I am home! After a very intense 10 days in San Francisco.

Quite jetlagged and so much work waiting for me to finish  🙂 But I am happy. It was such a privilege to be able to attend both the Oracle ACE Director briefing and the Oracle Openworld 2016!

People often ask me, after the OOW, what is new in the Oracle space. I am sorry but I cannot answer that question. The ACED briefing has a very strict NDA that does not allow me to tell anything I heard during those two days and because I am always too busy during the OOW to really see and hear what is publicly announced I have decided not to say anything, just to be sure I do not violate the NDA. So please do not get upset that my answer is I do not say anything.

It all started with the ACED briefing at the Oracle HQ. I was staying at the Sofitel hotel with a beautiful view (too bad I was not in my room except for sleeping):

The ACED briefing was for two days (Thursday and Friday), including highlights like meeting Thomas Kurian:

Working intensively with my friends and colleagues:

And attending a morning exercise session by my friend Kent Graziano:

After the intense two days at the HQ we moved to San Francisco to start the OOW. I gave two sessions during the event: one about Big Data together with my friend Elise Valin-Raki and another sessions about (still) my favourite topic on how to design databases using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Elise and I were pretty cordinated with our dresscode:

I also attended the WIT panel organized by OTN and Laura Ramsay:

And stayed after the panel to talk with people and answer their questions as well as I could:

OTN and Oracle Press also organized a book signing event for our new book:

It was a fun book to write. I hope you will like reading it 🙂

I am a member of the ACE community but also a member of the user group community. Part of that commitment is helping at the user group kiosk. I scanned everybody with my new toy 😀

Besides of the huge amount of content OOW is also all about parties and meeting people. Every evening there are plenty of parties… This photo is from the reception organized by Loïc Le Guisquet:

The best part of both these events is still meeting friends and making new friends. Just a few eaxmples 🙂

And to meet these friends from the Oracle community gets even more exciting when you start to know them better. This year I learned that my friend Arup Nanda is not just a great Oracle expert and a wonderful person but also a gifted artist. This is a painting he gave me as a present:

I love it!

Now the OOW is over and I’m back to home again. It was a great 10 days. Thank you for letting me speak, thank you for all the great feedback and thank you Oracle ACE Program and OTN for treating me so well! I cannot wait for OOW17!

Cheers,

Heli

It’s that time of year again, OOW is getting closer… This year I will have two presentations:

• Introduction to the Big Data World [UGF2116]
  Sunday, Sep 18, 11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Moscone South—305
• Design Your Databases Using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler [CON2120]
  Monday, Sep 19, 4:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Park Central—Concordia

I hope to see you there!

I will also attend the #OTNWIT Panel on Sunday. You can find more information about it here: https://community.oracle.com/events/3592

Please join us!

Before OOW we will have the Oracle ACE Director briefing at the Oracle HQ. That is one of the highlights of my year 🙂

Oh, and this will be a bit special OOW too because my new book just came out:

https://www.amazon.com/Real-World-SQL-PL-Experts/dp/1259640973/

I wrote it together with my good friends Arup, Brendan, Martin and Alex. Chet, our own Oraclenerd, was our tech editor. He also wrote the foreword together with my very own Oracle-dad Tim Hall. I hope you like the book! And if you want it signed OOW is a great place for that because we will all be there 🙂

See you soon in San Francisco!

— Heli

At the moment I am on vacation. I have started a healthier life: I exercise every day and I eat healthy. That’s what I have been mainly doing on my vacation 🙂

And it is very good because the rest of the year will be extremely busy! I still have my daily job at Miracle, my studies, research and teaching at the University and some travelling to speak in various events. I try to cut the travelling part down a bit to be able to work more but… First I got an invitation to come and speak at the POUG event in Poland, then 2 talks were accepted to DOAG2016 and on the content catalog of Oracle Openworld 2016 I found these:

But three trips is much less than it has been lately 🙂

This Fall/Autumn will be busy but extremely fun and interesting!

Enjoy Summer!

Cheers,

Heli

One of my fav events and a must to attend is definitely KScope. This year it was held June 26-30 in Chicago which was a perfect location for me: never been there and have a direct flight from Helsinki 🙂

The reason I write this post so late is that at the end of the event I managed to catch a flu and have been a bit slow and quiet. Now I am fine again 🙂

KScope always starts with a Community Service Day on Saturday but unfortunately I always miss it. The reason is that on Friday we have the biggest celebration (mid-Summer) of a year in Finland and I simply cannot miss that! Sunday is a day for Symposiums and that is something I always attend. Also this year. I am glad that it has been made possible for attendees to attend any of those tracks and I usually jump from one symposium to another during the day and learn about many different areas.

This year I had two session: Managing the Changes in Database Structures Using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler and a Thursday Deep Dive: Database Design for Developers.

(Thank you Bryn Llewellyn for the photo!)

I also moderated the database panel and a WIT roundtable. Thank you for attending my sessions and especially thank you to my wonderful panel: Kim Berg Hansen, Robert Lockard, Cary Millsap and Björn Rost. You were amazing! And a special thank you to Cary for this:

You really made my day!

One of the hightlights of KScope is the Wednesday party. This time it was held in the Museum of Science and Industry. What a party!

Thank you ODTUG! It was an amazing event! Bye-bye Chicago

See you all next year in San Antonio! (http://www.kscope17.com/)

I am at the Glasgow airport waiting to board my flight to London and then home.

I was attending and speaking at the OUG Scotland event in Glasgow. What a great event it was! I did not even realize how much I have missed the UKOUG events and Scotland! I had so much fun, met old friends and made new ones. Thank you everybody!

I arrived on Wednesday for the ACE dinner organized by Debra Lilley. The food was lovely but what was the best was that this restaurant is famous for its gin collection: they have 60 different gins! They did not know anything about Björn Rost’s speciality Gin Basil Smash but they offered us a Gin Smash which was pretty close to the one Björn makes but had mint in it. Not bad at all!

The event was a one day event on Thursday. I was a very proud panelist on a optimising panel chaired by Jonathan Lewis:

Based on what I heard from the attendees afterwards the panel was really good. I had fun and as usual I did have plenty of opinions 😉

I also gave a session about managing the changes in database structures using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Thank you for all the questions during and after the session!

I attended several great session during the day and when we finished I was really tired and ready to sleep. But since a good friend of mine, Peter Robson, was there I really wanted to have a dinner and a proper chat with him. He will be visiting Finland very soon! We realized we both like the same band and will go and see their concert in Helsinki in September 🙂

We had a great dinner in an Italian restaurant:

Kai Yu, thank you for the photos!

What a great event and what a great couple of days in Scotland! Please, UK, vote for “remain”… My travelling would get more difficult if you vote otherwice…

Cheers,

Heli

P.S. They voted “leave” 😦 My flight was delayed almost 2h and I missed my connecting flight. Thanks to Finnair’s superkind customer service (my ticket was a BA ticket!) I made it to the next flight and was home only about 1 h later than originally planned. Still waiting for my bag though…

P.P.S The bag arrived!

I am on my way home after travelling for 10 days. I visited 3 countries and attended 5 events. At the moment I am in Germany waiting to be boarded to my last flight of this tour.

I started my tour with the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge in Leiden, Netherlands. Then I attended the AMIS25 celebrations with two talks: My fav SQL Developer features and Managing changes in database structures. After that I flew to Sofia, Bulgaria where I drove to Borovets for the BGOUG event. At the BGOUG I gave two talks: one about Big Data and the second one about my fav SQL Developer features. After BGOUG I had one day to rest in Sofia (=to do my real work) and then Milena and I drove to Bucharest, Romania. In Romania I attended the EOUC Presidents’ meeting and I gave two talks at the local user group (RoOUG). The first talk was about Big Data and the second one about database security.

I had a great 10 days and I would like to thank all the organizers, attendees and fellow speakers. I am very tired but it really was a great (and efficient J ) tour! Now I will rest a bit before OUG Scotland in Glasgow and KScope16 in Chicago…

What an amazing BGOUG once again! This time it was held on the mountains in one of the ski resorts. Beautiful place!

I missed the first day because I was travelling from the wonderful #AMIS25 event but I did make it to the dinner and… the dancing. There is no BGOUG without dancing!

On the second day of BGOUG I gave two sessions. One about Big Data, the area I am doing my research on for the PhD. The room was packed! Not everybody found themselves a seat! Thank you so much for attending! I hope you enjoyed my talk.

The second session was a session APEX Connect asked me to give in April: My fav features of SQL Developer. I was thinking I have nothing special to tell, I am just a regular user not a guru. But already in APEX Connect it turned out that I did have some tips not everybody knew about. And also in BGOUG every attendee convinced me they learned something new in my session. I am so glad! And I am also extremely glad the session was so well attended!

The weather in the mountains was quite surprising: rainy, windy, sunny,… But we were good because we knew how to forecast the weather, thanks to a local sign:

Thank you Milena and the team! It was a great event, as always!

— Heli

First of all congratulate AMIS! 25 years is a great achievement!

I just attended the #AMIS25 event. On Wednesday we had a hackathon organized by OTN for ACEs. Later the name of the event was changed to OTN Cloud Developer Challenge and a challenge it was 🙂 My team was Oracle Family and the Associates including my Oracle Dad Tim Hall, my Oracle Mom Debra Lilley, Gurcan Orhan and Osama Mustafa. Gurcan was our team leader and Osama Mustafa missed the whole fun because of visa issues.

We built a demo application for speakers for OTN Tours to tell who will be attending, which flights and which hotels they have booked etc. I really hope we will finish building this application because it definitely would be extremely useful! Thank you to OTN for organizing and thank you to my team for all the fun! For instance I now know how to build REST Services (I built quite many of those 🙂  ).

After we finished the challenge the AMIS25 started with a welcome reception.

On Wednesday morning we were ready to start the official event. I gave two talks: one on my favorite features of SQL Developer and another one on how to manage changes in structures of database objects. Both my sessions were well attended (even though Jonathan Lewis was speaking at the same time as I gave my second presentation 🙂  ). Thank you very much for attending!

Thank you Lucas Jellema for inviting me! Once again congratulate AMIS and thank you for a great event! Now I am on my way to Bulgaria for the BGOUG…

– – Heli

As some of you might already know, I have started my PhD studies at the University of Helsinki. My research area is Big Data and Unified Databases. It has been extremely interesting but the highlight so far was last week: the 32^nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE  2016) was held in my home town, Helsinki. I was not just attending and working as a volunteer but I was also chairing one of the conference sessions: Research 6B: Analytics on Big Data (http://icde2016.fi/pre_program.php#Q1-1-196)! On Monday I was attending and web co-chairing/coordinating the First Europe-China Workshop on Big Data (http://udbms.cs.helsinki.fi/BigData2016/). On Friday I was attending and assisting with the Workshop on Keyword Search and Data Exploration on Structured Data, KEYS 2016, (http://keys2016.cs.helsinki.fi/).

That was a busy week but I could not find a better way to get to know the academic world! It was an amazing week!

This week I attended my first specifically APEX conference, APEX Connect in Berlin, Germany. Remember the Berlin Wall?

Our hotel was on the East side. I am sure I will remember this hotel FOREVER. Why? Guess.. 🙂

The first day started with a welcoming speech by Niels de Bruijn and his team. And then the stage was taken by “Tom” Chris Saxon. Chris gave a excellent talk about his experience on working on AskTom. My first talk was at 12.00 about Managing the changes in database structures in agile project with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. It is not easy to compete with lunch but almost a room full of people chose my presentation from lunch 🙂 Thank you so much for attending!

Before my next talk I attended Alex Nuijten’s Analytic Functions: Unleash the SQL Power, even though he was telling me not to. His excuse was that I have seen this session already. So what! Alex is a great presenter and I always learn new things in his sessions.

At 4.15 pm I was supposed to give a workshop on Top 10 Features of SQL Developer everybody should use. I say supposed because the room was getting fuller and fuller, more chairs were brough in and finally it was so full there was no extra space. I decided to just demo the features and give the slides to the audience to do the workshop part at home. I also agreed with the organizers (DOAG) that I will give this session in November at the DOAG event so that those who missed it this time will have a new chance to see it. Thank you very much for attending and thank you for all the questions and ideas!

The next morning started with the announcement of the winners of “APEX BI competition”. Congratulations to all the winners AND to all the attendees! Next it was the godfather of APEX, Mike Hichwa, sharing his thoughts of the APEX Vision; past, present and future. Mike is a great presenter and he definitely knew what he was talking about. Great keynote! After that I listened David Peake telling about the New Features in Oracle Application Express 5.1. As usual David was showing great demos for a full room. I could not get a seat so needed to listen the presentation standing 🙂

One of my favourite speakers is also Roel (“Rule”) Hartman. He knows what he is talking about and makes the audience believe they have understood everything 🙂 I went to see the presentation: Make your APEX Applications fly using JET components.

I though the day was perfect but no. The last keynote was simply amazing. Monkey See Monkey Do: Monkey Business at the work floor by Patrick van Veen. Using experiments with monkeys he explained human behaviour and gave great advice to IT projects, work and the whole life. Total Monkey Business!

After the monkeys it was time for a party! Dinner, show and plenty of music and fun!

The last day was full of great sessions. Of course I attended the sessions by Roel (APEX Developers: Do more with Less!!) and Alex (Structuring an APEX application). BTW I must attend all the session by Alex from now on: when I am in the room he remembers to tell the audience the right things  😉 If you add a new column, fill it up and change it to mandatory,…if you want to avoid performance problems, design your database,… 🙂

I also attended the session by Christian Rokitta, Lunchtime learn Q&A (which turned out to be lunch OR learn 🙂 ) and An Update to Universal Theme by Shakeeb Rahman.

Thank you all the organizers (GREAT WORK!) and thank you all who attended my sessions! Great event! Amazing community! I really, really hope I will be invited next year again!

— Heli