I am at the Birmingham airport on my way home from UKOUG Tech 2017. This was my last event for this year. Cannot wait to be home to celebrate the independence of Finland tomorrow. 100 years independent!

My year was busier than ever, I kind of hope next year will be easier but it is not an easy wish because I really enjoyed this year a lot. In addition to my everyday work I have been teaching at the university, studying, researching and speaking in different kinds of events about many different topics. In 2017 I spoke at

UKOUG, Birmingham, UK

DOAG, Nuremberg, Germany

Devoxx Morocco, Casablanca, Morocco

Nordic ACE Tour
Denmark
Sweden
Norway
Finland

HrOUG, Rovinj, Croatia

SIOUG, Portoroz, Slovenia

Oracle Open World, San Francisco, USA

Tajikistan TechDay, Dushanbe, Tajikistan

POUG, Krakow, Poland

Oracle Code Seoul, South Korea

APEX Day, Oracle House, Finland

Oracle Code Bengaluru, India

KScope17, San Antonio, USA

E4 2017, Dallas, USA

BGOUG, Bulgaria

OTN EMEA Tour
Baku, Azerbaijan
Madrid, Spain

Riga DevDays 2017, Riga, Latvia

APEX Connect, Berlin, Germany

BIWA Summit, Redwood City, Oracle HQ, USA

If I counted correctly that would be 23 events in a year. Now it is time to take a break for holidays. Next year does not start very slowly because I have already agreed to go to Israel in January and Ireland in March. But until that: enjoy December. Let’s hope it will be a white Christmas and that Santa (from Finland!) pays a visit 🙂

Cheers,

Heli

I cannot believe how fast time flies! It has been an exceptionally busy year and that is the reason I have not had time to write blog posts either. I have been speaking in amazing events like BIWA Summit, APEX Connect, Riga DevDays 2017, OTNEMEA Tour in Baku and in Madrid, BGOUG, E4, KScope17, Oracle Code Bengaluru, the first ever APEX Day in Finland, Oracle Code Seoul, POUG, and Tajikistan TechDay. Next on my list is Oracle OpenWorld. As always it will be a busy week.

I will fly to San Francisco on Thursday to attend the ACE Director briefing on Friday at the Oracle HQ. I will have three talks:

And I will also have two short talks:

• one at the EOUC track
• and another one at the WIT Lightning Storm session

I will have several meetings, swimming, running and chocolate tasking

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chocolate-tasting-at-oracle-openworld-2017-tickets-38069813838

Just to mention some of the social activities during the week. To me the social side is very important, I am a big believer of face-to-face meetings.

Now my only concern is will I finish all my presentations on time so I guess I need to stop writing and start working… I hope to see many of you next week in San Francisco!

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

In the beginning of November I attended my first OTN APAC Tour and was speaking in Beijing. It was a busy event:

And the first ever I could not read the agenda: I needed to ask the local people where and when do I speak 😀

And I did speak! My first session was about my favourite features of SQL Developer and the second one was about database designing using Data Modeler:

The Data Modeler session was the last one for the whole event and for some reason the previous session overrun about 45 minutes 😦 So my session started at the time I was supposed to be finishing…but no worries people stayed and I had a great audience for the session.

This was my first visit in China and I want to thank Tony Chen (user group liaison for APAC) for the great hospitality and taking the time (from his extremely busy schedule) to show me a little bit of China. And of course Jennifer for being such a fun company to travel with!

Thank you all my fellow speakers, it was a joy to spend time with you and to learn.

And thank you to the organizers for the great event and the amazing speakers’ dinner! When I was thinking we are done with the eating more food was brought to the table 🙂

And the same food fest was also with the breakfast. I travel a lot and I see many different kinds of breakfasts in hotels but I must say the one in Beijing was one of the best ever: I cannot imagine any food that was not served at the breakfast 🙂 Just some examples:

Travelling is always good but I think this one was really eye-opening: before my trip I did not understand that I should be extremely happy to live in the country that has clean air. In Beijing I though the smog was bad when I arrived:

But I learned it can be even worse:

I really enjoyed my visit to China but due to the pollution I do not think I could live there. But from now on I will never take our fresh and clean air for granted.

Thank you OTN, the ACE Program and ACOUG!

— Heli

Last night I returned from the POUG event in Poland. It was a two day event in Warsaw. This was their first international event with plenty of globally known speakers. It definitely was a great two days! The event started with a speakers’ dinner on Thursday evening. On Friday morning some of us were feeling better than others  🙂  I was smart enough to skip the “Warsaw sightseeing” (read “bar tour”) organized by Kamil  😀

BTW I learned that a tringle means Mens’ and this symbol:

Is the symbol for Ladies’…almost took the wrong door…

During the event I spoke about my TOP 10 favourite features of SQL Developer and explained how to manage the changes in database structures using SQL Developer Data Modeler. And finally I remembered to take a photo of my audience:

Poland is a great place to speak! The people are smart and they want to learn. And the athmosphere in the conference was very warm and comfortable. Sabine, Arne and I decided the official color of the event is red.

In the morning I did not feel like wearing red:

But by lunch time I felt the pressure so strong I needed to go and change  😀 :

And on Saturday I already knew how to dress up  😀 :

Friday evening was superfun! We had the after party in a restaurant where an amazing band of pirates was playing interesting instruments:

An excellent event and I am so happy to see Polish user group so active! Congratulations! Well done! As one of the two ambassadors for EMEA user groups I am so happy I was able to attend and be part of this new phase of one of our user groups. Thank you for inviting me POUG! Thank you OTN and the ACE Program for your support! The community is growing!