Michigan OakTable Symposium (Advert)

February 18, 2010 (Updated April 5, 2010)

Looking for an Oracle training session in the rust belt of the United States?

The Michigan members of the OakTable Network are organizing a two day Oracle training event on the Thursday and Friday (September 16th and 17th, 2010) just before Oracle OpenWorld. OakTable Network members from around the world will be providing sessions at the training event in Ann Arbor, Michigan (not far from the University of Michigan) at the Four Points by Sheraton hotel. Presented sessions will appeal to both DBAs and developers. Seating at the event will be limited to 300 people.

Confirmed Speaker List (See the Official Site for the Latest List):

Alex Gorbachev
Alex Gorbachev is a respected figure in the Oracle world, and a sought-after leader and speaker at Oracle conferences around the globe. He has been recognized as an Oracle ACE Director for his contributions to the community and unmatched set of skills. He is the founder of the Battle Against Any Guess movement promoting scientific troubleshooting techniques. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at The Pythian Group. Alex has worked for The Pythian Group in several roles. He began by leading a team of database experts in Ottawa. He then moved to Australia to build the company’s presence in the East Asia Pacific region. Now he is back in Ottawa as The Pythian Group’s Chief Technology Officer. In all his work, Alex continues to work towards bridging the gap between business and technology. The search for the perfect fit between technology, engineering talents, and business process is what keeps him up at night. Alex co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

Andy Zitelli
Andrew Zitelli has thirty years of experience as a software developer, data architect and performance analyst. He has served as a consultant to the aerospace, semiconductor, steel, and pharmaceutical industries. Andrew is proficient working with a broad range of operating systems and languages and has 25 years experience working with ten different relational database products, including 17 years working with Oracle. He holds MS and BA degrees in Computer Science. During the past 30 years, Andrew has taught college-level courses and made presentations at technical conferences and other venues on a wide range of topics. He made presentations at the Hotsos Symposiums in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Cary Millsap
Cary Millsap is the founder and president of Method R Corporation. He is widely known in the Oracle community as a speaker, educator, consultant and writer. He is the author (with Jeff Holt) of Optimizing Oracle Performance (O’Reilly 2003). Cary is also co-author of Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table. Cary is one of the former founding partners of Hotsos and worked at Oracle for ten years. In the early 1990s, Cary created Oracle’s OFA Standard, which became the default configuration standard for Oracle software installations worldwide. Cary is also a woodworker who builds and repairs furniture in his own shop.

Charles Hooper
Charles Hooper is the IT Manager and an Oracle database administrator at K&M Machine-Fabricating, Inc., where he has been employed since 2000. His role in the company extends well beyond Oracle database administration responsibilities, providing opportunities for database performance tuning, network administration, programming, hardware/software troubleshooting, mentoring fellow IT staff, and end-user training for the Infor Visual Enterprise ERP system as well as other custom developed applications. Charles is well known among the user community of Infor Visual Enterprise due to his years of participation in various user forums answering technical questions, providing the only Oracle presentation at Infor’s 2008 user’s conference, and providing presentations to regional user groups. Prior to joining K&M, he was a computer/technology instructor and Novell Netware administrator. Charles co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

Dan Fink
Daniel Fink is a senior Oracle database engineer and consultant, specializing in Oracle optimization, troubleshooting, internals, and data recovery. He started as a DBA on Oracle 7.0.16 running Parallel Server on OpenVMS and has experience on major Unix platforms and releases up to 10g. He maintains a library of his research at www.optimaldba.com.

Doug Burns
Doug Burns is an independent contractor who has 20 years of experience working with Oracle in a range of industries and applications. As well as presenting at a number of conferences, he has developed, taught, and edited performance-related courses for both Oracle UK and Learning Tree International.

Jeff Needham
Jeff Needham currently works for Red Hat Software and is responsible for Oracle RDBMS, and GFS/RAC certifications. This includes tending the relationship between RHEL Engineering, Oracle Linux Engineering and Server Technologies. Having founded Scale Abilities with James Morle in 1989, Jeff pioneered high performance NFS for Oracle at Yahoo! using Netapp and AMD technologies. Jeff worked on performance and scalability for Oracle 7 and Oracle 8 during his tenure in the Redwood Shores kernel group. When not at work, he attempts fatherhood, collects Opteron servers and tries to maintain a vintage electronic music studio.

Jeremiah Wilton
Jeremiah Wilton has worked with Oracle technology since 1994. His main claim to fame is having been Amazon.com’s first database administrator, back in the pre-IPO days. For seven years, he helped Amazon.com survive exponential scaling, and a wide variety of nearly-catastrophic technology failures. Jeremiah owned and ran ORA-600 Consulting for a number of years, until it was acquired by Blue Gecko, Inc., a global provider of remote administration for Oracle, MySQL, and E-Business Suite. Jeremiah also teaches the Oracle certificate program for the University of Washington. Jeremiah is an Oracle Certified Master, and a frequent presenter at industry conferences and user groups. His publications and whitepapers can be found at www.bluegecko.net. Jeremiah co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

Jonathan Lewis
Jonathan Lewis is a well-known figure in the Oracle world with more than 21 years experience of using the database (and several years on other products). He has published two books, contributed to three others, runs a couple of websites and contributes fairly regularly to newsgroups, forums, User Group magazines, and speaking events around the world. Jonathan has been self-employed for most of his time in the IT industry. He specialises in short-term assignments, typically of a design, review, or trouble-shooting  nature.

Joze Senegacnik
Jože Senegačnik has more than 20 years of experience in working with Oracle products. He began in 1988 with Oracle Database version 4 while working for the City of Ljubljana, where he had charge over the city’s municipal and geographic information systems. From 1993 to 2003, he worked in developing GIS systems for the Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia, and in the development of applications for other governmental institutions, all based on the Oracle database. More recently, he has specialized in performance optimization, having developed his own toolset for monitoring performance and analyzing trace files. Jože is an internationally recognized speaker. He is a regular speaker at user-group conferences, especially those put on by the Slovenian Oracle Users Group (SIOUG), the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), and the United Kingdom Oracle Users Group (UKOUG). He also speaks routinely at the Hotsos Symposium and Oracle Open World. In addition to sharing his knowledge through conference talks, Jože conducts technical seminars organized either by Oracle University or himself. He was awarded Oracle ACE membership for his long record of positive contributions to the Oracle community. Jože co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

Mogens Nørgaard
Mogens Nørgaard is technical director at Miracle A/S (http:www.miracleas.dk), a database knowledge center and consulting/training company based in Denmark, and is the cofounder and “father figure” of the OakTable Network. He is a renowned speaker at Oracle conferences all over the world and organizes some highly respected events through Miracle A/S, including the annual MasterClass (2001: Cary Millsap, 2002: Jonathan Lewis, 2003: Steve Adams, 2004: Tom Kyte) and the Miracle Database Forum, which is a 3-day conference for database people. He is also the cofounder of the Danish Oracle User Group (OUGKD) and was voted “Educator of the Year” in Oracle Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Awards, 2003.

Randolf Geist
Randolf Geist has been working with Oracle software for 15 years. Since 2000 he has operated as a freelance database consultant focusing primarily on performance related issues, and in particular helping people to understand and unleash the power of the Oracle cost based optimizer (CBO). He is writing on his blog about CBO-related issues and is also regularly contributing to the official OTN forums. Randolf is a member of the Oracle ACE program and is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA for Oracle Versions 8i, 9i, and 10g. He also maintains SQLTools++, an open-source Oracle GUI for Windows. Randolf co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

Riyaj Shamsudeen
Riyaj Shamsudeen has 17+ years of experience in Oracle and 16+ years as an Oracle DBA/Oracle Applications DBA. He is the principal DBA for OraInternals, a consulting company resolving many advanced performance, recovery, RAC, and EBS11i issues. Riyaj specializes in RAC and performance issues and has authored many articles, mostly about performance, database internals, optimizer internals, etc. He is a frequent presenter in major conferences such as Hotsos Symposia, UKOUG, RMOUG etc. co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices”.

Robyn Sands
Robyn Anderson Sands is a software engineer for Cisco Systems. In a previous incarnation, she worked in Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Development, and Quality Engineering at Lockheed Martin, supporting the P-7, F-22, and C-130J programs. Robyn has been working with databases and Oracle software since around 1996. She began her work with Oracle by developing tools for scheduling, composite fabrication capacity modeling, and engineering work flow, and progressing to the implementation and administration of data warehouse, PeopleSoft, and SAP systems. Current projects include “architecting” and managing the development of embedded database systems for Cisco customers, and searching for new ways to design and develop database systems with consistent performance and minimal maintenance requirements. She has been a speaker at UKOUG, Miracle conferences, Oracle Open World, and the Hotsos Symposium.  Robyn co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

Tanel Poder
Tanel Põder is an experienced consultant with deep expertise in Oracle database internals, advanced performance tuning and end-to-end troubleshooting. He specializes in solving complex problems spanning multiple infrastructure layers such as UNIX, Oracle, application servers and storage. He is one of the first Oracle Certified Masters in the world, passing the OCM DBA exam in 2002; and is a frequent speaker at major Oracle conferences worldwide.

Tim Gorman 
Tim Gorman began his IT career in 1984 as a C programmer on UNIX and VMS systems, working on medical and financial systems as an application developer, systems programmer, and systems administrator. He joined Oracle Corporation in 1990 as a consultant, then became an independent consultant in 1998, and has worked for SageLogix since 2000. Gorman is the co-author of Essential Oracle8i Data Warehousing and Oracle8 Data Warehousing. He specializes in performance tuning applications, databases, and systems, as well as data warehouse design and implementation, backup and recovery, architecture and infrastructure, and database administration. Gorman still considers himself a pretty good coder, although the market for C programs has dried up somewhat lately. Tim co-authored the book “Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table”.

———-

Awaiting Confirmation (Subject to Change):

Christian Antognini
Since 1995, Christian Antognini has focused on understanding how the Oracle database engine works. His main interests include logical and physical database design, the integration of databases with Java applications, the query optimizer and basically everything else related to application performance management and optimization. He is currently working as a principal consultant and trainer at Trivadis AG (http://www.trivadis.com) in Zürich, Switzerland. If Christian is not helping one of his customers get the most out of Oracle, he is somewhere lecturing on application performance management or new Oracle database features for developers. In addition to classes and seminars organized by Trivadis, he regularly presents at conferences and user group meetings. He is a proud member of the Trivadis Performance Team and of the OakTable Network. Christian is the author of the book Troubleshooting Oracle Performance (Apress, 2008).

Eric Grancher
Eric Grancher has been working at CERN since 1996 in the Information Technology Division. He has been working on different aspects of databases and application server products: database design consulting, cluster database administration and usage with commodity hardware, application server consulting, database and application server monitoring. He is currently responsible for a team that focuses on database oriented application deployment. He holds an engineer diploma from the French telecommunication engineer school “ENST – Telecom Paris” and a Magistre (Master) of Parallel Computing from “Ecole Normale Suprieure de Lyon”.

James Morle
With 20 years’ experience in professional computing, James Morle has been personally responsible for the architecture and implementation of some of the world’s largest and most complex business systems, including a 3-node Oracle Parallel Server configuration that services 3000 online users. James is a well-respected member of the Oracle community and is the author of the critically acclaimed book Scaling Oracle8i. He is the cofounder of Scale Abilities (http://www.scaleabilities.com), a specialist consulting and training company focusing on aspects of system engineering related to building very large and complex computer systems.  Authored the book “Scaling Oracle8i: Building Highly Scalable OLTP System Architectures”, co-authored the book “Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table”

Marco Gralike
Marco Gralike, working for AMIS Services BV as a Principal Oracle Database Consultant in the Netherlands, has experience as a DBA since 1994 (Oracle 6). Marco is also eager and skillful in other fields, like Operating System Administration and Application Servers, mainly in finding working, performing solutions. Marco has been specializing in Oracle XMLDB, since 2003, focusing on his old love, database administration and performance. He is an Oracle XMLDB enthusiast. He is also a dedicated contributor of the Oracle User Group community, helping people with their steep XMLDB learning curve. To this purpose, Marco also devoted his personal blog site to XMLDB and other Oracle issues. Marco has presented several times in Holland, UKOUG (2007, 2008) and Oracle Open World (2008, 2009). He has been awarded the Oracle ACE title for his work in the Oracle XMLDB area (2007).

———-

The MOTS Executive Committee:

Carol Dacko – OakTable member
Mark Bobak – Oak Table member
Mark Powell – OakTable member
Charles Hooper – OakTable member
Ric Van Dyke – Hotsos Friend
Myke Ratcliff – Esteemed Friend

The Michigan OakTable Symposium (MOTS) is not intended as a money making event. As such, the cost for attending the event has been set as low as possible to essentially “break-even”. The primary mission of the symposium is to provide attendees with logical, structured processes that lead to reproducible success, rather than treating the Oracle Database as a magical, unpredictable, black-box that yields unexpected behavior.

Early registration at a rate of $450 per person will end April 30, 2010. Registration between May 1 and July 31 is $600 per person, and increases to $750 per person after July 31. These prices do not include room hotel costs (roughly $100 per night), but will include a high quality buffet lunch. You may register for the event at the site:

Watch for future updates, agenda, registration details, and more information on the official MOTS site: http://michigan.oaktable.net.

Preliminary Schedule for Thursday, 16 September 2010 and Friday, 17 September 2010: 

Michigan OakTable Schedule

Abstracts for each of the sessions are located on the official Michigan OakTable site.