UKOUG Conference 2005 : Day 3

Mark Rittman -

Back from the UKOUG Conference now, just thought I'd jot some final thoughts down on the four days. Unlike Open World, I've actually had a job to do over the past three days so I've not had much of chance to post anything except photos, but here's my thoughts on what I saw.

Unlike Open World, the UKOUG isn't the event you go to for product launches (although Tom was originally due to launch XE at the Tuesday keynote), it's more about user group presentations, groups like the Oak Table (and I guess now, the Oracle bloggers) and lots of customer and consultancy presentations. I think much more so that Open World, if you're looking to go along to presentations by the likes of Jonathan, Tom, Mogens, Wolfgang Breitling, Connor McDonald and Anjo Kolk, and to meet them afterwards, this is the one for you. I'm hoping to go along to the Hotsos and ODTUG events as well next year (time and budgets permitting), so it'll be interesting to see how they compare.

I was fairly pleased with my own presentations although they both had their gremlins - a product I think of the fact that for both of them, it was the first time I'd presented them. The OLAP one on Tuesday was going fine until I started to run out of time (I could have done with 60 minutes rather than 45), the BI10g one today had an excellent turnout but was a bit hair-raising for me as my laptop packed up about ten minutes before the presentation. I was getting myself all set up in the hotel room about an hour before the talk, and tried to load up both Reports Builder and OWB at the same time; although I've got 2GB of RAM on my machine about 1.25GB of that was reserved for my VMWare virtual machine running the server products, and when I started up the two client products the laptop just started paging and locked up. To cut a long story short, with 10 minutes to go before I went on, I was trying to coax an AS10gR2 infrastructure and portal installation back to life and starting to seriously panic about not being able to do a demo during the talk. In the end, I managed to get most of it working, the talk went fairly well, hopefully people got something out of it.

So, personal highlights for me for the four days?

  • Getting to meet and spend a bit of time with people like Pete Scott, Jeff Moss, Nick Goodman, Tim Hall, Doug Burns, Lisa Dobson, Niall Litchfield, Andrew Clarke, Pete Finnigan, and to listen to and have a chat with Tom, Jonathan, Connor, Mogens and a few of the Oak Table people
  • Speaking to some very interesting people who'd come over to the SolStonePlus stand - hopefully I'll be going to see quite a few of them in the next few weeks and months
  • The dinner on Monday night of course - and the Focus Pubs beforehand, much better than I thought it was going to be, basically a free bar for two hours
  • Going to the Oak Table day with Jon Mead on Sunday - I'm not sure when I'll next get the chance to listen to a Jonathan Lewis talk on reading trace files as 10.00am on a Sunday morning!

Anyway, that's it for now. If you didn't catch them before, the photos are over at Flickr.