I usually write about conferences quicker, but didn’t manage to find the time so I’m a week late. Last week I spoke at VODD (Vancouver Oracle Developers Day) here in downtown Vancouver. The conference was organized by Insum, a consulting company specializing in Oracle development and APEX (with a branch here in Vancouver) and was sponsored by ODTUG and BCOUG. The conference was pure technical with speakers from Insum and Oracle (and me). It was very well organize and I had a lot of fun.
It started with a funny presentation by Frank Hoogendoorn (VP Business Solutions at Insum). He talked about the future of technology. After Frank, Sherry presented BCOUG and Martin presented ODTUG. And last for this part was Peter from BC Government, who presented a really unique (in my opinion) and innovative way that the BC government uses the developers community. That way they can respond very quickly to demands and allow a shorter and more efficient cycle of development with less investment.
The first full session was about APEX 5.1 (the new version that is not yet released) by David Peake from Oracle. I know David from about 2 years ago when he came to a conference we organized in Israel. He’s a great guy and we chatted as well later that day. As I tweeted, if I continue listening to David and Joel Kalman, I might find myself developing apps in APEX instead of being a DBA (which might be not a bad idea after all). David’s talk was great, light, informative and funny.
After David came Dan McGhan from Oracle and talked about JavaScript stuff. Dan is really nice and I talked with him after the conference quite a lot, but I have to admit that I couldn’t really follow his session as I have nothing to do with this stuff.
The next session was by Martin D’Souza (senior consultant at Insum and ACE Director) about open source PL/SQL packages in a project called OraOpenSource. As he promised, it started with easy and simple stuff like validation procedures, but got to really nice things such as lob conversion, logger and APEX stuff. It’s all open source, free and very cool!
During lunch, Adrian Png (Senior developer at Insum and BCOUG board member) and Monty Latiolais (Director of Business Development at Insum and Oracle ACE) showed how to quickly create an APEX application that immediately provides benefit to the organization.
The first session after lunch was a session I shared with Monty about 12.2 new features. As Monty comes from development background he presented new features for developers. I, As a DBA, presented features for DBAs. As I expected, once I explained about the new sharding option, that’s all what people asked about (you can read more in my post about sharding). As John Brock from Oracle (the next speaker) had some technical problems, we had about 15 more minutes for questions, and I hope I managed to answer them well.
John’s session was about JET (JavaScript Extension Toolkit), so again, I didn’t really manage to follow. The last session was a few lightning talks, 10 minutes each, on various topics.
After the conference, we went to St. Regis Bar and Grill for some drinks and networking. I got to talk to Martin, Monty, David, Dan, Peter and more and had great conversations (even though these developers sometimes don’t like DBAs…).
Oracle Developer Day was the first full day conference I spoke at here in Vancouver. Being part of BCOUG, it was a pleasure to see all these people come to hear the technical content the conference offered. Even though I’m new here, I realized that I’m starting to know more and more people and it was great to talk to everyone. The sessions were excellent (those that I understood anyway) and it was a great fun to meet everyone. I know how difficult it is to organize such a conference and the guys at Insum did an excellent job. It was simply a great combination of fun and knowledge with great people!
I would like to thank Insum and the organizers (Frank, Martin, Monty and Adrian) for the conference and for having me. I hope we will have more days like that here.