Looking back at UKOUG 2011

Now that the UKOUG annual conference in Birmingham is over, it’s time to write my thoughts down. As this was the second time that I attended the UKOUG conference, I already knew that it is a big conference. Lots of great speakers and a very good agenda. On the agenda were very interesting session, sometimes making it very hard to choose which session to go to. Guess you can’t complain about that.

On the Sunday before the actual conference starts, the OakTable organized a special day. Originally I didn’t plan to attending this day, as I was flying in in the afternoon. Turned out, I was on time to attend Connor McDonald’s session. Lucky me, Connor is an awesome presenter, so I decided to stay for the rest of the day. Very enjoyable, they even had OakTable beer before the final OakTable panel session.
In the evening there was the Ace dinner, in a nearby Thai restaurant. Good company, good food. A little nerdy perhaps, but as it turned out there were 42 Ace’s and Ace Directors attending.
On Monday I attended some really good sessions, like Kyle Hailey on SQL Tuning, Bryn Llewellyn on Using the PL/SQL Hierarchical Performance Profiler, and Connor McDonald on Partitioning 101.
Late in the evening Cary Millsap did a keynote session: Learning about Life through Business and Software. Only one word for this session: Wow! The things he talked about are still going around in my mind.
Tuesday morning, right after Roel Hartman’s session Done in 60 seconds, was my own session Who’s afraid of Analytic Functions? – for which I was quite nervous. Got some nice feedback on the session, so was quite pleased with it. Of course I had to go and see Carl Dudley’s session on Analysing Your Data with Analytic Functions – check out the competition, so to speak. Michael Salt’s session on Indexing: It’s All In The Index was also very interesting.
Wednesday was time to head back home, so packed up my bags and went to see Jonathan Lewis’ session on Redo. Can you keep an audience captivated for an hour talking about Redo? Jonathan Lewis can. Sadly this was my last session.
Because I arrived early at the Birmingham International Airport, I could get an earlier -originally delayed- flight back to The Netherlands. Now I can look back at a wonderful conference….
Oh,… did I mention I received the Inspiring Presentation Award for my session I did last year?