Recollections of a Conference

InSync11 presented a wealth of experience in the Oracle Sphere covering various segments such as Fusion Applications, E-Business Suite, JD Edwards & PeopleSoft to name a few.

The speaker sessions and the opportunity to network with Oracle partners and developers were well received by the attending delegates.

The weather was perfect and Sydney’s Convention Centre provided a fantastic venue for the conference.

Interesting highlights/recollections from our team from the time spent at the conference:

“The Australian Oracle User Group conference was held earlier this month at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre in Sydney.  For me, this was a particularly special event as it was my first Oracle User Group conference.  I also got to catch up with many friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen for a while.

Throughout it all, I spent the majority of the days attending various presentations. Here are some of the highlights from the sessions I attended:

Key Note Address:

Oracle’s Cloud Computing Strategy offered insights into the thoughts and intentions of Oracle in supporting the direction all of our customers are embracing in one form or another.  Whether it comes off or not will be interesting but it is certainly ambitious in its scope.

Mark Drake gave an excellent presentation on XML DB and its power.  Until the presentation, I had not considered using the features already embedded in the database in system design considerations.  Mark however, opened my eyes to some of the ways in which it could aid development while adding significant power to applications.  Very well done.

My hero, yes I know…sad, Tom Kyte put in an extraordinary session on pl/sql and how to use it to achieve high performance code. In true ‘fan-boy’ fashion, I attended Tom’s second presentation which highlighted the correct way to approach sql development and troubleshooting.  His banter and anecdotes around the “Ask Tom” website were illuminating and for some of those of us that ask ‘stoopid’ questions… a little chastening. In typical rapid fire succession, Tom raced through a number of techniques using ‘real-world’ examples and few he’d prepared earlier to demonstrate his points. 

Graham Wood in his “ASHes of DB Time”, gave a great presentation on the use of Active Session History.  Listening to Graham, I reconfirmed my mantra that there is *always* something new to learn about the Oracle database.  Graham’s additional insights into the historical development and progress of the database was great in showing us how far the product has come and what may be on the horizon.

To quote Tom Kyte,  ”…Those that value their data, the security of their data, the availability of their data, store their data in a database…”

and Marcelle Kratochvil argued that case particularly well.  As an expert in the field of image management, she gave some extraordinary affirmations to the concept of data storage.

All in all, a great conference and left me wondering why I hadn’t made the effort previously!”

“Using UPK in the upgrade process by Beth Renstrom was interesting and useful and left me with a drive to find out a whole lot more on the benefits and value of the upgrade process.”