Why? Well putting it simply AMD has beaten Intel on the number of cores for sometime now and with the scalability of Exadata it make senses to have the upper limit cores that AMD offers. Oracle is now using the AMD EPYC 9J14 processors. Where has the Persistent Memory gone? Since Exadat ..read more

If you missed my day 6, you can view it here. My Oracle CloudWorld trip is now well and truly over, and all that was left, was to return back home to the UK. I had a 3 leg journey home, Las Vegas to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Paris and finally Paris to Manchester. Despite the 3 legs, it was the shortest route back that day. Return Journey My flight wasn’t till 3pm, so I spent few couple of hours packing, watching Manchester United on TV and having breakfast. On the way to the Harry Reid International Airport, I could still see the strip as the airport is only 3 miles away from the strip. C ..read more

If you missed my day 5, you can view it here. The Oracle CloudWorld conference had finished, but before I went home I had one last thing to do! Attend the Oracle Ace Adventure, whereby Oracle Aces courtesy of the Oracle Ace Program get taken to Grand Canyon Grand Canyon So it was an early start with a 6:25am coach! This was out tour guide/comedy Anthony All eagerly listening to the facts that Antony was telling us This was the first glimpse of the Colorado river First glimpse of the Grand Canyon! Sai, Philippe, and Suraj, looking fresh! The eagle in the Grand Canyon at eagle point. C ..read more

If you missed my day 4, you can view it here. The main bulk of the conference was over, with all the keynotes presented. Today was more Oracle, partners, customers and end users sessions to wrap up the conference. 20x Faster Analytics, 25x Faster Machine Learning with MySQL HeatWave on AWS I’m not so familiar MySQL and I hadn’t heard of HeatWave this CloudWorld, so I thought I’d try something different and went to this session. Mandy Pang, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle explained how MySQL HeatWave is one database for OLTP, OLAP and Machine Learning. She went on to explain the con ..read more