Data … as usual

From 15th till 18th November, I was at the DOAG Conference in Nurnberg and it was a very great conference and a great opportunity for the Oracle Community.

Last year, I decided to attend (and to present) at different conferences in Europe and these conferences represent a good opportunity to develop your network (mainly technical for me), to learn a lot about technical stuff from worldwide Oracle experts, and to share your experiences.

More, you will share very good moments with people you certainly know by social networking (twitter, blogs etc.).

Let me explain how it was during DOAG and why I enjoyed it.

I arrived at my hotel the day before the conference, I didn’t know Nurnberg and as the conference center was not located in the town center, I feared to be alone in this area and to meet people exclusively during the conference days. But here comes the Oracle community …

Once installed in my room, I went to twitter to view the last news and I saw a tweet from Jan Karremans (http://www.jk-consult.nl/) who asked who was in his hotel (Yipiie !!! it’s mine too). So we plan to meet up in the hotel’s lobby in the evening. During this time, we found other people (Martin Widlake @MDWidlake, Neil Chandler @ChandlerDBA, Kamil Stawiarski @ora600pl etc.) that will enjoy to have a beer (or more 😉 ) in a pub just before the Oracle ACE dinner.

So we had a great time with those guys and I have a new opportunity to meet great people at the dinner which was organized by Oracle for its fellow advocates 😉

Day 1 : great conferences and a German Organization for a very nice event. After the conferences, comes the speaker dinner. With different guys, we had a beer (or two 🙂 ) before the dinner but once arrived at the restaurant, this one was full and we cannot join the speakers that came earlier. We were about 20 people and we decided to find a restaurant for our “unspeaker restaurant” event. Kamil found a great place and during this time, I had the pleasure to sit near Martin Widlake and Neil Chandler who made the demonstration of their “soooo” british sense of humor .. we had a lot of fun !! 😉

The last two days were more studious for me, I attended lots of sessions presented by so interesting and famous guys (Kerry Osborne: @KerryOracleGuy, Stefan Koehler: @OracleSK, Mauro Pagano: @Mautro, Franck Pachot: @FranckPachot, Ludovico Caldara: @ludodba etc.). The most interesting one was given by Toon Kooperlars and Bryn Llewellyn about the ThickDB concept. I’m specialized in infrastructure and this session was much oriented to development, it can be surprising but that’s the power of the community and the power to attend this kind of conference … you can discover new fields and develop your technical culture (even if I have some skills in database development 🙂 ).

Last day, I presented my session (about SIMD instructions) and I was very honored to receive some congratulations from Stefan Koehler who is one of the most interesting guy in the Oracle’s internal field (and member of the prestigious “Oak Table” network).

Thanks DOAG and thanks to all the speakers … it was a blast 😉