Once again I am sitting at the airport, this time in Prague. I had a wonderful week and I feel extremely blessed.

On Tuesday I flew to Bucharest, Romania for the Oracle University Romania Expert Summit. I arrived in the afternoon just in time to meet Chris Date and a Romanian friend of mine Mirela Ardelean. Mirela took us for a sightseeing walk and for a lovely meal. Oracle was very kind to us and sent some wine and fruits in our rooms. After the nice tour and meal Chris and I ended up to the hotel room drinking wine and talking about relational theory and everything. The next morning the Summit really started for me and Chris: he was presenting and I was attending his session on Aspects of Relational Theory. Chris mentioned there are at least two articles by Codd that everybody should read once a year; I think everybody should attend this session once a year! It is so easy to forget the basics and make terrible mistakes.

It was not an easy decision to attend Chris’ session: at the same time Pete Finnigan was teaching Oracle Database Security Audit and Jonathan Lewis explaining how to write optimal SQL. After the long and very useful day I gave a talk at the local user group (RoOUG) about agile database design. The audience was absolutely fantastic! I had so much fun that without my friend Ciprian (president of the Romanian Oracle user group) I would have talked until the morning and missed the speakers’ dinner Dan, Cosmin and Joel organized for us in a lovely Italian restaurant.

Thursday was “my day”: I talked the whole day about database designing and Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. I was quite surprised to see the room was totally packed! After all there was Chris explaining Time and Relational Theory and Pete continued his talk about security at the same time with me. When we finished teaching both me and Chris realized we are too tired to attend the Big Data roundtable led by Alex and instead ended up having a glass of red wine.

In the evening there was a light festival in Bucharest: a lot of lights everywhere and people having a party. I, Chris and Mirela went for a late dinner in old town. The late dinner turned out to be very late because the chefs were too busy since everybody wanted to eat out that evening and we really waited for the meal very long. But the meal came and it was delicious. Then we had to get to sleep because Chris had an early flight in the morning and I wanted to attend Alex’ session on Big Data the next morning.

Friday was the Big Data day: Alex was the only speaker and did get the room full with people interested in the topic. Unfortunately I had to leave in the middle to catch my plane.

I must say the Expert Summit was really worth doing! It was an excellent event and Oracle really made me feel like a member of royal family! Joel, Dan, Cosmin and the team: you really were spoiling us! Thank you! I only have one more thing to say: please invite me again to an Expert Summit! Thank you Oracle University!