Oracle Open World 2009 is just few weeks away and I firmed up my presentation schedule now. I will present three “normal” presentations and couple unconference sessions. I’m arriving in San Francisco few days before the conference (7th of October) get to the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so I’ll spend the first few day in Redwood Shores and then off to Moscone Center.

Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

My first presentation starts on Sunday as part of the Oracle User Groups Forum. It’s one and a half hour long session and as far as I know it’s the only long slot available on Sunday. The penalty is to start at 8:30am so I’ll see you all fresh that morning! :) I have presented on Sunday last year (also a long session with demos) and it was great success — it was standing room only and I know few people could get in (that’s why I’m repeating the session this year as part of unconference — see below). If you want to make sure to have a spot — use Schedule Builder and register for the session. Last time, I’ve done this presentation as the master class at the UKOUG Conference 2008 and it was very successful session. I will most likely pre-record the demos to make sure we fit in the allocated time — there is lots of content.

The next presentation is on Monday and I’m very much looking forward to that one. While the presentation is about building monitoring plug-ins for Grid Control, the example is based on the MySQL plug-in, which I wrote and that Pythian published as free software and Oracle validated the plug-in working closely with us. I had proposed this session for the last year but I guess I’ve made a mistake of adding the MySQL in the title. :) This year I removed MySQL from the title and the presentation passed through the Oracle Mix voting being in the top 10.

The last of my “normal” conference sessions in on Tuesday at 11:30 — just in time before the lunch break. This is a rather unusual area for me as the talk is about E-Business Suite and how to design EBS environment for high availability. While I’m not an Apps DBA, I’ve been digging into that area quite a bit recently and I’ve done this talk here in Sydney during AUSOUG InSync 09 conference.

Finally, I’m doing couple unconference sessions. Many people asked for a repeat of my last year’s presentation “Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware” which was a huge success so I decided to put that session into unconference schedule. I have reserved a double slot as there is a live demo and it takes some time. In addition, there is always quite a bit of follow up during this presentation so I don’t mind to get side-tracked and dig into live environment that I will have setup for this demo. In addition, we should check out what’s new in 11g Release 2 Clusterware (re-branded as Grid Infrastructure).

The last unconference session is on Wednesday and I decided to make it less of a presentation but more like a roundtable. I hope that my role would be as just a moderator as I would be looking forward to get more participation from the attendees and share methods and tools that various companies adopted to make their teams highly available. I’m also excited to have Paul Vallee by my side as he has lots of insights on this topic. The idea behind this session is that very little is told about organizing a proper round the clock support team. I’ve seen lots of situations when companies deploy expensive HA solutions without thinking about organizing seamless support from their engineers so it’s “normal” for one or two engineers to be “chained to the desk” and on the hook 24×7 no weekends and vacations. I would be more than happy to bring forward and discuss how we handle it at Pythian but I would like to see more contributions from the attendees and not make it look like a Pythian marketing plug. :) It’s not about DBA support only — it’s just that “HA DBA” sounds really cool!

And don’t forget about Bloggers Meetup this year. I’m organizing it with the help of OTN and it should be good fun this year.