It is easy to say BGOUG is one of my favourite conferences. Not only because Milena is a dear friend, the venue is always wonderful, food is excellent etc but because I simply love the Bulgarian audience! They are extremely interested in learning, they ask a lot of questions and the best for a shy Finn like me is that they give you wonderful face-to-face feedback.

After my first session a gentleman came to me and he said he saw my session two years ago and it changed his life for better: now he knows a better way to talk to the end users to get better requirements to be able to create better databases and applications for end users. Another person came to me and said he really hope I will be there in November to share my knowledge again because he learns so much in every presentation. A lady wrote to me that she admires my work and enjoys my sessions very much. Etc.

I am usually very bad with feedback: good or bad. But these people can give it in a way I do not feel embarrassed but honored and privileged. Thank you all for your nice comments! You do not know how much it means to me! I was really tired after the conference (I just realized I have not had any free weekends for two months!) but extremely happy: my travelling and speaking has a meaning! Thank you!

And Thank you Philip Stoyanov for the fantastic speech!

Heli

It’s the second day of BGOUG conference. The first day was excellent and was highlighted by a great party in the evening: good food and drinks, great company and lots of dancing! Not to mention the nice speech Philip Stoyanov gave at the party before we had a raffle for two lucky winners for a copy of my book 🙂

The second day started with a breakfast at 8 and the sessions at 10. I have been working the whole morning (answering questions from customers about Data Modeler, preparing my sessions etc) and I just realized that while you are travelling you do not make a difference if the day is a weekday or Saturday/Sunday. It’s 11.30 am now and I was wondering why people do not reply my emails. Now I know: it’s Saturday 🙂

Today I will have two sessions: one about comparing designs and database (at 14:00) and another one about reporting (at 15:00). Both sessions are in Plovdiv 3. I hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Heli

Now I am in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and the BGOUG conference is about to start…

Travelling around and trying to do your job on the side is not always easy: usually it means you will not sleep much… Well here we go… and this will be a great conference as BGOUG always is!

Tomorrow it starts: the ilOUG Tech Days 2015 in Haifa, Israel. I travelled all day yesterday to be here in time to attend the fantastic guided tour by Ika, the best guide in Israel. We had a wonderful day at the Nazareth area. After the tour I needed to work a little and then to dinner. Then I prepared my slides for tomorrow. I will be talking about agile database design, reporting with Data Modeler and about database security. And I will give one copy of my new book away in each Data Modeler session…

Hope to see you tomorrow! Now it’s time to go to bed…

I just got back from the EMEA user group leaders’ meeting in Lisbon. It was so great to see so many amazing friends again!

During the meeting we for instance agreed on the Ambassador program (DOAG and UKOUG will organize the election for new Ambassadors pretty soon) and the new and improved way of counting votes for the OOW when we select our EOUC speakers. I posted about these to Oracle community platform.

I hope I will have time later to blog more about the meeting. Unfortunately my pictures are not very good so cannot share them 😦

Now back to work. On Sunday I will fly to ilOUG and so much work I must finish before that…

The third and last event of our tour was Johannesburg, South Africa. The event was held at the local Oracle office which BTW is very beautiful. There have been some major changes in the organization of the local user group, SAOUG, but now it’s up and running again and the new president gave a nice welcome speech to kick off the event.

First I gave my presentation about “Getting started with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler” added with some general things from my “Database Design with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler” session. Later the day I gave a presentation about “Reporting with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler”. And of course I gave away one of my books, this time to Dina. This copy is special because it’s also signed by Debra Lilley who has written some nice words in the beginning of the book.

The local Oracle was kind enough to serve us a lovely lunch which was needed because we did overrun, we finished much later than planned.

It was a great tour! Thank you user groups in Portugal, Jordan and South Africa! I hope you liked my sessions and learnt new things about Data Modeler. Thank you Björn for organizing and OTN for funding the trip! And especially thank you to my travelling friends: Debra, Björn and Tariq. I sincerely hope this tour will be organized next year again and please consider me as one of the speakers 😉

The user group in Jordan is quite new and I was really amazed to hear they had 66 registrations for the #OTNEMEA day! The event was held in a University and unfortunately the ongoing celebrations of graduations delimited our number of attendees a bit… I cannot blame them: the party looked really fun!

Once again I talked about Data Modeler and database design and gave a signed copy of my book to the person Osama selected. I hope you like the book, Moe (Mohammad Faisal)!

We enjoyed a wonderful lunch eating traditional Jordanian food and talked about anything related to Oracle. After the day we had a little time to relax after the long day (and short night, thanks to our delayed flight). Then we had the first ever Jordanian Solaris SIG event led my Björn Rost. Great attendance and great content!

Now it’s time to get to bed. Tomorrow we will fly to South Africa…