I’m quite impressed by the UK user group that puts on quite a large conference in Birmingham, UK (aka Brum). While I believe there are many more regional groups in the US, I don’t believe there are any that are in the same “league” as the UKOUG. There must be several thousand participants and over 250 different sessions to attend… VERY, VERY impressive!

Some presentations of interest were those on the CBO, RFID, materialized view query rewrite, XMlQuery in Oracle, Oracle 10g OLAP and Discoverer, HTMLDB New Features. The session on XMLPublisher was full by the time I arrived and I’m bummed to have missed it.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed is the chance to meet some people that I’ve only had the chance to chat with, virtually, on email. Peter Scott, Jeff Moss, Jon Mead, and Julian Ford. I am well aware that all these people “know their stuff” because of their various blogs, articles, and emails. Now I know that they are genuinely nice people; it’s just as easy to chat about local beers as it is about the ins and outs of the Oracle database. Nice to catch up with Mark Rittman as well who put together a dinner of the bloggers that was well attended (and paid for by UKOUG, thanks!)

I was a bit taken aback by some of the Paris information being put forth at the conference… I’m uncertain if the beta information is not disseminated to Oracle employees properly or if it’s just a desire to keep upbeat about an overdue product. All the same, information announced publicly at Open World was not even covered (Paris released in CY 2006, officially). It’s clear that there is great customer interest in Paris and I think it’s a great leap forward for OWB. Paris is a great product, have no doubt! Just needs to get “finished up” and out the door!

I put on a presentation about new Metadata features of OWB Paris… I think some people found it useful, but it also might have been a bit of a firehose at 5pm at the end of conference day. I had this experience at another User Group before and I hereby resolve to refrain from submitting any more ‘highly focused’ presentations. Conference attendees I think would benefit more from something much more widely applicable… All the same, I’ll post the slides when I return for those that ARE interested and either did or did not attend the conference.

Blew off the social event to have a wonderful meal at the “bank” with my fiance. Excellent!

Oracle is free, btw. As if this hasn’t been blog covered, much to the dismay of Mr. Thomas Kyte. 🙂