I had a day off work today so I could go over to Birmingham City University (BCU) and do a talk to the students.

Today’s session was more about giving them an idea of where databases fit into the big picture as far as data and data processing is concerned. I obviously come at this as a relational database guy, but the presentation also included NoSQL and Hadoop. I hope nobody is naive enough anymore to think relational databases are the correct solution for every use case, so it’s important to be objective about this stuff, rather than to push your own agenda.

On 1st April 2006 I got an email telling me I was an Oracle ACE, so either this is the most drawn out April Fools’ Day joke ever, or I’ve been in the Oracle ACE Program for 10 years. Wow!

The numbers look something like this.

On Thursday last week, the day after UKOUG Tech15, I did my 4th talk at Birmingham City University (BCU).

In my previous visit I did a talk about community and employability to the staff. This time I did a quicker version of the same talk, but to the students. I’ll be going back a few times this year to do technical sessions.

The whole Sangam15 experience is over for me now!

Here are the posts I put out during the trip.

The night before a morning flight is always a little tricky for me. I lie in bed thinking, “What if I oversleep?”, which winds me up and makes it really hard to relax and drop off. I dozed on and off, but eventually gave up, turned the TV on and watched some films for a few hours.

I grabbed a quick breakfast and got the taxi to the airport. The hotel staff advised leaving at 07:00 for a 10:15 flight. The traffic was very light and the queues for check-in and security very small, so I ended up sitting at the boarding gate two hours before the flight. Better to be early than late!

My session on Day 2 started at 11:10, where I spoke about running Oracle Databases in the Cloud. This included a quick run through of the Oracle DBaaS offering and AWS RDS for Oracle amongst other things.

I was up at about 04:00 on Saturday and waiting for breakfast to open at 06:30. Pretty much as soon as I ate something I felt really tired again. That after a day of sleeping…

I headed on down to the conference and instantly saw a bunch of friendly faces, including lots of people I had met on the OTN Yathra 2014 Tour.

After the keynotes, I got to have a quick chat about User Groups with Mary Lou Dopart from Oracle, then it was off to my first session about database consolidation.

The day started pretty early. I was packing at 00:00 and the alarm went off at 05:00. Nothing like last minute packing to focus the mind.

The taxi to the airport was good. The driver was interesting, speaking to me about his visits to India and Pakistan. It certainly helps pass the time when the driver is chatty.

What is the Oracle ACE program?

The Oracle ACE program is a community advocacy program for Oracle technology evangelists and enthusiasts, sponsored by and managed by Oracle Corporation.  As stated on the ACE overview page at “http://oracle.com/technetwork/community/oracle-ace”, it is both a network as well as a resource for everyone in the Oracle community.  It is not a certification program, and there is no course to study and no test to pass.  Rather, the ACE program is a recognition program by one’s colleagues and peers, and joining is a process of nomination, review, and acceptance.

Who are Oracle ACEs?

I’m back home from Oracle OpenWorld 2015. My overall feeling for this year was evolution, not revolution. We got newer versions of some products, like APEX, WebLogic, SOA Suite and Oracle Forms, just before the conference. We got previews of new versions of products, like Oracle Database 12cR2 during the conference, which we might get next year.

Of course, there was a heavy emphasis on cloud, but the difference between this year and previous years was some of the product are now generally available (GA), so it’s possible to trial or buy them. In previous years, you could only use some of the cloud products if you were “special”.