COLLABORATE: Day 3

Even though I had to get up bright and early to get ready to be involved in the first two sessions of the day, it was not a chore because I am back in the conference swing! My feet might hurt, and my brain too a bit, but I forgot how much I missed this conference!

Upgrade SIG - Sandra Vucinic, Panel & Me! - 8:30 AM

I enjoyed how little Sandra had to present, but she could barely get through it because the crowd was really into the subject and kept asking good questions which fired off many discussions from the panel! An important takeaway for me is that there is likely no upgrade path from R11 to R12.3 when it comes out because it will be another major technical upgrade like from R12.1.3 to R12.2.1 was.

Analyzing Oracle Workflow Data for Increased System Performance - Me! - 9:45 AM

This is the old standby, the one that first got me on this journey, so it is good to get back to it AND I was able to address a question that had come up during the week at another Workflow event too like when should I purge (always!).

Workflow Administration 101 - Mary Hammes - 11 AM

Even though this is a 101 class, do not be fooled, it is GOOOOOD! I am taking this home and sharing this with the EBS Administrators-to-be so they can see a real world example of what we used to do in the day with workflow a LOT and what they might be asked to do/investigate. I mean, there is a reason that 40-50 people AT LEAST attended this session!! Awesome response, with about 10-15 people hanging out afterwards to chat with Mary and other OAUG members too. That is what COLLABORATE is all about! Oh and did you ever think to add a vacation rule to the SYSADMIN account to route errors to your team? Me neither, that is really smart!

Virtualized Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) - Containers and VMs for RAC - Marcus Michalewicz (@OracleRACpm) - 12:15 PM

I thought this session was interesting, and to start off the comment was made that "generally, the Oracle DB & Oracle RAC could be supported on a variety of virtual platforms". Ohhhhh really? While Oracle VM is the only certified VM solution for Oracle RAC for x86 environments, did you know that Docker Containers are supported for Oracle RAC for test and development environments? Yeah, I did not either!

Workflow Tips and Tricks - (@anand_jp07) - 1:15 PM

I was really looking forward to this one, but in the end the title should have been "Workflow Tips and Tricks for Developers" since the speaker went over what Workflow was, showed a very outdated technical diagram with OAS 10g as our platform, and just generally was going over how you would change things in Workflow Builder if you had different business cases. Kind of disappointing for me, but I hope the other attendees got something out of it!

Hit Refresh with Oracle GoldenGate Microservices - Bobby Curtis (@dbasolved) - 2:30 PM

This topic was all about Release 12.3 for GoldenGate and first off a major thing in this release is moving from a reliance on command line interface and going to a GUI instead! Whoa!! Really??!!? This release seems to be shaking the whole dynamic up, as it is a significant change in the architecture of GoldenGate for pretty much the first time in 20 years by having different REST APIs replacing key components of your architecture and even introducing AdminClient which is your GUI with security actually modeled and defaulted in the tool.

Virtualizing Oracle 12cR2 RAC Databases with Oracle VM and/or VMWare - Kai Yu (@ky_austin1)- 4:15 PM

While I had some RAC virtualization from Marcus earlier in the day, I was thinking this would be more compare/contrast of the options, and maybe even a discussion of why you would pick one, but in the end it was a very technical discussion of how to implement each option. Not what I was expecting, but a good kind of talking point abstract that I can try to get my head around if we decided to go to either option some day. Very interesting how the Dell EMC Ready Bundle (small version) is 6 VMs that can support up to 10 DB instances and they are building much bigger systems to handle larger ecosystems!!