SOUG: The Tanel Põder Edition

Note how I used the cool "õ" in the title. I learned that it's not really an "o" but the o with a tilde over it. It's the 24th letter of the Estonian alphabet apparently.



Note the casual attire. He was in shorts. Why? Because he was on vacation. In Miami.

Not only did he take time out from vacation to speak to us, he drove 3 or 4 hours to get here. Awesomesauce.

Naturally, it was a packed house.



(That's Dan McGhan there of APEX fame, he's bald too...but not fat)

We got the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting in 60 minutes which turned into something closer to 2 hours. Yeah for us. I went into this meeting thinking I wouldn't get a whole lot from it. I try to read Tanel's blog but much of is just beyond me. I figured this would be more of the same.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I got quite a bit out of it. I think the credit here goes to Tanel...he made the material incredibly easy to consume. Sure, there were moments there talking about latches and buffer cache's and stuff, but I think the message he was trying to convey was a methodology towards troubleshooting. In other words, don't use the shotgun approach. Systematic. That was the keyword. I loved the approach, I just wish I hadn't been so intimidated before now. I've wasted years of time on the shotgun approach.

I think it would be great to have a few hours (days perhaps) (probably over beer(s)) to just pick his brain. Ask questions. Get answers.

Oh...and the modesty. In one of his demos he displayed an OS stack trace (Solaris) listing all the Oracle function calls. Yeah, the "opi" prefix is for Oracle Programming Interface (I think) and this one is for that and so on and so on. You could hear the muffled laughter in the audience...the good kind...because not very many people know those things. It was fun to watch.

In other meeting news, I didn't win any prizes. I did, however, get to meet this guy:



You may recognize the picture, it was up in the top right corner of this page for a few weeks not long ago.

Guess where I met him for the first time? Twitter. Gotta love The Twitter. He and a friend drove down from Orlando just to see Tanel.

It was a great night. Next time Tanel will be staying at my house where I will provide him good beer and my wife will pepper him with questions on his travels and Estonia.

Thanks Tanel for taking time for us. Thanks Enrique for introducing yourself. Thanks SOUG for tolerating my odd behavior.