Going to SF, to meet SF

At 04:30 this morning my alarm went off. I don’t like mornings, but today is different from other days. Today I flew into San Francisco for the Oracle PL/SQL Programming Conference. After struggling over the armrest for nearly 11 hours I finally made it.

The conference starts on wednesday, that gives me a day to adjust to the time and language.

Looking at the Agenda, I think I will attend these sessions:

Wednesday

• Keynote: Wake Up and Smell the Methodologies – Steven Feuerstein
• Dynamic PL/SQL and SQL – Paul Dorsey
• Making the Most of SQL and PL/SQL Collections – Paul Dorsey
• Contract-oriented PL/SQL Coding – John Beresniewicz
• Getting XML Data into and out of Oracle – Ken Atkins
• PL/SQL IO: Files, System Output, E-mail – I am doing this session

Thursday

• Keynote: The Wonders of Oracle 11g PL/SQL – Bryn Llewellyn
• Design Patterns in PL/SQL- Pre-inventing the Wheel – I am also doing this session
• Storing and Manipulating XML in the Database – Ken Atkins
• Globalization and Localization with PL/SQL – Ron Hardman

Wednesdaynight should be good. Together with Steven Feuerstein and Patrick Barel I’m assisting with the Test-a-Thon. This contest is all about testing PL/SQL. Cause when you think about it, how well do you test your code? In this contest we are going to find out. There are a bunch of different scenarios that we created which cover different aspects of PL/SQL. Collections, File manipulation, String Manipulation, you name it and we created a scenario for it. Some of these tests are pretty easy, some are not so easy. In fact, some are just hard. All in all, it should be great fun.
The winner walks away with tons of goodies. All contestants will receive a T-Shirt, but that’s all I can say about it for now. What I can tell you, is that I suggested the slogan for the T-Shirt, so I’m pretty proud of that.

Now I’m in San Francisco and it’s almost 05:00 (European Time), so that means I’m up for over 24 hours.
Time to hit the sack, some sightseeing tomorrow (weather permitting) and preperation for the presentations for the conference.