OpenWorld 2015 Recap

I had a great time at OpenWorld this year. It was my second time at the conference in as many years. For me, knowing what to expect before hand really changed my experience and expectations of the conference. This time around I knew how incredible the User Group sessions are on Sunday and I made sure to book a Saturday flight so I wouldn’t miss it. Also, I was really pumped to be able to join in the #SQLDev 5k run across the Golden Gate bridge. The weather was perfect and I was able to meet a lot of people before the conference even started. It was great to put faces to the names and twitter handles I have been following for a while now.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday at Oaktable World. This was a terrific conference put on by Kyle Hailey and the folks at Delphix, Pythian and Gluent. It was definately information overload and my head was full of all kinds of information by the end of each day. Oaktable World is a big reason why I will continue to push to be able to go to Open World. It’s nice to hear from very smart people who are doing real work in the database field, not only with Oracle products, but other things like cloud technology, big data and internet of things. It amazes me the amount of knowledge and experience that was in that room for those two days.

That’s not to say that Open World is any less interesting. There were many technical and helpful sessions as well as other networking events and fun things to do. Another lesson I learned after attending last year is to make time to visit the Oracle product booths in the exhibition hall. Meeting with product leads and developers for the products that I use on a daily basis was very helpful. For some, it was just a matter of introducing myself and saying “Thanks” for all their hard work. Others, I had some very specific questions about their particular product and I was able to get some good feedback from them. As far as I know, this is the only place where you can get one-on-one time with the people developing Oracle products, so make sure to take advantage of it if you go.

The week was over before I knew it. I’m bringing back a lot of information and ideas to my workplace. The challenge will be to prioritize the new things I learned and put them into practice. Hope to make it back to OpenWorld 2016!