Computers, Communities, and Conferences – the Total Technology Trinity

In October 2024 I spent a week-and-a-half travelling, attending and speaking at 4 conferences in 4 countries. Why, you ask? Because the value to me, my company and our customers is immense, both directly and indirectly. Let me take you on the tour with me and explain what I mean. Along the way you’ll also learn about new cool stuff and trends I learned about on the trip.

POUG

I started my tour in Poznań in Poland attending POUG 2024. POUG is not (as you might think) an abbreviation of Polish Oracle User Group, but rather Pint with Oracle User Group – at this conference all day long you can see attendees as well as speakers with a beer in their hand.

Besides the beer (which is voluntary, not mandatory) POUG is also known for extremely technical presentations. The knowledge level here is such that this is a conference that speakers and experts will attend in order to learn, even if they’re not speaking there themselves.

There were deep dive sessions into transactions, isolation levels, migrations, EBPF and a lot more of immense value to those interested in the hardcore nitty-gritty details.

Of course a lot of the focus was on Oracle 23ai and new features like:

• JSON Relational Duality Views
• AI in Analytics/BI
• Javascript in Database 23ai
• Vector datatype and vector search
• New SQL and PL/SQL features 

My own session was in workshop style, where the attendees and myself tested the new SELECT AI feature of Oracle 23ai. It is a feature where you can use your own words for what you want to query from the data instead of SQL syntax and it’s built in so you can use it wherever you can use SQL. Like for example this statement which is a perfectly valid SELECT statement even if it is not anything near valid SQL syntax:

select ai give me names, monthly sales, monthly budget and how much over budget of products where monthly sales was higher than budget of the corresponding month;

It was a lot of fun trying to find out how to validate the result of such a way to query and looking at whether or not it generated good well-performing SQL. Also interesting that we could ask it to produce the output as a narrative (that potentially could be read out loud) instead of as rows and columns, which it could do in other languages or explained simply:

select ai narrate tell me in polish the names, monthly sales, monthlybudget and how much over budget of products where monthly sales was higher than budget of the corresponding month;

select ai narrate explain to a five-year old the names, monthly sales, monthlybudget and how much over budget of products where monthly sales was higher than budget of the corresponding month;

The last could be very useful in producing a report for your board of directors, right 😉.

Read more about Kim's thoughts on Oracle Database 23ai >

All in all, POUG is an event that embodies how a community should work when it’s best. The mix of technical excellence and awesome socializing makes it the perfect place to both learn and gain a network (maybe even gain friends).

AOUG

My next stop was Vienna for the Austrian Oracle User Group. A smaller local event, which has the advantage that typically attendees are from a smaller area with more chance of knowing each other and maybe even working together, making for a more closely knit network.

At such events there’s often just a single track of sessions, so attendees can’t pick whatever topic they prefer listening to but have to listen to whatever sessions the organizers have chosen. This can be a good thing – it’s healthy for you to hear about some things outside your normal topic sphere.

I presented about “Data Dualities” – a term I invented when I realized that the concepts of viewing relational data using two aspects (relational and non-relational) is not just in the new 23ai JSON Relational Duality Views, the term Duality can be applied to other cases as well:

• Object Views
• XML Type Views
• Analytic Views
• Property Graphs

All are examples of working with your data in a relational manner as well as non-relationally at the same time. The concept as such in JSON Relational Duality Views is not new, but it is implemented in a manner that is so much more natively integrated than the older examples above that it is a highly interesting new feature in 23ai. I even demonstrated migrating existing JSON document store to duality views in an automatically created normalized schema with referential integrity – very cool.

HrOUG

In Croatia the Hrvatska Oracle User Group yearly event is taking place on St. Andrew Island off the shore of the old town of Rovinj – a beautiful place. An advantage of such an event is that it’s a little harder for attendees to escape, so they stick around also in the evenings. The Croatians definitely know how to socialize, so you have a great chance to meet and greet and chat with your fellow attendees and speakers.

A part of the Oracle Community is the Oracle ACE Program where Oracle supports people in the community that are actively involved in sharing their knowledge and/or organizing events. The members of the ACE program tend to meet up whenever they speak at the same conferences – in Croatia we met and tasted different chocolates that we’d each brought from our home countries.

On the technology side, the HrOUG conference also attracts top quality speakers. HrOUG, besides DBA and developer topics, also has quite a lot of APEX content.

APEX can now also leverage AI capabilities – you can ask it in plain English to build an application with a couple forms and a handful of reports (or what you like). Currently it won’t entirely build the app for you, but it will pre-fill the relevant values of the APEX object creation wizards, so you won’t have to waste time on the basic boring groundwork, but can go directly to the details that still (so far) require human thought to build.

In APEX there’s also focus these days on CI/CD, DevOps and the like, to enable developers more easily to work together and making it easier to roll out deployments. We also saw sessions demonstrating how the new database features like JSON Relational Duality Views work together with APEX and/or ORDS.

For myself, my presentations were on well known tech – one talk on analytic functions and one talk on moving data around between databases using PowerShell and .NET database drivers. This is also important that events and community keep supporting what people work with in their daily life, besides talking about the newest and the greatest.

DOUG

Back home to Denmark for Danish Oracle User Group - the last event on the tour. It’s nice to talk Danish once in a while. Even though we in the IT world typically communicate well in English, you should visit your local events too, as communication in your native language sometimes allows expressing some nuances that can be difficult in other languages.

In Copenhagen we do two tracks – DBA and developer – and there was focus on much of the same things as the other events. My own presentation was a repeat of the talk I gave in Vienna.

But we also added useful stuff for the daily life – automation, replication, migration. With more and more happening in environments where you just spin up servers or containers, automation and infrastructure-as-a-service is an important thing to know more about.

On a lighter note, Oracle has produced a plush toy in the shape of the Oracle Database icon. The one on this picture is called Andy Capp (as he wears a cap like me) and travels with me to conferences. Some might consider it childish, but such things can be a great icebreaker to start conversations – which is key when you’re out there among your fellow IT professionals: start to have a conversation.

Home again

I’ll have to admit to being a bit tired when I came home after the tour. So why did I do it?

You might think it’s all just for the fun and parties and eating and drinking and enjoying. Sure, that’s part of it – but it also takes a lot of preparatory work, and there’s a lot of tiresome travel time on the road, so that can’t be the entire answer.

The main answer for me is that when I don’t rely on me alone, I expand my capabilities manyfold. As Jennifer Nicholson of the ACE program showed it on her presentation in Croatia about participating in the Oracle community:

When I participate in the community, I’m becoming a better developer (as well as a better human in my opinion.) By being a better developer, I provide both my employer and my customers a better result of my work.

And not only does it improve myself, it also provides a unique network that expands my knowledge thousandfold. We have several examples of problems that we have solved for customers where the solution was found after consulting the network in the community.

I can highly recommend getting involved in the community. It’s worth it. I can also highly recommend starting to work with Oracle Database 23ai – it’s also worth it.