Yesterday I had the pleasure of a day trip to London to attend the Mastering Oracle Trace Data session with Cary Millsap. The day got off to a great start as I arrived at the railway station in Leeds very early to find my train waiting for me at the platform. Excellent! I got on and 20 minutes before departure time, we headed on out of Leeds for London. WTF? The announcement that this was the 06:40 to London Kings Cross and not the 07:00 cleared things up a little.
Guess what? My ticket was only valid on the 07:00. :-( However, I sought out the guard and she checked my ticket, her timetable and said that “as it’s only a difference of 6 minutes, don’t worry about it”. Result! Nice lady.
After arriving in London, finding the location for the session wasn’t too bad, well if you exclude the £4 per trip to do two stations on the Tube, which was absolutely jam packed. I had to let one train go past as there was simply no room on it for anyone else. Luckily the next one wasn’t as packed. (Well, just!)
The session itself was an exceedingly interesting day. Cary is an excellent speaker and made what could have been a pretty dry day, very interesting indeed. There were 16 of us in total including one Doug Burns - who I would have thought already knew all this stuff!
The lunchtime chicken and mash was just that, chicken and mash. With a spot of gravy and a slice of lemon thrown in for good measure. I decided to get my jacket and nip out for something else, and a little walk. The room was locked.
In the afternoon session we looked at lots of ways to use the tools that we would be taking home with us. These are the MR Tools and MR Trace available from www.method-r.com - they appear exceedingly useful indeed. I’m currently waiting to obtain my license so that I can get hold of them and start trying them out on a few trace files from my past.
Mr Trace won’t be much use to me though, it’s an add on for SQL Developer which I don’t use, being a Toad man myself. However, I have passed Method R’s details on to Quest’s product manager for a potential inclusion in a future version of Toad, so maybe one day!
I really think the course should have been over a couple of days rather than just one, as all too soon, we were all departing for home. But not before we had picked up our exclusive T shirts (not available in the shops!) and posed for a group photo. (Sorry, dead link these days!)
Cheers.
