Dear NoCOUG members and friends,

Happy New Year; may it be productive for all of us! The next NoCOUG conference will be held on Thursday, February 11 from 9 A.M. to 5 A.M. at the CarrAmerica conference center in Pleasanton. Top billing this time goes to Dr. Neil Gunther, the world’s foremost expert in database performance analysis and capacity planning. He is known internationally for developing the open-source performance modeling software Pretty Damn Quick and is the subject of an entire Wikipedia article.

Dr. Gunther will deliver a keynote address titled “Why Are There No Giants?” and a technical presentation titled “Performance Analysis For Those Who Can’t Wait.” The full agenda of the conference has been posted at http://www.nocoug.org/next.html. Please RSVP at http://www.nocoug.org/rsvp.html.

Most Oracle professionals will benefit a lot from attending a NoCOUG conference in 2010. However, the following categories will not benefit much:

1. Those Oracle professionals who are at the very top of their game already. This group is limited to a select handful of individuals such as Tom Kyte, Jonathan Lewis, Cary Millsap, Steven Feuerstein, and Craig Shallahamer.
2. Those Oracle professionals who believe that Oracle’s goal in buying Sun is to replace Oracle Database with MySQL. This is probably a very small group.
3. Those Oracle professionals who are leaning towards the “NoSQL” camp and now believe that databases are only needed for storing key-value pairs. Another small group.
4. Those Oracle professionals who believe that every man is an island and don’t want to network with other Oracle professionals. Gilligan and Robinson Crusoe come to mind.
5. Those Oracle professionals who don’t subscribe to the seventh habit of highly effective people taught by Stephen Covey in his bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The seventh habit is “Sharpen the Saw” which means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have—you. We haven’t met anybody who admits to belonging in this group.

Most of us don’t fall in the above categories so we fully expect that there will be heavy attendance as usual at NoCOUG conferences in 2010. Please forward this message to your colleagues and we hope to see you on February 11.

All the very best,

Hanan Hit,
NoCOUG President

Randy Samberg,
Director of Conference Programming

Iggy Fernandez,
NoCOUG Journal Editor

NoCOUG conferences and the NoCOUG Journal are made possible in part by the generous support of companies such as Database Specialists. Call Database Specialists when you need remote DBA services or onsite support for your mission-critical Oracle database systems. Arrange a free consultation with a senior Database Specialists team member to find out how they can help increase your uptime, improve performance, minimize risk, and reduce costs. Visit their website for no-cost resources, white papers, conference presentations, and handy scripts.