The presentation you attend when not attending a presentation

Everyone is talking about going to OpenWorld and I'm jealous. So I'm proud to present: Oracle ClaytonWorld. For those not familar with Australian slag, "Claytons" was a non-alcholic drink, sold under the slogan "the drink you have when you are not having a drink".

What I'm looking at is presentations without a presenter. You can 'attend' on your own at home, with your work-mates in a conference room, as a user group in a hired function room (or the pub if there isn't a football game on [or its just England getting hammered in the Rugby]) or pretty much anywhere with a large screen.

There's a fair bit on offer, with special thanks to Quest, Hotsos and Pythian.

You don't have to fit it all in a couple of days and I'd prefer to watch a presentation or two a week (or each month for if shown by a user group), but it is possible to schedule up your own two-day conference.

An Oracle conference must start off with some Oracle spiel about the new wonder of the database world. It's a tradition, old charter or something. The 11g launch got a webcast from Oracle which fits the bill.

After that, I'd recommend a Flash movie on SQL injection from Console Pictures. It's one of those things you can watch, but don't have to take detailed notes, so makes good material for a morning session. It also puts you in a 'security' frame of mind for the rest of the stuff you listen to.

After coffee, you can pick some more of Oracle's "Web Events".
I may try a look at Warehouse Builder or Data Warehousing with 11g

After lunch, you can continue courtesy of Quest software's provisions on YouTube including Steven F.'s PL/SQL best practices and Common mistakes in PL/SQL programming for Developers, Database Change Tracking and Testing 10g RAC scalability for DBAs, and
Data Modelling for the models thrown out of London Fashion Week for being too skinny.

Then developers can finish off the first day with Carl Backstrom's preview of Apex 4.0
[The 'AVI' appears to be an 'OGM', but he recommends an appropriate player.]

For the DBAs, Pythian have their Goodies, a video camera recording of their "guided debates". They have that live, unrehearsed feel, just like the Blair Witch Project but without the hype.
They include Flash Recovery Area, Disk IO Basics and Parallel Execution Basics

The second day is "Oracle Performance Day", thanks to Hotsos.
Mike Rothouse pointed out Hotsos's Monthly Newsletter earlier this week but if you look at https://hotsos.webex.com, you'll find a treasure chest of over a dozen webinars. You need to get to the list of events, then go to recorded events. They need the WEBEX Player (which also comes with a recorder so you can roll your own).

If there is anyone not interested in performance, the "Files" link on AskTom also gives a presentation on "Content database". That isn't much of an alternative, but that's because EVERY-ONE should be interested in performance.

Finally, to finish up the conference, , the Man himself can be there in the form of "The Things You Know" (Thanks to Don Seiler for the pointer in his blog )

There's plenty more presentations, papers and podcasts that can be downloaded. Unfortunately, without that Audio/Visual combination, that's just a step too far away to be a Clayton's presentation. More like swigging the dregs or sniffing the empty bottle at the end of the night.

You can see that I've got nothing for the Apps crowd. Primarily it is because that's not my area, so I don't look for anything there. I'm not saying it isn't out there, just that it would be under my radar. Similarly with Java or Fusion. If you've got any pointers, schedule your own conference (or just add a comment for individual items and see if there's enough material).

While we have plenty of volume for a conference, the major contributors are Oracle (of course), Hotsos, Quest and Pythian. We could probably do with a little more breadth and some independents would be welcome. Maybe we can really annoy Oracle if anyone knows of something about EnterpriseDB ? Links are welcome.

I'm afraid you'll have to assemble your own goodie bag though. Still maybe we can build up some interest amongst those of us in places too insignificant to rate a real conference. [I dunno, we can host APEC but not a decent Oracle meet-up. Maybe I should switch to Python ]