UKOUG Agenda
As in previous years the UKOUG allows you to create a personalized agenda for the upcoming conference. To give you a flavour for some of the excellent presentations and to encourage you to register I’ve reproduced mine below, as with previous years this is a ideal wishlist, I’ll probably “die” halfway through various days and so take a break, or get caught up in the many networking and informal learning opportunities this conference gives.
Sunday
12:15 – 13:15 Tales From The OakTable – Mogens Nørgaard
Mogens is always entertaining and thought provoking, a great way to start the Oak Table Sunday.
13:25 – 14:10 Faster, Leaner, More Efficient databases – Index Organised Tables - Martin Widlake
If you’ve been following Martin’s excellent IOT blog series (start here if not) you’ll know what I’m expecting.
14:35 – 15:20 Optimizer Statistics – a fresh approach - Connor McDonald
Connor is always worth listening to, for both content and style (not to mention slide count).
15:30 – 16:15 Statistics Gathering and Histograms – DOs and DON’Ts - Wolfgang Breitling
Wolfgang has huge experience specifically in this area and a great clear style
16:40 – 17:30 Performance & High Availability Panel Session
Well the word beer is mentioned 
, I believe there will also be various giveaways including books that I and other Oakies have contributed to or written.
Monday
10:00 – 10:45 SQL Tuning - Kyle Hailey
I’ve never yet seen Kyle present, but his written material and design flair are both excellent, to this day he remains the only Oakie to be nominated and win for a fashion photography award!
11:05 – 12:05 Partitioning 101 - Connor McDonald
It’s that aussie again.
12:15 – 13:15 Going deeper into Real Application Testing – Learn how to make smoother migrations to 11g - Mariusz Piorkowski
RAT is a product with huge promise, hopefully Mariusz will let us know if the promise is fulfilled.
14:30 – 15:15 Automatic Diagnostic Repository – a look at how and when it can be used - John Hallas
John blogs here and we share a number of interests, including performance management and Grid Control. Another first for me.
15:25 – 16:10 MySQL: the least an Oracle DBA needs to know - Patrick Hurley
Criminally Patrick doesn’t appear to have a blog so pester him to get one via twitter at @phurley.
16:35 – 17:35 Database I/O Performance: Measuring and Planning - Alex Gorbachev
Alex is the founder of Battle Against Any Guess, oh and CTO at Pythian, always well worth hearing.
17:45 – 18:30 Performance and Stability with Oracle 11g SQL Plan Management - Doug Burns
Yep, another Oakie and another favourite subject for me. Maybe the Cuddly Toys will yet see him present.
18:45 – 19:45 Learning about Life through Business and Software - Cary Millsap
A keynote I’ll actually attend – that’s because Cary speaks well, has clear insights to share and is an all-round nice guy.
Tuesday
09:00 – 18:35 RAC Attack workshop - Jeremy Schneider
Clearly I won’t be here all day, but I do intend to be there for at least some of the time.
10:10 – 10:55 First Things First: Getting the basics right - Niall Litchfield
This is a presentation I gave (and got positive online reviews!) a while back covering the things you really really shouldn’t get wrong.
11:15 – 12:15 Troubleshooting RAC - Julian Dyke
I’ve know Julian for a very long time now, but it’s been nearly 4 years since I last heard him talk about RAC. Time for an update methinks.
12:25 – 13:25 Instrumentation: Why You Should Care - Cary Millsap
Yep, Cary again.
14:40 – 15:25 ASH Outliers: Detecting Unusual Events in Active Session History - John Beresniewicz
JB always speaks well, played a core role in the engineering effort for the EM performance pages and improvements introduced in 10g and the subject is great.
15:35 – 16:20 Oracle on the Amazon Cloud – What should you consider - Stephen Priestnall
Over the next decade (maybe even 5 years) many databases will likely end up somewhere “in the cloud”, this is a must attend for me as a result.
16:40 – 17:40 My Case for Agile Methods - Cary Millsap
I’m not a fan of Agile – Cary is.
17:50 – 18:35 Challenges and Chances of the 11g Query Optimizer - Christian Antognini
Again another presentation on a personal hot spot by the author of the excellent Troubleshooting Oracle Performance
Wednesday
09:00 – 10:00 Redo - Jonathan Lewis
No UKOUG conference is complete without a Jonathan Lewis session, and redo is an often misunderstood area of the database.
10:10 – 10:55 Using Oracle GoldenGate to Minimize Database Upgrade Risk - Marc Fielding
Another excellent writer, who blogs here, whom I have yet to meet or see.
11:20 – 12:20 Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache Overview -Harald van Breederode
The advent of affordable reliable, enterprise ready SSD storage, for example FusionIO cards or SSD Arrays likeViolin, is probably the biggest game changer for I/O intensive workloads such as database operations for years. I’ll be interested particularly on whether and how the smart flash cache works compared to, say, locating datafiles directly on reliable low-latency flash storage.
12:30 – 13:30 Oracle RAC One-Node: What, Why, & How - Asif Momen
I’ve followed Asif through the OTN forums for some while now, so I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say on this new Oracle feature.
14:25 – 15:10 Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Database Tuning for Packaged Applications - Mike Swing
This and the following presentation may not make the cut depending on the state of my mind regarding the final presentation of the day. Here I’m mostly interested in the message.
15:20 – 16:05 Simulating Workloads with RAT and Simora - James Morle
Those of you who can stay till my final session will realize that good workload simulation is a big part of getting performance design right.
16:15 – 17:00 What shape is your data? - Niall Litchfield
That nice Dawn R blog|twitter says she’ll be there. If you come perhaps they’ll be 2 people in the audience.