Oracle Data Visualization Desktop - now available

After a bit of a long wait Oracle have finally release Oracle Data Visualization for the desktop. The desktop version of this tool is only available for Windows desktops at the moment. I'm sure Oracle will be bringing out versions of other OS soon (I hope).

To get you hands on the Oracle Data Visualization to to the following OTN webpage (click on this image)

After downloading has finished, you can run the installer.

When the Oracle Installer opens you will be prompted to enter the required details or to accept the defaults, as outlined below.

• Installation Location : Decide where you are going to have the Oracle Data Visualization tool installed on your desktop. The default location is C:\Program Files\Oracle Data Visualization Desktop . Click Next
• Options : There are 2 check boxes for 'Create desktop shortcut' and 'Deploy samples'. Leave both of these checked, as you will probably want these. Click Next.
• Summary : Lists a summary of the installation. There is nothing really for you to do here, so on the Install button.

• Progress : You can ten sit back and monitor the progress of the installation. The installation tool about 4 minutes on my small Windows VM

When the installation is complete you can now fire up Oracle Data Visualization and enjoy. If you have just installed the tool it will automatically be started for you.

When the tool has finished all the configurations that it needs to do, the tool will open with the following window and shows a sample projects for you to get an idea of some of the things that are possible.

For more details on the tool and on the Oracle Cloud hosted version click on the following image to get to the Oracle webpage for the product.

People from Ireland who are Speaking at #OOW15

Oracle Open World 2015 will be kicking off in a few days time. There will be over 50K people attending this event, with a couple of hundred speakers.

I'm one of the lucky ones to have been selected to speak at Oracle Open World. This will be my third or fourth year in a row that I'm speaking at Oracle Open World.

Am I the only person from Ireland who is speaking at Oracle Open World ? No, I'm not, but there is a small number of us this year. There are basically 2, yes 2 other people from Ireland speaking at Oracle Open World. These are Richard Corbridge from the HSE, and Debra Lilley.

If you are interesting in attending these sessions here is the schedule.

Please share this information to allow your colleagues and help spread the news about he Irish Speakers.

If you are attending OOW, then please tweet, blog, Facebook, etc about these presentations.

Hopefully I will see you are one or both of my presentations on the Sunday.

And I will be having a draw/raffle for a copy of my book at my second presentation on the Sunday at 15:30 in Moscone South - 307

My schedule for OOW15

It seems to be a things that people blog about their schedule for Oracle Open World and talk about how busy they will be.

So to join the club this is my current schedule.

The boxes that are (a kind of) orange with red text are when I have MY presentations.

The purple boxes indicate some fun event and entertainment.

When attending conferences sometime you get to hear about a good presentation or some other events just happen. So this schedule is tentative and will probably only reflect 40%-60% of what I will really attend/do. There is so much going on each day.

You will see I have some Hands-on-Labs booked. These are a great way to try out some product for an hour. I highly recommend you doing some too.

By far my favourite part of my OOW trip is the Oracle ACE Director briefing that OTN arranges for us. This briefing will happen on the Thursday (22nd) and Friday (23rd) before OOW, and this is held in Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores.

We have been given a tentative schedule for the ACED Briefing and for me I highlight of this briefing is when Thomas Kurian comes in an very openly talks to us, telling us lots and lots and lots about what is happening across the Oracle product set. I would lover to be able to share what we are told but we are all under NDA. After Thomas we have some Cloud updates, then we get onto some updates on Oracle Development Tools, lots of updates on what is coming next in the Oracle Database. So we get the likes of Penny Avril, Andy Mendelsohn, Tom Michelini, Steven Feurerstein, Roland Smart and Wim Coekaerts, among others. So lots and lots of EVPs, Sr VPs and VPs.

After the briefing is over we then hop on a bus and head to our hotel in download San Francisco, near Union Square, where we will be based for the OOW.

Thanks to all in OTN and to those who run the Oracle ACE programme for arranging and paying for my flights, hotels and transportation.

SQL and PL/SQL icons and stickers

Over the past couple of weeks I've been preparing my slides and presentations for Oracle Open World (2015).

One thing that occurred to me was that there was no icon or image to represent Oracle SQL and PL/SQL. I needed something that I could include in my presentations to represent these.

After a bit of Tweeting it turns out that there is no (official) icons or images for Oracle SQL and Oracle PL/SQL.

So I created some and here they are.

and there are these

Feel free to use these in your presentations and share around. All I ask is that you give me an odd acknowledgement from time to time.

Stickers

If you would like to get these as stickers and put them on your laptop, notebooks, or anywhere really, you can order them on Stickermule.

NB: It is important to note that these are in no way approved or acknowledged or endorsed or anything else by Oracle.

From Zero to Dashboards in 10min with BICS

Unless you have been going around with your head in the clouds, all you can hear from all the big names in the IT worlds is about moving to the Cloud. (yes that was a poor attempt at a joke. It is Friday afternoon after all).

The title of this post is 'From Zero to Dashboards in 5 min with BICS'.

BICS stands for Oracle BI Cloud Service.

Over the past few months I've been working rolling out BICS at a number of different sites, and it is surprising how quickly you can get up and running with BICS.

There is no install. There is the minimum of setup and configuration. All you need to do is to create a user and give them some privileges. All of that takes 2 minutes.

Next get them to log in to BICS (2 minutes for the first time they log in) and load up some data using the Data Load feature (another 2 minutes).

Then you can move onto the fun part of creating some Dashboards using Visual Analyzer. See the example below of one that we created in 4 minutes.

So all of the above took 10 minutes. How quick and easy is that!

Give it a go yourself and see how quick it is for you.

Let me know if you have any question on using BICS and if you need any help.

Oracle Magazine - March/April 2001

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for March/April 2001 were on using Oracle 9i Application server to deliver e-business and web based applications. There was some case studies of companies using this technologies including Tantalus Communications, Digital River Commerce System, Tomatoland.com and Oracle themselves.

Other articles included:

• Tom Kyte's column looked at tips on automation, cleanup and database maintenance. Some of the details included index rebuilds, indexing interMedia files, killing and cleaning up sessions, how to specify the column at runtime in an order by, and how to use DBMS_JOB for database maintenance.
• Oracle announces the release of PORTAL.ORACLE.COM and MY.ORACLE.COM.
• Fre Sansmark has an article on Database Benchmarking and discusses what it means and how well they address real-world performance questions.
• Understanding XML Standards gives a brief introduction to what XML is about, explains the three layers of XML Grammar, XML based Protocols and XML Vocabularies. .
• Part 3 of 'Exploring Oracle Text Basics' looks at text searching and comparisons, creating, indexing and loading data.
• Creating Updatable Views explores the various requirements for creating an View that can be used to update data that is based on a single table or based on the joining of multiple tables..
• Linking to Remote Databases explores the basics of Database Links and that the DBA needs to know to setup and manages these..
• Steven Feuerstein's article looks at Advanced Native Dynamic SQL and the use of bind variables and their limitations.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

Loading JSON data into Oracle using ROracle and jsonlite

In this post I want to show you one way of taking a JSON file of data and loading it into your Oracle schema using ROracle. The JSON data will then be used to create a table in your schema. Yes you could use other methods to connect to the database and to create the table. But ROracle is by far the fastest method of connecting, selecting and processing data.

1. Necessary R Packages

You will need two R library. The first of these is the ROracle package. This gives us all the connection and data processing commands to work with the Oracle database. The second package is the jsonlite R package. This package allows us to open, read and process a file that has JSON data.

> install.package("ROracle")

> install.package("jsonlite")

After you have installed the packages you can now load them into your R environment so that you can use them in your current session.

> library(ROracle)

> library(jsonlite)

Depending on your version of R you may get some working messages about the libraries being built under a different version of R. Then again maybe you won't get these :-)

2. Open & Read the JSON file in R

Now you are ready to name and open the file that contains your JSON data. In my case the file is called 'demo_json_data.json'

> jsonFile <- "c:/app/demo_json_data.json"

> jsonData <- fromJSON(jsonFile)

We now have the JSON data loaded into R. We can now look at the attributes of each JSON record and the number of records that was in the JSON file.

> names(jsonData$items)

[1] "cust_id" "cust_gender" "age"

[4] "cust_marital_status" "country_name" "cust_income_level"

[7] "education" "occupation" "household_size"

[10] "yrs_residence" "affinity_card" "bulk_pack_diskettes"

[13] "flat_panel_monitor" "home_theater_package" "bookkeeping_application"

[16] "printer_supplies" "y_box_games" "os_doc_set_kanji"

> nrow(jsonData$items)

[1] 1500

As you can see the records are grouped under a higher label of 'items'. You might want to extract these records into a new data frame.

> data <- jsonData$items

>

Now we have our data ready in a data frame and we can use this data frame to create a table and insert the data.

3. Create the connection to the Oracle Schema

I have a previous post on connecting to an Oracle Schema using ROracle. That was connecting to an 11g Oracle Database.

JSON is a new feature in Oracle 12c and the connection details are a little bit different because we are now having to deal with connection to a pluggable database. The following illustrates connecting to a 12c database and assumes you have Oracle Client already installed and configured with your tnsnames.ora entry.

# Create the connection string

> host <- "localhost"

> port <- 1521

> service <- "pdb12c"

> connect.string <- paste(

"(DESCRIPTION=",

"(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=", host, ")(PORT=", port, "))",

"(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=", service, ")))", sep = "")

> con2 <- dbConnect(drv, username = "dmuser", password = "dmuser",dbname=connect.string)

>

4. Create the table in your Oracle Schema

At this point we have our connection to our Oracle Schema setup and connected, we have read in the JSON file and we have the JSON data in a data frame. We are now ready to push the JSON data to a table in our schema.

> dbWriteTable(con, "JSON_DATA", overwrite=TRUE, value=data)

Job done :-)

The table JSON_DATA has been created and the data is stored in the table in typical table attributes and rows format.

One thing to watch our for with the above command is with the overwrite=TRUE parameter setting. This replaces a table if it already exists. So your old data will be gone. Be careful.

5. View and Query the data using SQL

When you now log into your schema in the 12c Database, you can now query the data in the JSON_DATA table. (Yes I know it is not in JSON format in this table).

How did I get/generate my JSON data?

I generated the JSON file using a table that I already had in one of my schemas. This table is part of the sample data set that is built on top of the Oracle sample schemas.

The image below shows the steps involved in generating the data in JSON format. I used SQL Developer and set the SQLFORMAT to be JSON. I then ran the query to select the data. You will need to run this as a script. Then copy the JSON data and paste it into a file.

The SQL FORMAT command sets the output format for a query back to the default query output format that we are well use to.

A nice little JSON viewer can be found at http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/

Copy and paste your JSON data into this and you can view the structure of the data. Check it out.

Pulling Large Database tables in R

As the volume of the data in your tables grows, particularly in the big data world, you may run into some memory issues or package restrictions with pulling down the tables to your R environment.

Some of the R packages and drivers have some recommended numbers or limits for the number of records that can be fetched.

Caveate: My laptop is a Mac and at this point in time the ROracle package is unavailable for a Mac. It is for Windows, Solaris and AIX.

In the following example I'm looking at downloading a table with 300K records from an Oracle Database. I've already setup my DB connection using the Oracle JDBC driver. But when I run the following command I get an error.

> res<-dbSendQuery(jdbcConnection, "select * from my_large_table")

> dbFetch(res)

Error in .jcall(rp, "I", "fetch", stride) :

    java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

I also get a similar error if I run the following command.

> train_data <- dbReadTable(jdbcConnection, "MY_LARGE_TABLE")

How can you pull down a large table in R? So that you are not restricted to memory restrictions or limits on the number of records.

One way to do this is to loop through the data, pull the records down in chunks (a certain fetch size), put these into an array, and then merge them all together into a data frame. The following code illustrates how to do this.

> res<-dbSendQuery(jdbcConnection, "select * from my_large_table")

> dbFetch(res)

> rm(result)

> result<-list()

> i=1

> result[[i]]<-dbFetch(res,n=1000)

> while(nrow(chunk <- dbFetch(res, n = 1000))>0){

+     i<-i+1

+     result[[i]]<-chunk

+ }

> train_data<-do.call(rbind,result)

The above code runs surprisingly quickly, generate no errors and I now have all the data I need in my R environment.

The fetch size in the above example is set to 1000. This is a bit small really and is only set to that for illustration purposes here. You will need to play with this size to find out what size works best for your environment.

As with all programming languages and with R too there can be many different ways of performing the same thing.

2014 A review of the year as an ACED

As 2014 draws to a close I working on finishing off a number of tasks and projects. One of these tasks is an annual one for me. The task is to list all the things I've done as an Oracle ACE Director. If has been a very busy year, not just with ACE activities but also work wise too. That will explain why I have been a bit quiet on the blogging side of things in recent months.

In 2014 I one major highlight. It was the publication of my book Predictive Analytics using Oracle Data Miner by Oracle Press. Many thanks for everyone involved in writing this book, especially my family and the people in Oracle Press who gave me the opportunity.

Here is my summary.

Conferences

• January : BIWA Summit : 2 presentations (San Francisco, USA) **

• March : OUG Ireland Conference (Dublin, Ireland)

• April : OUG Norway : 2 presentations (Oslo, Norway) **

• June : OUG Finland : 2 presentations (Helsinki, Finland) **

• June : Oracle EMEA Data Warehousing Global Leaders Forum (Dublin, Ireland)

• August : OUG Panama : 2 presentations (Panama City, Panama) **

• August : OUG Costa Rica : 3 presentations (San Jose, Costa Rica) **

• August : OUG Mexico : 2 presentations (Mexico City, Mexico) **

• September : Oracle Open World (San Francisco, USA) **

• December : UKOUG Tech15 : 2 presentations (Liverpool, UK)

• December : UKOUG Apps15 (Liverpool, UK)

That is 19 hours of presenting this year.

** Many thanks to the Oracle ACE Director programme for funding the flights and hotels for these conferences. All other expenses and conferences I paid for out of my own pocket.

My ODM Book

On the 8th August my book titled Predictive Analytics using Oracle Data Miner, was published by Oracle Press. It all began 12 months and 2 weeks previously. I had the book written and the technical edits done by the middle of February (2014). Between March and June the Copy edits and layouts where completed. The book is ideal for any data scientist, Oracle developer, Oracle architect and Oracle DBA, who want to use the in-databse data mining functionality. That way they can use and build upon their existing SQL and PL/SQL skills to perform predictive analytics.

The book is available on Amazon and comes in Print and eBook formats

Oracle Open World

This year I got to go to my second ACE Director briefing. This is held on the Thursday and Friday before OOW. At the briefing we get lots of Very senior people coming in to tell us what is happening with the products in their area and what the plans are over the next 12 to 18 months. Lots of what we are told is all under NDA. My favourite part of this briefing is when Thomas Kurian comes in and talks for about 90 minutes. No slides, no notes. The first 15 minutes is him telling us what Larry & Co are going to announce at OOW, that are the main product directions etc. Then he opens to the floor for questions. You can ask him anything about the set of Oracle products (>3000) and he will explain in detail what is happen. He even commented on the plans for the Oracle Games Console this year!!!

This year I had the opportunity to present at OOW again. It was a joint presentation with Roel Hartman and we had the pleasure of being one of the first presentations at OOW at 8:30am on the Sunday morning. Despite the early start we have really good turn out for our presentation.

Then I got to enjoy OOW with all the various activities, presentations, entertainment and hanging out at the OTN lounge with the other ACEs and ACEDs.

Blog Posts

One of the things I really like doing is playing with various features of Oracle and then writing some blog posts about them. Most of what I blog about evolves around the SQL & PL/SQL Statistics functions and the Advanced Analytics Option, comprising Oracle Data Mining and Oracle R Enterprise. In addition to these blog posts I also have posts relating to various Oracle User Group activities. So there is a good mixture of material on the blog.

In 2014 I have written 60 blog posts (including this one). This number is a little be less than previous years and perhaps the main reason for that is due to me being extremely busy with various project work this year.

OTN Articles

OTN has accepted three articles from me in 2014. I was delighted about these acceptances and I'm looking forward to writing some more articles in 2015 for them.

• Sentiment Analysis using Oracle Data Miner
• ROracle : How to get Started and Commands you need to Know
• Predictive Queries in 12c

I have a few more ideas for articles and I will be writing these in 2015. We will have to wait and see if OTN will accept them.

My Oracle Magazine Collection & Reviews

You may or may not be aware that I've been collecting Oracle Magazine for over 20 years now. I have nearly the entire collection of Oracle Magazine going back to the very first edition. Check out the collection here. You will see that I'm missing a few and these are highlighted by the grey boxes. If you do have any of these and you would like to donate to my collection then please get in touch.

One of the things I like to blog about is on some of these old Oracle Magazines. If you go to my Oracle Magazine collection page you will see the past editions that I have writing a review of. Click on the links to view the blog post review an edition.

In 2014 I have written reviews of the following:

• Oracle Magazine-July/August 2000
• Oracle Magazine September/October 2000
• Oracle Magazine-November/December 2000
• Oracle Magazine-January/February 2001

OUG Activities

The Oracle User Group in Ireland (OUG Ireland) has continued to grow this year in membership but also with the number of attendees at our events. In March of each year we have our flagship event which is our annual conference. This year we have almost 300 people and unfortunately people had to turned away at the door because we had headed the maximum limit on the number of attendees for the event. Planing has already commenced for 2015 and the call for presentations is now open. Hopefully 2015 will be bigger and better that 2014. We had a second day at the conference this year where we had Tom Kyte give a full day seminar. Again this was fully booked out for weeks/months before hand. In March 2015 we will be having a second day of the conference with Maria Colgan giving a one day workshop/seminar on the In-Memory option and the Optimiser. You cannot book your place on this seminar yet but then it does open make sure to book your place quick as I'm sure it will book out very quickly.

We also had a number of TECH and BI SIGs and the number of attendees has significantly grown over the past few years. This is fantastic and hopefully this will continue. If it does then maybe we might be able to put on more SIG events.

In the editor of Oracle Scene Magazine which is published by the UKOUG. This was my first full year as editor after spending many years as deputy editor. In 2014 we have published three editions of Oracle Scene and I would like to thanks everyone who has submitted an article. You have helped grow the quality of the contents and also grow the readership numbers. The calls for articles for the Spring edition is now open.

My Oracle Data Science newsletter & My Oracle User Group Weekly newsletter

A couple of years ago I set up a news aggregator based on Twitter feeds and on updates from certain websites. I've divided these into two different newsletters. The first is My Oracle Data Science News and as you might guess it is focused on the worlds of Data Science, Predictive Analytics and related developments with a bit of a focus towards the Oracle world. This newsletter gets published each day.

My second newsletter is focused on Oracle User Group activities around the World and is again based on the various Twitter handles of the Oracle User Groups. I'm include over 40 OUG Twitter handles in the aggregator so I should be picking up almost everyone. If you discover your OUG is not being included then drop me an email and I'll add you to the list. This newsletter goes out every Friday.

Plans for 2015 so far

The start of 2015 is already very busy and I'm already booked for 3 conferences BIWA Summit (CA, USA), OUG Norway and OUG Ireland.

Planing for OUG Ireland is under ways and we are hoping to build on the successes we have had over the past few years.

So as editor of Oracle Scene magazine we are planning for our first issue in 2015, the call for articles is open and we have been busy recruiting authors of articles on specifics.

I'm sure I've forgotten a few things, I usually do.

It has been a fun year. I've made lots of friends around the World and I look forward to meeting you all at some conference in 2015.

Oracle Magazine-January/February 2001

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for January/February 2001 were on how the current set of Oracle products supported the development and deployment of mobile and internet applications.

Other articles included:

• Oracle and HP form an alliance to develop and delivery CRM solutions aimed at helping companies keep up with customers in a world where rapid change is common place.
• In Tom Kyte's regular article he look at and gives examples of using function based indexes, automatically calculating percentages in queries, password protecting the Listener functions, making user lists and securing your data using DBMS_OBFUSCATION_TOOLKIT.
• Oracle announces the release of Oracleportal.com and Oracle Portal Studio.
• Over the past few months Oracle has gone about renaming a number of their products. A full page id give over to this list that maps the old product name to the new product name.
• There was a number of small announcements of collaborations between Oracle and Sun. The start of a beautiful friendship that eventually ended in a marriage.
• Steven Feuerstein had an article on Dynamic Approaches to Multirow Queries. Based on the native dynamic SQL introduced in Oralce 8i he shows us how to handle multiple row results either individually or as a collection.
• In the article on Net8 examples are given showing how net service names are resolved and using LDAP.
• The Oracle 8i Database has components that allow you to take advantage of XML technology. These include XSQL pages, how to install XSQL Servlet, registering the xsql file, processing dynamic xml documents from SQL queries and supporting XSLT tags.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

OUG Mexico

We (Gorcan, Glen, Debra and I) arrived into Mexico around 10pm and had a few minutes wait for our local user group contact to meet us. They had arranged transportation to our hotel.

The next morning (Friday) was the day of the OUG Mexico conference. We were collected from the hotel and taken to the conference venue. Our transport had to made a number of trips to/from the conference venue to cater for all the speakers, so some of us arrived in the middle of the opening keynote by Noel Portugal from Oracle.

After lunch we had a group photo of all the speakers.

My 2 sessions were on in the afternoon so I got to relax a bit and hang out with some of the other speakers. My first session was on Oracle Data Mine and my second session was on Oracle R Enterprise. Just like in Costa Rica I had a good attendance and again they seemed to enjoy the presentations as they were laughing along at my attempts at jokes :-)

The Mexico conference was on Friday the 8th August and this was an important day as my book was officially available that day. Just like in my previous countries I had a copy of my book to give away. Here is a photo of me with the winner.

I had the last session of the day. Some of the sessions before this had over ran and I was under a bit of pressure to finish up my last presentation by 5pm. So apologies if this presentation seemed rushed.
Also many thanks to everyone who came up to me afterwards for a chat, to have your photo taken with me and to get my autograph! :-)
Then it was time to catch a taxi to my next hotel in Mexico city centre. This would be my 6th hotel in 6 days :-(
After checking into the hotel it was time to go for dinner. Renne Antunez had invited some of the speakers to his house for dinner. These was a very enjoyable evening and for me marked the end of my OTN tour. Many of the other speakers were going to over countries over the next week.

Many thanks to Renne and his wife for hosting this dinner, especially as it was Renne's wife birthday. I hope he bought her a good present.
The next morning (Saturday) I was up at 5am to get a taxi to the airport and my long long travels home, from Mexico to Newark to Dublin getting home on Sunday morning at 8am.
A big thank you to the organisers of the OTN Tour and to each of the countries that invited me to present at their conference. I really enjoyed the experiences and hopefully I can join in another OTN tour sometime soon. Also a special thank you to Vikki in OTN for sorting out all the funding and everything else.
The finals thank you goes out to my travel companions for the tour, Gorcan, Debra and Glen. Without your companionship throughout the week it wouldn't have been as much fun.

OUG Costa Rica

After the OUG Panama conference we arrived later that night in San Jose the capitol of Costa Rica. The whole emigration, luggage pick up and customs was the smoothest experiences I have ever experienced at an airport. All was done in a matter of minutes. All the booths for emigration and customs was open and staffed. When was the last time you have ever seen this before. It was a very positive start to our short couple of days in Costa Rica. We had arranged for our hotel to have a taxi pick us up and sure enough the driver was there with a good clear sign. From time of landing to being in my hotel room, which was a 20 minute drive, took no more than 1 hour.

The next morning (Tuesday) we (Debra, Glenn, Gurcan and I) headed out to do some exploring of San Jose on foot. Our first task was to get some breakfast but none of us had any local currency. Debra volunteered to use one of the enclosed ATM machines to get some money. But there was some issue with the machine and she got locked into the cubical. At the same time she got a phone call from her bank in the UK. Her ATM transaction was flagged as a potential fraudulent transaction. I most say Debra's bank was very quick to contact her and to make all the necessary changes so that she could withdraw some money. After which we had a local breakfast.

Then we sent the next 3 hours walking around San Jose.

Then it was back to the hotel in the early afternoon as the local Oracle User Group had arranged a mini bus to take us up to a hotel that was near the conference location in San Carlos. We had been told that the journey would take 2 hours. Well after 2 hours of driving up hill we were told we were only just over half ways there. It was a long long journey but the views were really beautiful. We had a 10 minute break at little village with a nice church and a really cool garden in front of it.

After anther hour we arrived at the hotel, checked in, and we met up with some other presenters for some dinner. Then it was time for bed as we were being collected at 7:30am.

On Wednesday morning we got collected and taken to the conference venue which happened to be a local university. The User Group had proved a bus service from San Jose to the conference venue and there was a sizeable number of industry people mixed in with some of the university students.

My first presentation was in the auditorium just after the opening keynote. This has to be one of finest rooms I've seen and presented in. Even better we had a HD projector. This has to be a first, so I had no resolution issues with running my VMs. I had a really good turn out for my presentation and the photo below shows only some of those who attended.

In the after noon I had my 2nd and 3rd presentations. For my last presentation all the seats were taken and there was even some people standing. There was a lot of people who came to all my presentations which I was delighted with.

After my last presentation I had a raffle for a copy of my book. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this :-). Here is a photo of me with the winner of the book and someone else who was having a read of it afterwards.

This was a very enjoyable conference and the attendees at my sessions were laughing at some of my jokes or maybe they were laughing at me. Anyway I took it that they were enjoying my presentations. For the first time, I had people come up to me after my presentations to have their photography taken with me and to ask me for my autograph.

Here is a picture of the Oracle ACE Directors who presented at the OUG Costa Rica conference.

We were told that our bus journey the day before was the scenic route so that is why it took 3 hours. As soon as the conference was finished we got back on the mini bus to be taken back to our hotel in San Jose. Theoretically it should have been a much quick journey as we were going back the quickest route. This time it took 2 hours 40 minutes.

On Thursday at 2:45am we were woken by a 4.7M earth quake. The room was shaking and everything was shaking in it including me. After breakfast on the Thursday morning, Debra had arranged for us to go on a tour of a Coffee plantation and factory. This coffee tour was hilarious and the best tours I have ever been on. Our tour guides were a comedy double act :-)

After the tour it was back to the hotel and to get our taxi out to the airport. Did I mention how well operated the airport was. How often have you gone through security when all of the scanners were in operation and fully staffed. This meant that there was almost no queue and I was through security in no time at all. From check in to the departure gate took about 2 minutes.

Our (Glen, Debra, Gorcan and I) next stop was Mexico