NWOUG Annual Conference

This was my first time in Portland, OR, and I’ve hardly seen it. I arrived On Sunday, October 9th, for the October 10th conference in down town.

The flight landed at about 6:30pm, and it took me about an hour to get to my hotel (I have to say that the MAX light train was very efficient). It was quite late and rainy so it was dark outside and I couldn’t see anything. I got to the hotel, checked in, had dinner at the hotel restaurant (didn’t feel like getting out in the rain). It took them about an hour to get my food because of “problems in the kitchen”, but they didn’t charge me for my beer, so that was nice.
I got up and went to the conference. The conference was very well organized. The area where they held the conference was great, nice breakfast and coffee (I was surprised to see a proper latte), and the sessions started.
After the keynote I had to work a little bit, so I skipped the first presentation slot. For the second slot I went to see Sean Scott talking about “Exploring the future of the Oracle DBA”. I was intrigued by the title and was interested to hear what he has to say. I liked the session a lot, Sean is a good speaker and he talked about what it means to be a good DBA and what DBAs should do in the near future. I stayed to chat with him about the session, and ended up having a very long and interesting (and also funny) talk over lunch.
At 2:15 I started my session. It went well (I think), but for some reason I thought that I had until 3:30 (instead if 3:15). I was sure I was right on time, until I was done and the next speaker came in and said that he needs to start in 1 minute. Only then I realized that I took up the entire break. To their benefit, I’ll say that the attendees stayed in the room and didn’t left, but I wish someone would have told me that my time was over. I hope they didn’t care too much.
At the last slot I went to hear about the cloud from Oracle people (an Oracle conference without hearing about the cloud is not a conference these days). But that was, unfortunately, a mistake. I wasn’t clear from the session title, but The session was about the applications cloud, which is completely not my area.
I stayed for the post-conference networking reception and talked with some really great people about skiing, English accents, Vacnouver and more.
The way to the airport was around 5:30, so at least I was able to see some of the city from the MAX light train’s windows. It looks nice! Now I’m waiting for my flights back. It’s such a waste of time to fly from Portland to Vancouver via Seattle, but that’s the only late flight I could find.
So, thanks again for the North West Oracle User Group and Dale Rae for having me, and thanks for all the attendees for coming (and sitting quietly while I talked through the break). I’d like to see more of Portland, so I guess I’ll be back.