OUGN16 - Call for paper

The biggest conference for Oracle users in the Nordics is not far away. Be there as a speaker and attendee. Sure you have a war story or another experience worth sharing. Last year OUGN received 250 abstracts, please, do it again! Follow this link to submit your abstracts: http://c4p.ougn.no/ Deadline is November 15. See you on the ship (which is a boat with other boats on it, according to Millsap)!

October 30, 2015 · 1 min · Øyvind Isene

Why was my abstract (not) accepted?

You know, this is my blog, but I am aware of my role in our user group. The opinions here are mine; I haven’t stolen them. Selecting abstracts for our conference is done by many in our board, but I wanted to clarify how I look at the task, what speakers I look for to our conference. Thursday this week we sent out emails to 71 people who will present on our next conference that starts March 12. Another group received a more disappointing email. Some have questioned why they did not make it (again). ...

December 20, 2014 · 5 min · Øyvind Isene

Oracle database XE and APEX on Amazon Web Services

In our user group OUGN we used to collect abstracts for our annual conference with a simple Google Form. Advantage: Easy to set up Disadvantages No possibility for users to reconnect and correct what they had already submitted Lots of manual work Difficult to work with in the process later (selection, agenda, late submissions, special guests) Not really cool or cloudy Google Forms is really just a shared spreadsheet with a form interface wrapped around it. And like any other spread sheet it is easy to work with in the beginning, but as the number of people involved increases and data grows it soon gets cumbersome to work with. ...

October 18, 2014 · 5 min · Øyvind Isene

42 Reasons to join me at #OUGN14

Oracle User Group Norway (OUGN) organizes the biggest Oracle user conference in Scandinavia. As of March 28, 341 DBAs, developers, managers, sales people, and more have figured out why. Read on for more reasons if you have not registered yet. This year we are breaking many of our own records, for example we have 66 speakers from 15 different countries. We have added another track with a total of 8 different tracks. ...

March 28, 2014 · 6 min · Øyvind Isene

OUGN Spring Seminar 2013

Last week’s conference is the second since I joined the board of our user group. Never been more worried, but it turned out better than ever, in my not so humble opinion. I was really proud of our agenda, we had several new speakers with top content. Cary Millsap from Method R gave a keynote and two excellent presentations. This was his first time in Norway, but judging by the feedback we got he will be back soon. Actually having him here at our conference was a goal I committed to last year. Thanks, Cary, for excellent content and presentation! ...

April 24, 2013 · 3 min · Øyvind Isene

OUGN 2012 Day 2 - Wrap up

The last day started with a master class Key features of redo by Jonathan Lewis. You need quite a good reputation to gather a large crowd to listen on such a subject. Well prepared with good slides, lots of real-world experience together with questions from the crowd made it to a time well spent in the auditorium. He didn’t get through all the slides, but that did not matter since we had two hours filled with entertaining learning. ...

March 25, 2012 · 4 min · Øyvind Isene

OUGN 2012 Day 1 - At sea

This is my first conference as a board member, and going to a presentation for every slot is not possible. I did go to Doug Burns presentation on SQL Plan Management in 11g though I had actually seen it at OOW 2011, probably because I like Doug’s presentation style. This preso does not go into very much detail on SPM, but takes us on a travel through the subject and leave it to us to actually get some experience on it. It does look interesting, and the only thing that keeps me from getting much experience on it is that the current customer is lagging behind on the upgrades to 11g; the few we have on 11g are small and have not presented any problems with plan instability. ...

March 23, 2012 · 2 min · Øyvind Isene

OUGN 2012 Day 0 - The Martins

23:48, so tired that a Twitter message would be more appropriate. But, just wanted to make it for the record that today turned out to be a very pleasant day. I had the responsibility to host track #5, which started with Martin Büchi on Information Lifecycle Management in OLTP DBs with Partitioning. ILM is a subject that many postpone because it is too complicated. In Martin’s presentation he showed a reference model, illustrated various scenarios with alternative solutions. He then showed how partitioning can be used to archive data that has been aged out. I cannot possible make justice to his presentation, but since I write about it here I’m sure I’ll remember to come back to it, download it and digest it. If Mr Büchi reads this, he has it on record that he did well. Hope he’ll be back again. ...

March 21, 2012 · 2 min · Øyvind Isene

OUGN 2012 Day -1

Tomorrow is the big day. For the last 4 years our annual conference has been on a cruise ship from Oslo to Kiel and back. That is two days with presentations, fun and stuff. A big success we are not going to change at least this year. But, for this conference, we sent out too many invitations to Very Important Presenters and got an impressive positive response; we run out of slots pretty fast. (Let’s say we are not really #1 when it comes to logistics in this country.) So we decided to extend the conference with one day in Oslo before we board the ship on Thursday. Someone called it a pre-conference, which is unfair to the presenters since they are giving real meat tomorrow. Someone called it a whole-day conference, eh, as opposed to the other days? Anyway. tomorrow we’ll have lots of hands-on labs, master classes and what I’m really excited about, RAC Attack. ...

March 20, 2012 · 2 min · Øyvind Isene

OOW 2011 Day 1

First day at OOW 2011 started with interesting presentations arranged by IOUG, very usefull stuff and I have to read the presentations again to get all the details regarding Oracle on VMware, and deploying APEX with security in mind. Highlight of the day was OUGN’s encounter for Norwegians at OOW 2011 and invited guests (invited VIP speakers for next years OUGN 2012 conference). This took place at The Norwegian Church Abroad . The church has a spectacular view over the city. Among the guests were Jonathan Lewis and Cary Millsap, two of my heroes in the Orace World. I had a long conversation with Cary regarding work, relationship between DBAs and developers, something we both have thought a lot about . I also tried to convince him to come next year and speak at OUGN 2012. Hopefully we can arrange for one of his one day classes a day before the conference.

October 3, 2011 · 1 min · Øyvind Isene