Kamran Agayev's Oracle Blog

Oracle Certified Master

My LAD Tour 2014 impressions

Posted by Kamran Agayev A. on September 10th, 2014

After returning home from LAD Tour, I would like to share some of my experience on my first ever trip to Argentina and Uruguay. First of all, it was a very long journey :) It took me 26 hours to get to Buenos Aires (Baku->Istanbul->Sao Paolo->Buenos Aires) and it was really a long flight! Once I arrived in Buenos Aires and exited an airport, the first thing what I felt was cold :), because the weather was chilly. I took a shuttle directly to hotel. In the morning, I got up early and took a wonderful tour to the Tigre.  The trip was phenomenal and I had a great time. Tigre is special when you are in the islands, 500 river and streams, and threre are not any street, or bridges. An incredible place is the Rio De La Plata with 40 miles in width and their new islands.

LAD_Tour1

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I came back to the hotel at 3 PM. On the first of my stay I was having a jetlag and I felt sleepy at 4PM (It was 12AM midnight in Azerbaijan, Baku :) ) and woke up at 2AM :) (It was 10AM in Baku) and couldn’t sleep till the morning. For the rest 4 hours I prepared for my presentations, had a breakfast and went straight to San Andre University which was a few blocks from the hotel. I met Marcelo Ochoa (an Oracle ACE from Argentina) in the lobby, who was one of the organizers of the conference. Together with Gustavo Gonzalez (ACE Director) Afterwards, I met Hans Forbrich and Michele Malcher in the speakers room. In a few minutes the conference started and all attendees gathered in the auditorium. After 15 minutes of the introduction, I was invited to delivery my speech. I was very lucky to make a first presentation of the event in front of the participants that were gathered to listen the introduction before me and stayed there :). The lecture theater was completely packed and I was very excited that so many people were listening my presentaiton

Kamran A - Argentina

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I talked about my RAC investigation and discussed real-life solutions on some “Oracle RAC How-to” scenarios. Then Hans Forbrich talked about Oracle VM. Once his speech was finished, my strong interest emerged in his field of research and consequently I made up a decision to use VM in real life. I also delivered my second presentation in 3 hours after my initial speech. My second speech of the presentation was dedicated to “Success story of migrating Oracle 10g single node to Oracle 11gR2 RAC environment in AzerCell”. After my second half of the presentation all the participants were invited to attend a lunch in the dining hall. Some of the participants approached me in order to introduce themselves and to ask questions about my presentation. During the launch we had very lovely conversation. The launch followed by seminar of practical RAC simulation – RacAttack! And this simulation was attended by 15+ participant and all of them brought their laptop to install Oracle 12c 2 node RAC. I noticed that most of them were using 2G or 4G RAM and this caused difficulties in installing RAC, nevertheless, the rest of the participants installed Grid Infrastructure successfully.

So the first day was over. Unfortunately, due to continuing jetlag at that time, I was forced to miss the speakers’ dinner. Next day, I attended 2 sessions of Mike Dietrich about Pluggable Databases and Oracle Upgrade. Both of the sessions were outstanding in the quality of delivery and the content! Then I left the conference and took a City Tour. I was fascinated by Buenos Aires and its tempestuous history.

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Being a BJJ (Brazilan Jiu Jitsu) practitioner, I have been trained in different countries and thus try to learn various techniques from different BJJ schools. This time I called Sebastian Munoz from Gracie Humaita school and took a private and public class. Both classes were awesome. I learned a lot of different techniques, rolled with professor and students.

Lad Tour bjj

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was very tired, returned back to the hotel and on the following morning packed for Montevideo trip. When I arrived to the Argentina Airlilnes (it was very cold!) I met Hans, Michele and Mike. I bought my tickets and thanks to Hans, we had some rest in the Star Alliance VIP Lounge Ezeiza.

The flight to Montevideo wasn’t too far. After 55 minutes, we landed. Nelson Calero (President of Uruguay Oracle User Group) and Edelweiss (Oracle ACE) were already there, they picked up us at the airport to the hotel. Then we went out to have a wonderful lunch, did a city tour and returned back to the hotel.

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The following day, the conference has started. It was a few blocks far from the hotel, in the ORT University. Both my sessions were after the midday, and there were plenty of participants. In the first session I talked about RAC Best Practices, while in the second session I presented “Oracle RAC failure test cases”.

Kamran A - ORT University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the presentation was finished, I had a short discussion with participants, afterwards I decided to go to the Gracie Humaita Montevideo gym and took a class from them. Once I entered the gym, I noticed the generous kindness of the students of this JitJitsu school. Everybody was friendly to me. Master De Souza introduced us to different techniques. Then I rolled with them a little and went to join to the dinner with the speakers. The dinner was awesome and very delicious. Once the dinner was over, we returned back to the hotel and I slept.

Uruguay_Bjj

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next day, we did a RacAttack with 30+ participants! That was the most interesting RacAttack I’ve ever done in my professional career. I wasn’t expecting such a huge number of participants, and almost all of them had different kind of problems with the installation and configuration. With the great support and guidance of Michele, Hans and Nelson, we resolved essentially most of the problems and therefore most of the participants were finally able to install Grid Control. The entire session lasted for 8 hours and it was exciting.

RacAttack2 RacAttack1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, I would like to underline the fact that both events were very well planned, professionally organized  and went extremely well. After travelling 60 hours, presenting 4 sessions and organizing 2 RacAttack events for 50+ attendees, joining 3 different BJJ (Brasilian Jiu JItsu) classes, provided me with a unique and great opportunity to make new friends, and get to know good experts in my field. I also enjoyed getting an exposure to new culture and traditions.

I would like express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the organizers, to OTN, to ACE Team and especially to Francisco Munoz Alvarez for creating such great tours and helping us to share our knowledge. Thanks to Nelson Calera, Edelwiss for their hospitality. I truly appreciate the time they spent with us. It’s nice to know that you are surrounded by such lovely people

Uruguay group photo

 

 

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