I already know 2017 will be busy there is no questions about it. I will continue my day job at Miracle and my research and teaching at the University. I was planning not to travel but I guess I am not a very good planner 😀

In January/February I will be speaking at the BIWA Summit and attending the Property Graph Developer Day at the Oracle HQ. In April I will be speaking at the Collaborate, in May at the APEX Connect, in June at the KScope and in September at the POUG event in Poland. It is possible I will be speaking somewhere else too during the year but all these are already confirmed.

I wish you a wonderful 2017! And hope to see you somewhere during the year!

— Heli

2016 was again a busy year. I have been working on my regular day job, studying the Big Data world, researching, writing, speaking and teaching at the University of Helsinki.

My second book came out:

I spoke at several events (I hope I did not forget anything):

• DOAG2016, Nuremberg, Germany
• OTN APAC Tour:
  • Beijing, China
  • Sangam16, Bangalore/Bengaluru, India
• POUG, Warsaw, Poland
• Oracle Open World, San Francisco, USA
• MiitIT, Helsinki, Finland
• ODTUG KScope16, Chicago, USA
• UKOUG Scotland, Glasgow
• RoOUG, Romania
• BGOUG, Bulgaria
• AMIS 25 – Beyond the Horizon, Leiden, The Netherlands
• APEX Connect 2016, Berlin, Germany
• OUGF EXA-SIG, Helsinki, Finland
• Collaborate, Las Vegas, USA
• OUGN, Norway
• GaOUG Tech Day 2016, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

I attended my first academic events: a Big Data Workshop (http://udbms.cs.helsinki.fi/BigData2016/) and the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE (http://icde2016.fi/). I was also a volunteer worker in both events and I guess I made some kind of history by being a chair for one of the sessions at ICDE as a newcomer:-) I really enjoyed both the events!

I was helping to organize and co-chairing the EOUC Leaders’ meeting in Nuremberg:

http://www.helifromfinland.blog/2016/12/02/eouc-leaders-meeting-at-doag2016/

I have been helping several user groups to judge the submitted Call for Papers and of course serving the EMEA user groups as their elected Ambassador. One of my duties during the year was to attend the EOUC Leaders’ meeting in Romania in June and give a speech to our long time Oracle liaison, Mary Lou Dopart. I want to thank her for all the years she has been working for user groups and I want to wish her all the best with her new duties:

For many years (at least since 2011: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/green/eco-enterprise-awards-2011-517494.html ) I have been one of the judges for the Oracle Sustainability Award (used to be called the ECO Award). I am very honoured about it because I consider myself as a “green person” and I enjoy seeing companies making green choices. Also in 2016 I was  judging the 2016 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/green/sustainability-innovation-3251463.html). Congratulation to all nominees and the winners!

I attended the OTN/AMIS Hackathon in Leiden. We did not win but we had a great team and so much fun!  😀

I have been giving interviews, signing books and smiling in several photos 🙂 .  I think this photo sums it all up  😀 Somebody taking a photo of Connor “AskTom” McDonald taking a photo of me  😀

Oh and I was listed as one of the TOP 100 IT Influencers in Finland by TiVi magazine (http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/tassa-ovat-it-alan-100-vaikuttajaa-2016-6604873), just like last year. I am extremely proud of this. Thank you!

And just to remind everybody, it does take a lot of work, it is not just dancing ballet (I love ballet! and I know how real this photo is…)…

It was a great year and I probably forgot to mention half of what happened. I am tired but happy  🙂

Thank you! I am looking forward to 2017!

— Heli

My last event this year was DOAG 2016 in Nuremberg. Since the event was in Germany it all started with a…beer…

DOAG is one of the best organized user group events in this planet! And the venue is the best possible one with several floors each having its own restaurant for lunches. Also DOAG has a great number of attendees meaning you will meet plenty of friends. I started it by meeting (accidentally 🙂 ) Christian Berg at the railway station before the event even started!

I had breakfast with Tanel Poder…

And during the event I met many, many friends like Alex Nuijten:

2*Martin, Neil, Mathias,…

And some more friends at the dinner organized by Tirthankar and Sonja. Thank you! It was such a nice evening: great company, delicious food.

Oh I did present too 😀

Again two talks: Database designing with Data Modeler, where I gave one of by books away as usual:

and the favourite features of SQL Developer in a huuuuge room:

Great event! Amazing presentations and wonderful people. Thank you!

— Heli

Already the third time DOAG was helping the EMEA Oracle Usergroup Community (EOUC) leaders to meet face-to-face during the big event of DOAG (the German Oracle user group). Thank you DOAG for your amazing support for the community!

As always the meeting was a great success: 31 participants from 24 different user groups sharing their experience and collaborating. This time we also had two special guests from Mark Hurd’s office to hear our feedback on Oracle Cloud.

The day was full of interesting topics starting from improvement ideas on communication between user groups to our appearance at the OOW2017. We spoke about our new magazine (feel free to sign up, it’s free and extremely interesting http://www.oraworld.org/home/ ).

Thank you for attending the meeting and being so active! And thank you DOAG for making this possible!

And the mandatory WIT in user groups photo 🙂

In November I also attended the Sangam the first time. It all actually started in Norway at the OUGN event earlier this year. Sai from AIOUG was there and attended my session. Afterwards he came to me and said: “Heli, we need you in India!”. Because of Sai I was willing to skip one of my favourite events, BGOUG, that was at the same time with Sangam and decided to visit India.

I am glad I did. I really, really liked India! And Sangam was an amazing event. And I learned a lot about different cultures! In Delhi (I changed the plane there) I learned that you must have a tag (for stamping) in every hand luggage and in Bangalore I learned that in Finland we do not have any rush hours…

The venue for the event was a lovely hotel in Bengaluru:

Sai was extremely kind to us and organized us a wonderful sightseeing tour:

After the sightseeing tour we were ready for Sangam16!

One of the keynotes during the event was a guru explaining us the technology of happiness.

It was an interesting presentation. We also tried meditation and I am pretty sure I fell asleep 🙂

I gave again two sessions: my favourite SQL Developer features and database designing with Data Modeler.

It was a great event!

We enjoyed the ACE dinner:

and plenty of quality time with great people:

Thank you very much Sai and the AIOUG team, OTN and the ACE program for letting me to experience this! I really hope I can visit Sangam one day again!

— Heli