Tag Archives: Manchester Convention Center

UKOUG technology conference 2013


Air-born again, December first 2013. Heading to Manchester for the UK Oracle User Group technical highlight of the year, or for short: #UKOUG_Tech13 as the twitter handle sounds.

This time it will be a little different since I have been granted a speaker slot. A great honor and also a great responsibility since there will be a number of people offering their precious time to spend in my session and all that in a VERY EARLY time slot.
But first, find my way to the Manchester Convention Center, my hotel and the sessions I plan to attend this afternoon. Through Twitter there have already been several contacts made with friends inbound to Manchester or those who are already there. These will again be a few full, fun and exciting days spend in the companionship of what will call “The Pragma’s!”:
Joel Goodman, Iloon Wolff, Philippe Fierens and myself.

It turned out to be a great conference! Manchester proved to be a fine venue with a lot of possibilities and compact enough to have everything close-by, where even OTWUK13 (Oak Table World 2013) found its venue close by!
Although I planned to visit many more sessions, there is where I ended up:

  • How to Avoid to Struggle with the APEX Listener by Iloon Wolff
  • Next Generation GoldenGate vs. Streams for Physics Data by Zbigniew Baranowski
  • PL/SQL Enhancements Brought by Oracle Database 12c by Bryn Llewellyn
  • Installing Oracle Database on LDOMS by Pragma Philippe Fierens
  • Goodbye KVM… Hello KVM by Martin Nash
  • Beginners’ Guide to Cost Based Optimization by Jonathan Lewis
  • Roundtable Development Tools, chaired by Andrew Clarke

racattack-51Then, on Wednesday it was time for my own talk. This was my premiere talk on an international stage and I guess it went quite well and It was good to see a few famous Oracle people amongst the audience! In a 45 minute session I discussed a project where we replaced an Oracle Forms application front-end by an APEX implementation on Oracle Standard Edition. This implementation is currently running production with Dutch Healthcare providers.
Thank you, my good friends for your support!

But, first and foremost, UKOUG_tech13 turned out to be the event to meet all my friends and heroes again… (in no particular order 🙂 and without the hope not to forget anyone)

Tim Hall, Simon Haslam, Ronald Luttikhuizen, Osama Mustafa, Peter Raganitsch, Heli Helskyaho, Frits Hoogland, Uwe Hesse, Lonneke Dikmans, Björn Rost, John Scott, Patrick Barell, Alex Nuijten, Alex Gorbatchev, Mogens Nørgaard, Øyvind Isene, Bryn Llewellyn, Kuassi Mesah, Martin Nash, Alex Zaballa, Martin Widlake, Brendan Tierney and even a few more.

And so, Manchester, we say goodbye. Until we meet again!