COLLABORATE19: Day 1

8:00 AM–9:00 AM - Keynote: Be The Leader You Were Meant to be, Monday to Monday® - @StaceyHankeInc

This was an interesting session as the message was one of being brief, not saying too much (think, leaving out um and uh type words), and giving yourself time to think about what you will be saying next. Also, "only speak when you see eyes" and "common sense does not mean common practice" are some very sound pieces of advice we could all use.

9:15 AM–10:15 AM - Oracle Database infrastructure as code with Ansible - @ilmarkerm

The missing piece to this presentation was an introduction to Ansible, which Ilmar said could be found anywhere on the Internet and that is a fair point, but I felt that would have helped us to understand the session a bit more. There were a lot of use cases provided, setting up the OS (easy), automating routine DBA tasks (medium), and DB config and changes deployed as version controlled code (advanced). There are a few projects worth checking out here http://github.com/oravirt/ansible-oracle-modules and http://github.com/ilmarkerm/ansible-oracle-home-mgmt which can help you to do some automation around Oracle DBs and ORACLE_HOME directories.

10:30 AM–11:30 AM - Upgrade SIG Meeting - Various Panel Members

The SIG meeting was kind of short on content, on purpose, so that the majority of the hour was spent on answering questions from the audience and most of those questions were about how to upgrade to 12.2, and not at all about going to the Cloud. Some of the content shared: there will not be a 12.3 EBS release, only Continuous Innovation of EBS 12.2, and future releases will separate technology stack from applications code updates.

12:00 PM–12:30 PM - Provisioning Oracle test environments made simple using Vagrant - @simonpane

This is very similar to the blog post from Blaine I shared yesterday, showing us how to use vagrant to start up an instance and then apply 2 levels of customizations: the VM (done via Vagrantfile), and the build (done via install.sh) but was pretty neat to see it done live after a short presentation about what was going to be happening during the demo.

12:30 PM–1:30 PM - OAUG Geo/SIG Coffee Talk Roundtable Discussion - @OATUG1

This was an internal meeting for Geo and SIG leadership, but the gist of it is that OATUG is looking to be Trustworthy, Relevant, Dynamic, and Relatable, and the name change was because 40% of the sessions at this conference are technology focused and the group has been delivering technical content for years. Some very good points brought up here, and hopefully more discussions will be happening as a result of this change as it is not a bad change, but one we need to get used to.

Time for lunch! Still on Arizona time, and the keynote being presented sounds a LOT like something I saw last year, so I decided a better use of time was focusing on the noon session, and then eating later, so time for a short walk outside for some food.

3:15 PM–5:30 PM - Hands on Lab: Container Native Microservices Development - @richardintx & Thomas Palzkill

If you have not noticed this year, I am a fan of Hands on Labs, and I am also looking to get a lot of new technology under my belt, so I wanted to go to this one and was surprised when there were only 10 of us in the room as I thought it would be standing room only! After signing up for a free Oracle Cloud account as a COLLAB19 attendee, we got down to business following one of the labs at https://go.oracle.com/hol to dig in and start up a Kubernetes instance in the Cloud, and connect to it locally!! I probably need another hour or two to get through the rest of the lab, and then there are more labs available (including one I will be going to tomorrow) which I can use my free Cloud account for until I run out of credit or they turn it off next month, whichever comes first. :} Oh, and you can get $300 of free credits too https://cloud.oracle.com/tryit which I am sure you have heard about by now, but if not, I wanted to make sure you had as this seems like a great way to get your hands dirty a bit with this technology.