My last presentation this year was extremely interesting: it was both my first presentation (EVER!) about cloud as well as APEX. I was speaking at the Oracle Cloud Day in Helsinki, Finland on a real customer case on building APEX applications on Oracle Cloud. Thank you Carus for letting me tell your story!

Thank you for attending the session and thank you so much for all the positive feedback! I guess I will keep on talking about both Cloud and APEX 🙂

Cheers

Heli

My last trips this year were two amazing conferences: DOAG in Germany and BGOUG in Bulgaria. I am not sure if there would be a better way to end your travelling year!

Thank you very much for having me and thank you so much for the great hospitality! And please forgive me this blog post only comes out now: I have been far too busy lately.

Best wishes,

Heli

It’s time to pack again, the last time this year. Early on Monday morning I will fly to Germany to start my week-long tour in Germany and Bulgaria.

On Monday we will have an EOUC (EMEA Oracle Users Group Community) leaders’ meeting in Germany. I look forward seeing all the leaders of the user groups in EMEA, it will be a good meeting. In three hours I will have the final call with the organizing team and we will finalize the agenda based on the ideas about the content the leaders have told us.

Then on Tuesday the DOAG2015 starts! I will have two presentations about Data Modeler to present. This year I am not in that big and scary room 🙂 I hope to see you in my sessions!

On Thursday I will fly to Sofia, Bulgaria to present at BGOUG. I also have two presentations there. Milena (the president of BGOUG) informed us that there will be 370 registered attendees! That is an impressive number! Congrats Milena and BGOUG! Good job!

And on Sunday I will fly home.

It will be an interesting and wonderful week. See you all soon!

Heli

Thursday, the day to fly home.

I started my day with a WIT breakfast and had a lot of fun during that. Next year we will most likely have a WIT lunch and maybe a bit more official one than this. Let’s see what Kellyn does…

Then I rushed to the panel where Connor, Tim Hall and a bunch of others were talking about SQL and PL/SQL and got complains from people not taking selfies with them 😀 So plenty of selfies in the following 5 min 😀

Then it was time to pack and check out from the hotel.

1:15 pm I attended That Jeff Smith’s sessions where he gave away some copies of my book and I had my red pen ready for signatures…

Then a lunch with a customer, and a milkshake with my Oracle Dad, Tim Hall. Tim was kind enough to carry my extremely heavy bag to the limousine that the kind people of the ACE Program had organized to take me to the airport. Thank you! Very much appreciated! And thank you Lufthansa for ignoring the fact my bag was kind of heavy 🙂 Great Customer service at the SFO airport!

I slept both my flight from SFO to MUC and MUC to HEL, stayed up for a couple of hours and slept the whole night. Two naps during the day and now I feel I am quite OK again.  Great week! Thank you everybody and see you next year again!

Wednesday started with an EMEA breakfast at Fairmont hotel and an interview. Then very briefly to meet Jean-Pierre Dijcks (thank you JP!) and off to the meeting with Mark Hurd. It is not unusual I meet him (we usually have a brief meeting during the OOW) but what made this meeting special was that firstly I gave him a copy of my book and secondly he tweeted about our meeting. How cool is that!

I am an Ambassador for EOUC (EMEA Oracle Users Group Community) and in that role I have this wonderful chance to meet Mark Hurd. Thank you, Mary Lou Dopart, for organizing these meetings!

After all this excitement it was time for a lunch with our local Oracle and one of our customers. Then meeting Wendy Rinaldi from Oracle Press and the super talented and wonderful Mike Dietrich. Thank you, Mike, for your help and advice!

And the guess what…parties again 🙂 First my favorite party: The Bloggers’ meetup organized by Pythian and OTN. I do not go to the big party (I am too old and tired to go there) so after the Bloggers’ meetup it was time for a quiet dinner with Jens Walbjorn from Oracle Denmark. Thank you, Jens! It was a very nice dinner!

Tuesday. First thing in the morning was attending the Publisher Seminar. Once again strict NDAs and plenty of interesting content. The best though was to meet personally all the people from McGraw-Hill, Oracle Press team. I am working on my second book and I enjoy it very much. If you have not seen my first book yet, here it is: http://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Developer-Modeler-Database-Mastery/dp/0071850090.

Then it was time to meet the APEX team for lunch. Thank you! It was a very nice lunch and once again I learnt a lot!

If you are wondering what I did during breaks I have in these reports, I went to either the user group kiosk to meet people there or the OTN lounge to meet people there 😉 The best during the OOW is meeting people!

Speaking about that, it was again time for receptions and meeting more people. Next the ODTUG meetup and then the Author Appreciation Event organized by Oracle Press team. Thank you! I had fun and a lot of food 🙂

The second day of OOW15 started with a Bay Swim organized by Chet, the Oraclenerd. Yes we did swim on the bay and yes, it was cold 😀

After the swim (and a warm shower) I went to the Oaktable World (OTW) to meet friends and to hear Kerry’s presentations about SQL Translations. And then it was time for a lunch with Maria Colgan. Thank you, Maria, it was so nice to see you and to have a chance to chat!

Everyday during the OOW was full of highlights. The highlight of Monday was the Devvy 2015 Awards. Devvy is the Oracle Database Developer Choice Award (https://community.oracle.com/community/database/awards) and was given this year the first time. And guess what: I won the Devvy on Database Design Category! Woo hoo! Thank you to everybody who voted and thank you for being active in the Oracle community! And thank you Oracle for having the Database Design Category as one of the categories! It is too often that database designers are forgotten. Thank you Steven, Laura and Todd! The database designing is important because of data quality and performance and the Oracle Community is all about sharing and caring. If you are not in the community yet, join now. Of course join the community.oracle.com but also find your local user group and join that too. User groups are the BEST!

After the awards it was time to head to receptions and parties: ODTUG, Friends of Pythian and Accenture…

Oracle Open World (OOW) started on Sun 25th. I started it with the traditional Bridge Run organized by the Oracle SQL Developer team. It is an event I would recommend everybody to attend: there is no better way to start a morning than a walk/run on the Golden Gate Bridge when the morning is still a bit crispy and scenery is breathtaking. After the Bridge Run it was time for a shower and getting ready for my presentations.

First I was presenting at the More Than Another 12 on Oracle Database 12c [UGF3190] (http://debrasoracle.blogspot.fi/2015/09/oow2015-back-by-popular-demand-more.html) which was first introduced in OOW14 and thanks to the great feedback from the audience organized again this year. I was talking about how to design 12c Databases using Oracle SQL Developer Data  Modeler. Thank you Debra Lilley and Ralf Kölling for organizing this! It was great fun!

My second session was right after that with the title Managing the Changes in Database Structures [UGF6317]. Both the sessions were well attended and I want to take the oppontunity to once again thank you everybody who attended these sessions! EOUC rocks!

After the sessions it was time to run to the OTN booth for a group picture of Oracle ACEs. And then to the cloud…

There was a cloud built at the Buena Yerba Gardens. It was a ball pit made of white, plastic balls. We were invited to jump and swim in the “cloud”. My jump was shown live on Larry’s keynote 😀 That was great FUN!

Now it was time to head for dinners. Sunday is usually the busiest because it is the day for the ACE dinner AND the Finnish dinner. But since I am fast and also a good eater, it is no problem for me to attend them both 🙂 Thank you! The food was good and plenty and I had fun.