2019 OOW Fun

'Work Hard, Play Hard', that is defiantly the the mantra I like to follow at Oracle Open World.

On the Saturday night Roel and I went as guests along with Tim and Alex who have both celebrated 50^th birthdays over the summer, a visit to Graham Wood and his partner Katie who treated us to the most amazing dinner at their home in Half Moon Bay.  The journey out was along the coast and was great to see the sea at its best with the surf rolling along with the Californian beaches on the way back I got to experience just how fast an Uber driver can drive, something which is not the thrill I seek.

In the past I would have included my annual triathlon but with the ACE Director briefings moving to Saturday I haven’t done the bridge cycle ride for a few years. However I was up for the bridge Run walk on Sunday morning. I travelled up to the bridge with Maria Colgan and Roel Hartman, but Roel is a real runner and not only did he run the bridge and back but also all the way back to the hotel, as part of his upcoming Chicago Marathon training. Maria and I walked the bridge with Barry McGillin who doesn’t live that far from me back home, but that I only ever see at events.  Three people from the island of Ireland on the bridge having fun. We start earlier than the runners so at least we got to wave at them in both directions. Thanks to Jeff Smith for organising

Monday morning is the traditional Swim in the Bay originally started by Chet Justice and now kept going by Connor McDonald and renamed 'dash & splash'. It was a damp misty morning and despite best ever registrations the turnout was not high but those of us that swam loved it and thank you Aylin Uysal for the lift back the hotel and especially thanks to Hellion's and Jennifer who were waiting with coffee and doughnuts when we left the water.

I registration on Sunday Oracle gave out tickets to the baseball at the newly renamed Oracle Park to see the San Francisco Giants Play the Miami Marlins. Thanks to Andrew Bohnet from innovatetax, he gave me his tickets as well so I was able to enjoy the baseball on my only free afternoon. However I had not anticipated the strength of the sun and despite not removing my jumper and wearing the baseball cap I was also given, I still managed to burn my neck and face. I can’t pretend to have understood the rules of the game but loved the atmosphere. 

I did see that someone had tweeted their steps for the conference I had a look at mine but although they are probably inaccurate for it appears I did almost 15 km on Wednesday, my travel day and 14 ½ of which I know where actually knitting!

I didn't have much time for the Exhibition but I did do the Scavenger Hunt with Alex Nuijten, I think we should have won a special award for the fastest complete. It was a whirlwind run around the show floor and definitely fun!

This year the Oracle appreciation event was at the Chase Centre Home of the San Francisco Warriors basketball team. This is only been open a couple of weeks and it was a great honour to be able to attend and what an amazing building it is. The first act was John Mayer, who as Linda Barker shared, he appeared to have been coached very well on Autonomous Database which gave everyone a smile. I really enjoyed his music but thought of it as almost background music. As an old lady I had intended not to stay for the second act but was persuaded to give it ago by Alex and Roel. Flo Rida took to the stage and was absolutely amazing he had everybody moving gave great energy and for the first time in many many years. I stayed until we were removed from the appreciation event with everybody leaving at the same time we decided to walk back, after all you can never have too many steps.

I always feel guilty about talking about the fun at Open World, I am such I lucky little old lady who gets these opportunities but most of all what I love is catching up with old friends and making new ones. Graham has retired from Oracle and it was lovely to see him and I also got to catch up Mogens and James Morle.

Michelle Malcher now works for Oracle and although was not at open world was that hate you on the Friday, she came into the city before a late flight were we managed to have dinner with a couple of friends.

Dina Blaschczok knows how I love to have flowers in my hotel when away for a few days and these beautiful roses delivered

I have learnt that If you want to catch up with people at this event you have to actually make appointments, and most days I had one or two breakfast meetings following pre-breakfast meetings and a full diary however it is so well worth it both professionally and with people I can truly call friends.

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2019 OOW Travel

I am a creature of habit.

I normally attend Partner Advisory Boards on the Friday before OOW and arrange individual meetings at headquarters for the Thursday, I also like to have a day upfront to ensure I haven’t forgotten anything and that my presentations are ready to go. Therefore I traditionally travel out to San Francisco the Tuesday before the conference starts.

But, It seems, I am also doomed to travel issues, my airline decided to have its first pilots' strike in history and my original flight was cancelled two weeks before travel. I wasn’t too concerned as I thought that I could use my contingency day and simply move my flight to the Wednesday. 

I left my house at 0500 for a 0645 flight to London. Everything seemed to be okay until we were told are that as the plane had been sat on the apron for three days since before the strike, when they started it up two monitors in the cockpit failed. Apparently they can fly with only one working but not with two out. The plan was to wait for the incoming flight from London and borrow one of theirs, however when it arrived it only had one functioning. 

Plan B was to borrow one from another airline in Dublin, they would send the monitor up to Belfast and all would be fine. This put my 1130 connection at risk but there was another flight about 1400. There were no alternative flights to London with any airline as the strike it meant all flights were full.

After a couple of hours, (it takes two hours to drive from Dublin to Belfast), the engineer chased the part only to be told that they were waiting for a specialist courier and it hadn’t yet left. 

Later, once sure it was on its way, the pilot told us that he expected to leave about 1430 if it worked. Just before 1400 we saw the engineer run down to the plane with part but just a few minutes later at exactly 1400 we all got a text to tell us there was still an issue and the next information with bit 4pm. No more than five minutes later the pilot came into the lounge and told us we were good to go everything was working we were ready to board however when we left at 1500 several people had to have their luggage offloaded as although the flight was ready to go they could not be found. So sad, many hours delayed and then to miss the flight.

At London I was offered the next available direct flight which was the next morning. I asked about connecting flights and was offered one to New York but then I would only get to San Francisco 2 hours earlier and with runway issues there causing many delays and cancellations I decided to stay put.

When am I travelling long-distance I try to take some knitting with me, it allows me to feel I’ve achieved something during long journeys and is good for de-stressing delays. However I hadn’t expected to complete this jumper on this journey. Guess I should be thankful for small mercies.

They put me up in a nice hotel at the terminal and my flight the following day went without incident but it did mean I missed my individual meetings at Redwood Shores on the Thursday, one with Hilell Cooperman who was to share with me the excitement around the new Oracle branding, Stefan Schmitz who is responsible for the OTB I use within Fusion and most importantly my annual catch up with Steve Miranda who owns apps development.

I always take chocolate to conferences, and this was no exception, but I also had vouchers for food during the delay and spent that on large bars of chocolate, all of which I had to explain on my arrival in San Francisco.

In contrast my flight home was without incident and the connection to Belfast was actually 25 minutes early but that doesn’t actually cancel out the 9 ½ hours delay on my original flight and out this could be my last European Union flight delay claim (another Brexit casualty).

As ever my faithful taxi driver was waiting for me at the airport I was soon home with another Oracle Open World under my belt.

That should have been the end of it, but I seemed overly tired. Sunday morning I was due to dive and I cancelled which is not like me, and then the next day I woke up with a full head cold, so spent my second day in bed. My excuse for how late these blogs are.

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2019 OOW ACE Program

The ACE briefing is my highlight of Oracle Open World, I still preferred them when they were the week before rather than on the Saturday, but they are still truly valuable and I thank all of those from Oracle who give up their day, prior to the busiest event of their calendar to make sure ACE Directors get a full understanding of things to come during the conference.

This year they invited some guests or friends from other groundbreakers' programs who wanted to attend, this is a lovely idea and I made some great new friends. There was also a special treats me as Liam Nolan, VP Apps Dev, gave an update on SaaS.

The ACE dinner on Sunday evening was great fun, we pose the now traditional photograph at the end of the pier 39 and then had a wonderful evening, Open World is so busy that this is one opportunity to see as possible in my community before the main event begins.

photo thanks to Jim Grisanzio

This year the main Oracle Open World and Code One where colocated in Moscone.  I don’t know how the demographics work but to me is encouraged crossover and meant that I as a traditional Oracle person saw more of Code One that I normally would have.

As part of our ACE Director duties we each do a session in the Code One show floor and mine was to be on the welcome desk helping delegates find specific stands or encouraging others to come in and look. The most successful area I would say was the 'Meet the Experts' sessions, that many people asked about. At the stand we had a small stress car  giveaway which came in blue and red, all the time I wanted to sing 'the red car and the blue car had a race' from a childhood advert I remember fondly. Thankyou Chris Saxon for singing it to me out loud.

As in previous years those that represent the community we given the opportunity to have head shots taken and although I liked the ones I had on the first day I thought my eyes looked a bit closed so I went back to some more.

On Wednesday there was a power hour to celebrate diversity I went on stage with Linda Bronson from our local communities, David Ortiz from the Oracle diversity program office and Mackenzie Dancho from Technovation, an Oracle diversity partner here we were asked questions about how we saw the diversity in our own lives and strives to remove the uncomfortableness of being different and how we can reach out and include everyone. Watch our quick session here.

Thank you to Jennifer and all the Oracle Community Team for all you do for us in the program. 

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2019 Oracle Open World San Francisco

As always, a little late but my epic epistle to Oracle Open World is now here!

This was my 16th consecutive OOW and my 15th presenting. I love the event although it totally exhausts me and I come back with so much more to follow up on.

Again, I have split up the content into smaller bites to make sense of it all.

• ACE Program
• Oracle Highlights
• OOW Presenting
• Code One Session
• Accenture @ OOW
• Travel
• Fun

Attending Open World would not be possible without these groups, thank you to them all:

• Having papers selected, so thank you to EOUC and Code One 
• ACE Program support
• Employer, Accenture support

A Different Approach

Sharing knowledge is what the ACE Program is all about, blogs, white papers, books and presentations. 


ACEs having been speaking at education facilities for many years, in UKOUG we encouraged this through our "Next Generation' initiative and many ACEs actually work part time in Education sharing their knowledge.

The way we consume knowledge is also changing, meet-ups and webcasts are now the norm and video is the way we learn everything from changing a fuse to practically rocket science.

That said I have recently, along with Michelle Malcher and Tim Hall, been involved in a slightly different initiative. 

Bambi Price who for a long time was a volunteer and Board Member with both AUSOUG and ODTUG is now outside the mainstream Oracle community and one of her many roles is with the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Bambi contacted me earlier in the year and asked if I could help with a trial they were running. They have students studying Business and IT and ideally they would want to have time out in industry learning from 'real life', but this isn't always possible, so they wanted to try something different for this using Problem Based Learning. This is a key way they can help students who cannot access an internship acquire and engage with the knowledge, skills and behaviours required in practice.


The topic was to be the provisioning of Cloud Services and would cover 4 weeks:

Week1:  Intro to Oracle and their Cloud Strategy
Week2:  Databases in the Cloud
Week3:  Security
Week4: They present back their thoughts 

For each session we recorded 3 or 4 short videos which were played and then they discussed each point and went onto the next one. I was happy to deliver week1 but needed some friends for the others so I reached out to Michelle and Tim, who were both happy to be involved. One of the key requirements is that the student feels exposed to industry and practice.  To help with this the videos were very focused and we were asked to keep mentioning Swinburne to ensure they felt part of it.

The feedback from the university was very positive and 21 students took part in the module. Some have reached out directly through linkedin and I love the fact we are a part of their network as they go forward into the industry.

The course director Stuart McLoughlin told us 'Whilst we have some tweaking to do in terms of delivery, the vast majority of the students responded enthusiastically to the new pedagogy'

It did take time to plan and prepare but the 3 of us loved being involved and exciting students with Oracle technology is great for the future.

2019 Kscope - Seattle and the Event

Sometimes I worry that my event posts are very 'samey', however from the start this Kscope was different.

First the travel was without issue - worthy of a post on its own! Unfortunately others were not so lucky and I sympathise, but for me, this time it was excellent.

I had been to Seattle with Kscope before so it felt very familiar. Sadly I wasn't able to travel earlier and so missed the Community Day which to me is something that makes ODTUG stand out.

The event kicks off with symposiums and I was a bit cautious about this. The content at Kscope is very EPM heavy which on its own is not a bad thing, ODTUG embraced this community when Hyperion was acquired by Oracle and they certainly have the community support. However development tools have lost their way. Some content has gone into the database track and some into emerging technologies. I don't count APEX in this, that is an amazing community and somewhat of an enigma, and isn't going anywhere. Anyway more about dev tools later, I spent the day moving between tracks and found myself looking at data visualisation and know it is something I will need to investigate further.

I loved the keynote presentation from Jason Latimer, which is a big thing for me as I hate magic, although here the presenter was using 'magic' to encourage us to ask questions, wonder and look for answers.

As well as my sessions I also took part in a panel session that Helen Sanders organised Changing Landscapes: Staying Relevant in the Database—Relational, Big Data, and Beyond! It was very interesting and does demonstrate the changing face of our world.

ODTUG have ambassadors to look after speakers and sessions. I like to do this, if I sign up I will be in the session so I pick subjects that look useful to me. I volunteered for a couple of Analytics roadmap sessions and a fellow VBCS session

I was also the ambassador for the 'fight' of the event. Oracle SQL v ANSI. This session was the brainchild of Alex Nuijten and Chris Saxon which started to take shape at the end of last year. The session takes on the shape of an actual boxing bout and the audience determines the winner. The first bout was in Germany at DOAG last November and again in Dublin this March. Here at Kscope Chris was not there and Connor McDonald, his 'Ask Tom' colleague took up the gauntlet.

Did they take it seriously! watch the videos. Connor first then Alex.

On this occasion ANSI won, and Alex got to wear the belt. (I made this after the first match, since the original one they had was a bit plastic).

I helped at the Women in Technology lunch and the table I facilitated had great ideas to encourage women and embrace success.

Somewhere in the event there was a quick ACE Briefing - so much information in so little time! And a great ACE Dinner. Thankyou Oracle and congratulations to all those who joined the program or were promoted at the event. 

Bob Rhubart captured me for a 2 minute tech tip at the Groundbreakers lounge - I spoke about Digital Assistant Governance.

There was a great party at the MoPop, the ODTUG Board all went way out in their costumes. I loved Opal and Natalie were my favourites (I'd like to add Roel in the list but found him a little unnerving).

And to finish off Kscope I had another look at the Data Visualisation

It was great Kscope and thanks to Opal and the rest of the team. Read Opal's blog here. See you in Boston!




Related Posts:
Development Tools at Kscope
My sessions at Kscope

2019 - Kscope - Development Tools

First I want to say Kscope19 was excellent as always and a big round of applause to Opal Alapat and her team for the conference. This conference is all about the community and has unraveled support from Oracle Product Management and a good mix of expert and customer stories.

I do however want to share my fustration  When I first attended ODTUG it was all about Development Tools but over the last few years it has become so much less so that I think for me, this year it failed to deliver on those tools. I am not saying it was a bad conference, quite the opposite and I am so glad I went, I learnt a lot about analytics which are becoming more pervasive in large Cloud Application implementations, and something I need to know more about.

When I first attended KSCOPE (not sure it was called that back then), there was a thriving Fusion Middleware (FMW) community. Forms and Reports still had a large following and ADF was a new product. I often talk about the lag between marketing and adoption of products and I think ADF fell into this category, it seemed a slow burn. 

ADF was important to me, Fusion Applications were written using ADF and I expected that people would extend using ADF. Other products such as SOA suite were also covered here and the community had some great characters like John King, Lucas Jellema, Lonneke Dikmans, Sven Vesterli and Luc Bors, to name just a few experts. 

One of the great things about ODTUG is how much support they have from Product Management and I loved how much they brought to the event. Delegates did attend sessions but as part of the portfolio, many were more interested in the SQL and the rapid growth of APEX, few people came solely for the FMW content. 

When Cloud came along and FMW morphed into PaaS there was a new wave of products and ‘survival of the fittest’ meant it would take a while for the best to rise to the surface. Mobile was launched and that was very exciting, initially that used ADF and I thought it would accelerate adoption, but then they dropped ADF from mobile. PaaS was also difficult. Each component was fine but using them together was a challenge, in fact the ACE program held a hackathon at the AMIS conference to see how many we could use at one time and the PaaS ACE Directors would showcase this at the PaaS Forums for the next few years.

In the meantime the development tools track dwindled at Kscope and eventually is was consumed into the Database Track. APEX was growing and EPM became a large part of Kscope. I was concerned because I understood why something like Forms and Reports were on the decline but I felt PaaS was just starting. I missed Kscope last year as it clashed with something else (thankyou Kscope for giving us the dates for the next 2 years, it won’t happen again). My last Kscope in 2017 had very little PaaS content and from what I saw in the agenda there was even less last year, however this year with the introduction of an Emerging Technology track I thought it might be better.

When the content is down, there is nothing to excite possible delegates who would want this as their main track, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the agenda was launched, although I had my VBCS session accepted there were only two others. Mia Urman talking about it with E Business Suite and a session by Shah Smeltzer one of the Product Managers. 3 sessions isn’t enough to make this sustainable. Both had audiences made up of people who wanted to know what the fuss was about, not people who had come to the conference for that specifically.

Recently there have been grumblings in the community about Oracle not pursuing ADF and I don't agree. Our world is at hyper speed, we talk about agile, the ability to try things and fail fast, or things that develop so quickly they are unrecognisable. Well that is true of the technology behind them, some will fail, some will morph and some will kick others out. Remember cassette tapes? Remember CDs? The struggle between VHS and Betamax? Oracle are now using JET based development for the refresh of the Fusion UX, so the extension tool of choice is now VBCS, and that today looks nothing like its original ABCS incarnation. That however is progress.

PaaS adoption is growing, I see NO Cloud Applications deal that doesn't have a substantial PaaS component today, regional user groups are covering these but there is no global home today. It isn't just for SaaS customers, look at the rise of chatbots, digital assistants. Lots of case studies here are independent developments. And if you are a partner you MUST be part of the PaaS community run by Jurgen Kress, it is awesome.

However all is not gloom, I spoke to several ODTUG people and Kevin McGinley who will be the conference chair next year and there will be lots of thought as to what is included and how it is marketed. I would like to see something like a development solutions track, and yes I'm happy to help.