Learning is not a spectator sport

Just a quick snapshot of the EMEA tour, which I hope inspires you to get involved next year as either a speaker, user group volunteer or even as simply as attending and supporting your local user group.

Poland

I couldn’t quite understand why my flight to Poland left on time, but still landed 90 mins late. Then I discovered the flight plan from Dubai which took a very generous detour around the middle east. No complaints from me there!

Selfies are of course the method de jour for catching up with friends I haven’t seen for a while.

In the POUG conference, you get a personal chaperone for your talk. This young woman was delightful, taking a few minutes before my talk to tell me to keep my nerves in check, not to worry, and that I would be fine

 

And of course, no conference is complete without some Karaoke to wrap up the event. The Polish locals certainly knew how to bang out a number

 

Austria

Mirela graciously gave her time on the day we flew into Austria to be the tour guide for Kim and myself. It was my first time in Austria, so it was much appreciated. So many amazing sights.

It was also a chance to catch up with great friends from the Latin America Oracle community, Nelson and Edelweiss. It was a little breezy on the top of this tower, but Nelson insisted we got there to try catch a glimpse of Comet C/2023 A3.

 

I also discovered that a national dessert dish is a croissant stuffed with ice cream. Something I’ll want to try at home 🙂

The AOUG meeting was a small group but highly engaged. It was held at the Oracle office which also had breathtaking views over Vienna.

Netherlands

Some idiot (namely me!) copied the Netherland pics off his phone to his laptop, and then accidentally deleted the folder on said laptop … Fail

Croatia

I had never been to Croatia and the coastline is breath taking. The conference takes place on a island hotel, which makes for great views and captive attendees 🙂

 

Because of the hotel venue, every spare moment is spent chatting with attendees. It makes for a great networking and community event, which I was really pleased with because I came in with a bit of worry thinking that the focus would be partying rather than conversations.

I was thrilled to see that there is still a strong interest the benefits of good database design. My talk was well attended and (seemed to be) well received. Proof again of the incredible power of a relational database.

And no ACE event would be complete without ACE chocolate tasting. I know the chocolate offerings below look sparse, but trust me, it started with a lot more 🙂

The town of Rovinj is a tourist hotspot for good reason!

Spain

The Spanish user group take a slightly different tack on their user group event, heavily embracing sponsors which means the centre of attention is more the exhibition area than the sessions. Think of it as like “baby cloudworld”. I was initially hesitant with this model, but it encourages strong networking and I made a bunch of new contacts both within and external to Oracle. The only drawback was my total lack of spanish, but Powerpoint real time subtitling does a fine job according to the Spanish folks I asked.

Good friend Sai was singled out as Cloud Architect of the Year!

Rita from Argentina gave an awesome talk on replication, which I translated in real time using Google on my phone 🙂

Monica Godoy gave a great presentation on APEX on OCI utilising some of the image processing services available on our cloud.

Denmark

The final country in the tour was Denmark, which once again commenced with the locals giving Ludovico and myself a quick tour of the city.

The venue was the Oracle Denmark office, a really well designed open plan office with lots of natural light and greenery. We had about 70 attendees in total at the event, which was a 5 year high for the Danish group. Big congratulations to Jeanette for driving this enthusiasm.

Ludo brought his Oracle and PostgreSQL expertise to the fore with an awesome presentation comparing the two. I think attendees were expecting a marketing spin, but he gave an objective and balanced analysis.

Danish local Daniel covered all the nuts and bolts of DataPump performance to make large database operations much more manageable.

And finally a great idea for any user group hosting a meetups. Have a simple meal onsite at the end of the event to let people unwind and chat. Kudos to the Danish Oracle user group on this one.

 

Huge thanks to all of the user groups (POUG, AOUG, NLOUG, HROUG, SPOUG, DOUG) for their hospitality over the past couple of weeks… I’m very tired but very inspired by our great communities in Europe