Off to Denver. Collaborate'13 Preview

Final preparations before heading off to Denver: Collaborate'13 is awaiting! Presentations - checked, tickets/hotel reservations - checked, session schedule - che-e-e-e-e-e-e....

If you go to a good conference, some schedule conflicts are normal - there are too many good speakers and there is always not enough time slots to go everywhere. But this year for me was indeed a pretty tough time to balance all of my wishes, because in addition to my regular "split personality" (DBA/Development), I've got a new hobby ("Big Data") and more explicit C-level role (I've got invited to attend IOUG Strategic Leadership Program). So, I had even more choices to pick from.

As promised earlier, here is my plan (of course, with some variations):

1. Sunday

• #517 Gary Gordhamer: "Hacking, Cracking, Attacking" - to be able to protect my DB, I'd better know it vulnerabilities! Should be definitely useful!

2. Monday

•  #872 Annette Baldenegro "Introduction to Apache Hadoop" - I am still trying to figure out how Hadoop solutions could be integrated with RDBMS.
• #464 George Trujillo "Demystifying MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers" - new DB environments like new languages, more you know - more you understand.
  ---or  ---
• #166 Mike Abbey "Pluggable Databases - An Intro" - considering that in the development environment the most time is always spent on setting up extra configurations, it will be interesting to see what Oracle is planning to do in 12c. And listening to Mike is fun anyways, irrelevant of the topic  ;-)
• #162 Michael Corey "Trends in Database Administration" - another great speaker. And the topic is also great - currently DBAs are much more involved in the overall business cycle than it was even couple of years ago.
  ---  or ---
• #13104 William Hardie, IOUG Oracle Rep "What's next to Oracle database" - one of the key presentations from Oracle employees. Not sure how to select
• #402 my own talk :-) Top 5 Issues that cannot be resolved by DBAs

3. Tuesday

• #737 Tom Deutsch "How to get started with your first BigData project" - really good question, isn't it?
• #118 Michael Conklin "Database Shrinking - Advanced" - yes, we can buy more storage space, but saving some money would not be a bad idea too
•  #386 Carl Dudley "Oracle Join Techniques" - there is something stylish in the good presentation spiced with good British humor. 

4. Wednesday

• #103360 Sambasivam Sampathnathan "Why mask Big Data" - security problems+Big data = big security problems? Let's see what other people are doing here.
• #403 Maxym Kharchenko "SQL Pagination Patterns" - classical problem of getting TopN has more and more solutions with newer Oracle releases. Will be interesting to see a specialized talk on this
• #399 my second talk "Data Tracking: On the hunt for information about your database"
• #225 David Chen "Demystify Global Temporary Tables" - one of my favorite features for years (if properly used). Looking forward to see what else can I learn about it
• #935 Dipti Brokar "Why every NoSQL Deployment should be paired with Hadoop" - hm-m-m-m-m, should it? I am not 100% sure, but it will be worthwhile to listen to arguments.

5. Thursday

• #119 Bjoern Rost "The ins and outs of Oracle Total Recall" - I always wanted to learn a bit more about this feature. Good opportunity just before my flight home.

My next promise - I will try to do full-scale daily reporting (but, sorry, only post-factum! No real-time journalism for now :-). See you in Denver!