My OOW15 is now over

It seems to be traditional for people to write a blog post that summaries their Oracle Open World (OOW) experience. Well here is my attempt and it really only touches on a fraction of what I did at OOW, which was one of busiest OOWs I've experienced.

It all began back on Wednesday 21st October when I began my journey. Yes that is 9 days ago, a long long 9 days ago. I will be glad to get to home.

The first 2 days here in San Francisco was down at Oracle HQ were the traditional Oracle ACE Directors briefings are held. I'm one of the small (but growing) number of ACEDs and it is an honour he take part in the programme. The ACE Director briefings are 2 days of packed (did I say they are packed) full on talks by the leading VPs, SVPs, EVPs and especially Thomas Kurian. Yes we had Thomas Kurian come into talk to us for 60-90 minutes of pure gold. We get told all the things that Oracle is going to release or announce at OOW and for the next few months and beyond. Some of things that I was particularly interested in was the 12.2 database stuff.

Unfortunately we are under NDA for all of the stuff we were told, until Oracle announce it themselves.

On the Thursday night a few of us meet up with Bryn Llewellyn (the god father of PL/SQL) for a meal. Here is a photo to prove it. It was a lively dinner with some "interesting" discussions.

On the Friday we all transferred hotels into a hotel beside Union Square.

We had the Saturday free, and I'm struggling to remember what I actually did. But it did consist of going out and about around San Francisco. Later that evening there was a meet up arranged by "That" Jeff Smyth in a local bar.

Sunday began with me walking across (and back) the Golden Gate Bridge with a few other ACEDs and ACEs.

The rest of the Sunday was spent at the User Groups Forum. I was giving 2 presentations. The first presentation was part of the "Another 12 things about Oracle 12c". For this session there was 15 presenters and we each had 7 minutes to talk about a topic. Mine was on Oracle R Enterprise. It was an almost full room, which was great.

Then I had my second presentation right afterwards and for that we had a full room. I was co-presenting with Tony Heljula and we were talking about some of the projects we have done using Oracle Advanced Analytics.

After that my conference duties were done and I got to enjoy the rest of the conference.

Monday and Tuesday were a bit mental for me. I was basically in sessions from 8am until 6pm without a break. There was lots of really good topics, but unfortunately there was a couple presentations that were total rubbish. Where the title and abstract had no relevance to what was covered in the presentation, and even the presentation was rubbish. There was only a couple of these.

Wednesday was the same as Monday and Tuesday but this time I had time for lunch.

As usual the evenings are taken up with lots of socials and although I had great plans to go to lots of them, I failed and only got to one or two each evening.

On Wednesday night we ended up out at Treasure Island to be entertained by Elton John and Becks, and then back into Union Square for another social.

Thursday was very quiet and as things started to wind down at OOW finishing up at 3pm. A few of us went down to Fishermans Wharf and Pier39 for a wander around and a meal. Here are the some photos from the restaurant.

Friday has finally arrived and it is time to go home. OTN are very generous and put on a limo for the ACEDs to bring us out to the airport.

As always there are lots of people to thank but I won't start naming names here as I'm sure I will forget someone. But I do want to thank all the gang in OTN that look after the Oracle ACE programme. You really look after us, not just at OOW, but all year round. It is with your support that I get to go to wonderful conferences and to OOW.

People from Ireland who are Speaking at #OOW15

Oracle Open World 2015 will be kicking off in a few days time. There will be over 50K people attending this event, with a couple of hundred speakers.

I'm one of the lucky ones to have been selected to speak at Oracle Open World. This will be my third or fourth year in a row that I'm speaking at Oracle Open World.

Am I the only person from Ireland who is speaking at Oracle Open World ? No, I'm not, but there is a small number of us this year. There are basically 2, yes 2 other people from Ireland speaking at Oracle Open World. These are Richard Corbridge from the HSE, and Debra Lilley.

If you are interesting in attending these sessions here is the schedule.

Please share this information to allow your colleagues and help spread the news about he Irish Speakers.

If you are attending OOW, then please tweet, blog, Facebook, etc about these presentations.

Hopefully I will see you are one or both of my presentations on the Sunday.

And I will be having a draw/raffle for a copy of my book at my second presentation on the Sunday at 15:30 in Moscone South - 307

My schedule for OOW15

It seems to be a things that people blog about their schedule for Oracle Open World and talk about how busy they will be.

So to join the club this is my current schedule.

The boxes that are (a kind of) orange with red text are when I have MY presentations.

The purple boxes indicate some fun event and entertainment.

When attending conferences sometime you get to hear about a good presentation or some other events just happen. So this schedule is tentative and will probably only reflect 40%-60% of what I will really attend/do. There is so much going on each day.

You will see I have some Hands-on-Labs booked. These are a great way to try out some product for an hour. I highly recommend you doing some too.

By far my favourite part of my OOW trip is the Oracle ACE Director briefing that OTN arranges for us. This briefing will happen on the Thursday (22nd) and Friday (23rd) before OOW, and this is held in Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores.

We have been given a tentative schedule for the ACED Briefing and for me I highlight of this briefing is when Thomas Kurian comes in an very openly talks to us, telling us lots and lots and lots about what is happening across the Oracle product set. I would lover to be able to share what we are told but we are all under NDA. After Thomas we have some Cloud updates, then we get onto some updates on Oracle Development Tools, lots of updates on what is coming next in the Oracle Database. So we get the likes of Penny Avril, Andy Mendelsohn, Tom Michelini, Steven Feurerstein, Roland Smart and Wim Coekaerts, among others. So lots and lots of EVPs, Sr VPs and VPs.

After the briefing is over we then hop on a bus and head to our hotel in download San Francisco, near Union Square, where we will be based for the OOW.

Thanks to all in OTN and to those who run the Oracle ACE programme for arranging and paying for my flights, hotels and transportation.

SQL and PL/SQL icons and stickers

Over the past couple of weeks I've been preparing my slides and presentations for Oracle Open World (2015).

One thing that occurred to me was that there was no icon or image to represent Oracle SQL and PL/SQL. I needed something that I could include in my presentations to represent these.

After a bit of Tweeting it turns out that there is no (official) icons or images for Oracle SQL and Oracle PL/SQL.

So I created some and here they are.

and there are these

Feel free to use these in your presentations and share around. All I ask is that you give me an odd acknowledgement from time to time.

Stickers

If you would like to get these as stickers and put them on your laptop, notebooks, or anywhere really, you can order them on Stickermule.

NB: It is important to note that these are in no way approved or acknowledged or endorsed or anything else by Oracle.

From Zero to Dashboards in 10min with BICS

Unless you have been going around with your head in the clouds, all you can hear from all the big names in the IT worlds is about moving to the Cloud. (yes that was a poor attempt at a joke. It is Friday afternoon after all).

The title of this post is 'From Zero to Dashboards in 5 min with BICS'.

BICS stands for Oracle BI Cloud Service.

Over the past few months I've been working rolling out BICS at a number of different sites, and it is surprising how quickly you can get up and running with BICS.

There is no install. There is the minimum of setup and configuration. All you need to do is to create a user and give them some privileges. All of that takes 2 minutes.

Next get them to log in to BICS (2 minutes for the first time they log in) and load up some data using the Data Load feature (another 2 minutes).

Then you can move onto the fun part of creating some Dashboards using Visual Analyzer. See the example below of one that we created in 4 minutes.

So all of the above took 10 minutes. How quick and easy is that!

Give it a go yourself and see how quick it is for you.

Let me know if you have any question on using BICS and if you need any help.