Being a four hour red-eye flight away, Sangam, the All India Oracle Usergroup conference, is the closest significant Oracle conference to Hong Kong. It is included on the OTN APAC Tour, and Oracle corporation supports it by sending some of it’s big guns to present, resulting in a fantastic line-up of speakers; the fact that all sessions are conducted in English is a real bonus too.
Last year it was hosted in Bangalore, and I was fortunate to be able to attend; this year it was hosted in Hyderabad and was pleased to be accepted as a speaker. Checking the schedule I saw that I was due to speak at the same time as one of the Oracle big guns, Connor McDonald, so I was expecting no-one to be attending my session, however in the end I presented to a pretty full room.
One thing which impressed me was the level of engagement from the audience, they weren’t hesitant to ask for clarification during the session, and also to discuss points informally throughout rest the conference.
I enjoyed many of the other sessions, highlights included:
- Chris Saxon using packets of M&Ms to demonstrating the differences between index access vs full table scans, and the effect of clustering factor. This was stuff I already knew, but I had never heard them explained so clearly, and it’s great to see someone presenting the basics for a change
- Andrew Holdsworth from Real World Performance Team suggesting that it might make sense NOT to gather system statistics on a system, which initially seemed counter-intuitive, but am starting to see the sense of it
- Bawa and Dinesh talking about the importance of rest, and leading all the attendees through a guided meditation
A trip to India wouldn’t be complete without enjoying some of the food, unfortunately this trip I hardly got out from the hotel and conference center bubble, however I loved the buffet put on for lunch and the dosas for breakfast.
Thanks so much for the all the organizers and volunteers for giving me the opportunity to participate in such a great conference, and also the attendees and speakers for making it so special.
The fact that these two conferences run back-to-back seemed a perfect opportunity to experience both, at the expense of a single long-haul flight. Their taking place at amazing locations on the Istrian coast which I had never visited before sealed the deal. I submitted abstracts and was delighted when they both accepted me to speak.
The Slovenian conference was held on the town of Portoroz, and I had heard about some cave systems, Postojna and Skocjan on the way. I had planned to visit both, but on the way to the Postojna, I saw a sign to a cave at Planina so I decided to check that out. The public accessible area only extends a couple of hundred meters inside (much more is accessible with a guide) but it was really cool just being alone in the quiet and pitch darkness.
Postojna Cave is a complete contrast; you take a 20 minute train journey with hundreds of other sightseers deep into an amazing cave system, followed by a 40 minute guided tour, before taking the train back out again. After these two experiences I’d had more then enough of caves, so I decided too skip Skocjan and head direct to the conference venue.
The speakers dinner was held at an fantastic restaurant, Na Burji, and the meal was accompanied by bread baked by the multi-talented Jože Senegačnik. I was thrilled to finally catch up in person with Jure Bratina, the first subscriber to my blog (!).
