Hotsos 2010 – Presenters, Presentations, Presenting

I never find it very easy to try to capture the atmosphere during a conference, the presenting part, the presentations or the discussions, for example, you could have with the presenters. Hotsos is such a cool and unique event were you have the opportunity, to listen but also to interact. The amount of people that attend isn’t that big, only a few hundreds, but they share all the same passion, the passion to improve on performance, mostly Oracle related. It has only two tracks and its not uncommon that people present and than go afterwards to a presentation to listen in what the other presenter has to say.

Due to the fact that it is manageable in terms of choice, located on a convenient location and well organized, you have the opportunity to pick just the thing you like and most of the time not miss out on “the other” presentation you would have liked to see. Besides that people stay in (overnight in the Hotel), so discussions about the technology, the method or an example during a presentation will be discussed in far more detail than you normally would do, from presenter to presenter or from presenter to the guy that attended and vice versa. The fact that all have the passion for performance or that they realize that performance is a beast with various angles to approach, bounds, and every point, every question is one to be heard and/or discussed. On equal terms. If you have seen my video impressions of Hotsos in 2009, you get a bit of what I am trying to say.

Anyway, not being a native speaker and with my new “flip” at hand (Ultra HD), I just show you how much fun and interesting stuff is going on, probably this will do more right to those presentations than me trying to explain what all those new ideas which were that popped into my head during this years Hotsos Symposium…although…sometimes technology helps and sometimes it just doesn’t…or is it a VMware thing Doug…?

My agenda is not that much different then the one from Doug. The moment it is mentioning RAC related stuff, then I probably would have been attending the other guy.

The Monday started great with a small introduction of Tom Kyte’s generally unknown other qualities…

…Enjoy…

Ohhh…and I wasn’t the one, by the way, that was giggling… On a more serious note, the following clip will show how Tom Kyte handles date time conversions, if remembering birth dates.

Alas I didn’t manage to film a more serious piece of his keynote, so sorry. The “flip” thing was a new attempt to capture the atmosphere and I wasn’t sure how it would workout…and as you noticed, using the zoom function on the “Ultra HD” flip, is not a good idea…

The conceptual presentation of Alex Gorbatchev was cool and well thought out. To give you an impression I have two clips that are a good representation of the humor and the topics that were discussed during his “Battle Against Any Guess” presentation. The first part is a good example why it is sometimes handy to be lazy…

In his more serious section of his presentation, Alex discusses the use of checklists…

As always, Cary Millsap’s presentation was very useful and I really love his way of presenting (it looks easy – but it isn’t – very clearly discussing the topic). In this case the presentation topic was “Lessons Learned” about testing and the boundaries you should respect, if your test set-up should be useful. Apparently he tested his idea’s, once again, this time using his daughter as a test subject addressing the issue: “Can she lift 15 pounds…?”

Besides Sales guys being addressed, Cary sums it up on how cool it is to test stuff until it breaks…

Doug Burns had a very unlucky day. Sometimes the demo setup was working, sometimes it didn’t. Having a presentation that only consisted out of demo’s, and only a few slides for starters at hand, he had to improvise. In the end, as you can see here on his blog site, he had only time for 30 minutes doing his demo’s. Seen the presentation already during Oracle Open World in 2009 during a “Unconference” session, I can only say: wow, what did those people miss out… but alas, that’s the risk of doing demo’s. Sometimes it goes wrong…

So here how Doug tries to save the presentation via going in on more detail on Swingbench and tips and advice while using Oracle Enterprise Manager…or with other words: What you can do with a bit of Scottish humor to save the day…

…and how we finally got to the part were I guy saved Doug’s presentation (regarding the demo’s) using a wireless gadget, that probably fixed the issue with the routing table that messed it all up. Oh and a tip to all those life savers out there: “Never type in your secret password while it is being displayed on the big screen…” (we now you bluffed regarding changing it…). 😉

The last clip is from Kevin Closson’s presentation while he explains a bit about “Why do we still think a CPU is a CPU…”.

Apparently he likes cuddly toys as well…

Ohhh, did I tell that I did well regarding my presentation? I did. How I know? Due to the fact that I encountered most of my audience afterwards (4) during the Disco Night event on Tuesday and they all liked it (total of 7!). They bought me beer even. Cool. Should do it more often, this presenting thing. The other 200+ people who went to Tanel Poder’s presentation, which is their bad luck. If they only knew what they were missing out on. I mean even Doug was positive in his Scottish way trying to tell me. So in all, not bad for a newbie during Hotsos. At that time slot all 200+ plus 7 people had a good show for their money; if only I could have attended Tanel’s… Hmmm.

😉

PS. Before I forget. I would like to thank Toon Koppelaars for reviewing my presentation and giving me some useful advice.