Back from UKOUG 2007

UKOUG is really a very well organized conference. A conference I look forward to attend every year, either as speaker or as an attendee. This years conference was no different as usual great. Unbelievable set of presenters on great topics. It was interesting to see some excellent RAC related topics this year. I did give a presentation on “Exploiting Parellel Queries in a RAC Environment” just focusing on RAC related areas. Apart from this I also had the opportunity to chair a RAC roundtable on the final day.

Julian Dykes presentation was different compared to last year. Those who attended last years UKOUG presentation, Julian had done a presentation where he requested some attendees (including myself) to act as Oracle instances to demonstrate Cache Fusion. Here are some photographs from this session last year (courtesy Connor McDonald) Picture 1 and picture 2. This year his presentation focused on Interconnects. Was excellent as usual. Here is another view from Alex’s blog on this presentation..

There were 4-5 papers from CERN on RAC topics, two of the ones I had attended are 1) Real Life experiences of RAC Scalability with a 6 Node Cluster, 2) Installing and Managing Hundreds of RAC Servers. Its interesting to see more and more companies undertaking challenging projects using Oracle RAC.

Another outstanding presentation was on Oracle Clusterware By Bernhard de Cock Buning. He explained the clusterware details with such great detail. Showing all the components of the clusterware and then drilling down into each component at a greater detail. The new component piece that I learnt from this presentation was the oclsomon, which was introduced in Oracle 10.2.0.2 and I have not covered this in my Oracle 10g RAC Grid Services and Clustering book. Great job Bernhard..

I will discuss about oclsmon later on this blog.

I hope these presenters can do a webcast on these topics for the Oracle RAC-SIG.