AUSOUG Conference Intermission

In terms of the Australian Oracle User Group Conference, right now represents the time between the successful Perth leg and the Melbourne finish.

For some, the series is over, one city is enough. For others, it's a quick re-jig of the presentation before whisking off to another state or 3. For me, as exhausting as it was, I'm looking forward to viewing those great presentations I just couldn't fit in between all the others I wanted to see.

For us at Sage, we had a great time and our presentations went well. Penny's involvement ODTUG stream was a success. Ray & Eddie assisted putting together a very organised look at putting Ajax into Oracle Application Express. I popped into Penny's best practices presentation while I was gearing up for mine and I saw plenty of heads nodding and what I'm sure were people thinking "I must go back and do that when I get back to work!"
Multiple award winning Chris Muir kept churning out excellent information, and quite happily accepted the challenge to extend his presentation time when an opening appeared.
All this while Branka & Kate held the fort at the Sage booth, keeping people fed (with chocolate) and keyboards clean with our little trinkets.

My presentation on converting Oracle Forms to Oracle Application Express went well, although 90 minutes sure does seem to go quickly when there is so much to be said.

As for some of the others I attended:

Howard Ong - Demonstrated a great introduction to Oracle Designer's replacement - the verbose Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Despite some early bugs on Oracle's part, it shows much promise and we all feel it will come through quickly just like SQL Developer did.

Lynn Munsinger - showed Oracle Forms programmers like me why ADF will be a fairly simple transition. I was quite impressed with the comparisons she made, in particular the analogy of comparing a washing machine to a dishwasher when talking about conversions. It was great to hear an Oracle product manager confirm some of the sentiments of my own presentation.

Connor McDonald - this man once again outdid himself and walked away with the best (OTDUG stream) award for his SQL-ectric look at SQL, Analytics and the Model clause. I think the crowd thinned a little bit the deeper he got into it, but it remained entertaining throughout.

Gabriel Ilarda - after a few years of jeering, he found himself on stage talking about Oracle Data Warehouse builder. Despite Murphy's Law jumping all over his live demo, the message came across well.

Tim Armitage - we jokingly lamented on those who didn't come to hear about Oracle 11gR2's best feature - Edition Based Redefinition, but they were probably enjoying Tim Hall talk about PL/SQL (which I hope to see in Melbourne). I was a little taken aback on some of the features regarding editions, but I think once I get into it more I'll see the great potential this feature has.

Many thanks to those international speakers who came to our remote capital, it was good to catch up with old friends and meet new ones. For those making their first or second appearance as a presenter, good work - I hope they went well and we all trust you'll be up for doing it all again next year.

To all heading to Melbourne next week, I'll see you there!