UKOUG Conference 23 Day 1

UKOUG Conference ’23

If you missed my day 0, you can view it here.

Up bright and early, so I could get to the venue before the delegates. On arrival, I could see the UKOUG team had been busy getting all the branding up ready for the event 😎👏🏽:

The foyer to the main keynote area Ozone was ready for all the delegates to congregate:

Come 8am and the registration was open; it didn’t take too long for the area to fill up with lots of delegates, eager and ready to enjoy the conference (I hope):

Without our sponsors (reminder in case you don’t know, I am a UKOUG Board Member), we couldn’t put the conference on. It’s with their support we are able to continue, so it’s a big shout out to them, to thank them for their support:

UKOUG has had a hard time following Covid and we’re not out of the water, hence why I unashamedly continue to ask our sponsors to continue to support us, as well as organisations to send people to our conference. Without delegates, speakers and sponsors, we will no longer exist! I hope we are able to continue for many more years to come!

Richard Pepper, the president of the UKOUG opened up the conference with the welcome keynote, talking about how we are an independant non-for-profit organisation who’s been around for 40 years!

He also introduced how we’ll be working with Princes Trust, then introduced James Herbert, who is the Apps Member Advocate (my counterpart, where I am the Tech Member Advocate):

James explained our very new DISC model, that encapsulates what the UKOUG is: Discover, Influence, Share and Connect. We hope this will make it easier for our customers to understand the value of UKOUG, which we are going to add more to. We also want this to be a vessel for sponsorship as we envision larger sponsorship for each of the quadrants, providing the sponsors coverage throughout the year. Watch this space!

Next Richard spoke with Nick Wallace Oracle VP Technology Sales, Siobhan Wilson Oracle UK Country Leader and Kelly Pierce MBE Oracle:

They gave updates from Oracle CloudWorld which mainly were around Customer Success and CX.

Next I attended “23c – The Developer’s Release” by Connor McDonald, Oracle:

He spoke about many new features, to name a few:

Not requiring “from dual”
Drop “if exist”
Privileges on all schema objects
True boolean data type

Next I attended “The Future is Multicloud – Harnessing the power of Oracle Multicloud” by Sai Penumuru, Accenture:

Sai spoke about OCI and how Oracle are making it interconnected with other Clouds, and how this was going to be the future.

Next I attended “Oracle ACE Program & Community Programs” by Jennifer Nicholson, Oracle:

This was mainly to support her as an existing Oracle ACE. There were a few potential candidates that attended and wanted to learn more about the Oracle ACE Program.

Next I attended “Oracle ACE Product Update for ACE members” hosted by Jennifer Nicholson, Oracle. We had 3 Oracle guest speakers, of which firstly was Nadia Bendjedou:

Who talked about Oracle Apps Unlimited, how Oracle was still behind the product for at least 10 years which is on a rolling carousel. But reassured us it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon despite the existence of Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps, due to the large user base out there.

Next Tirthankar Lahiri, spoke about the new AI Vector Search that will be introduced in 23c:

Finally, Ewan Slater talked about Oracle GraalVM:

Next I attended “Finding Widlake is a bit like Finding Wally” by Brendan Tierney, Oralytics:

Interesting presentation talking about how using AI Vision models can be used to identify where Martin Widlake was in a photo.

Next I attended “All you need to know about Oracle” by Debra Lilley, Inoapps:

This isn’t the traditional presentation I would attend, but Debra sold the idea of the presentation the day before when I attended the Oracle ACE dinner, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It was interesting as it went into the history of Oracle, of which certain aspects mentioned, I didn’t know about.

The final presentation of the day that I attended was “Oracle Zero Downtime Migration: Get To The Cloud!” by Roisin Tapley, Capgemini UK:

She went through her experience of migrating hundreds of databases for a client using Zero Downtime Migration. What was more impressive is that she a recent graduate with no experience of Oracle databases but was able to use Zero Downtime Migration with little effort 😎.

UKOUG Evening Celebration ’23

Once I was done with the conference, it was a quick dash to the Hilton hotel in Reading where our 40th celebration party was held. I arrived just in time before the first coach arrived, and was able to welcome all the guests of the coach. I then proceeded to the hall where the party was, only the exhibitors were allowed into the hall at this point, whilst final preparations were underway.

I used this time to take photos of each of the exhibitors, so I could thank them on X:

And eAppSys, but unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of their stand before everyone came in as no one was at their stand.

Come 5:30pm and the doors opened; Aidan and myself welcomed everyone into the party, where everyone got welcome drinks sponsored by Veran.

Next Richard along with Scott Hay, Vice President UK Software Sales Oracle welcomed everyone to the party:

Next, Chris Gilbert from Bespoke Comedy gave a really cracking parody of Oracle Tech and Apps:

He had the audience laughing at Oracle’s expense:

I loved how he depicted Oracle Database World:

And brought in the Tux Oracle Linux penguin which I believe most people didn’t get:

Next on was the famous Milton Jones, who is known for his one-liners:

He was good, but I preferred the tailored jokes Chris made as they resonated better.

Finally to close of the party, The Original Party Band performed live:

It was great to catch up with so many people and have a 40th year celebration. I hope we get to celebrate many more years and hopefully be at the 50th anniversary of the UKOUG! 🤞🏽

You can view my day 2 here.

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

Zed DBA's Oracle Blog

The Oracle DBA Specialist – OCM, OCP, OCE, OCS, ACE

UKOUG Conference 23 Day 1