UKOUG Wednesday

Wednesday morning I arrived in Birmingham. The weather wasn't great, dark clouds and rain.

I went to the hotel, the Jury's Inn, but couldn't check in until 2pm, so I headed to the ICC buildings where the UKOUG conference was being held. Luckily it wasn't to far from the hotel, only a 5 min walk. The building was quiet impressive: lots of glass and big.

I registered as a speaker and went to my first session, which I was a session chair for, which means I had to introduce the speaker. The speaker was John Scott, does that ring a bell?

When I entered the room John would present in, I was amazed and tumbled! Unbelievable! What a big and nice room!

John asked me to keep my introduction short as he had a lot to talk about. At OOW he did the same presentation but got 90 minutes, now he had only 60... A challenge!

I followed his instruction and did my fastest introduction ever, 8 seconds ;-)

John did a fantastic job in his presentation about "Debugging APEX Applications", which proves this article and that some people came to him and told him that it was "the best presentation" they had seen so far. Of course I didn't do mine yet ;-) (only joking!)

Right after John's presentation I had to participate in the APEX Roundtable. Jeremy Duggan was the host and in the panel we had Anthony Rainer, Peter Lorenzen and myself. John Scott was in the audience but answered also a lot of questions, so although it wasn't on the schedule, you can state John was in the panel too.
Jeremy asked the people the questions they had or the topics they wanted to talk about, noted that down and then we started to answer them. Some of the questions we had, were about javascript, security, when apex/when java and authorization.

Then I went for lunch, I was really hungry as I had only eaten in the early morning before I left and it was already 2pm (in Belgium time that's even 3pm). The catering and logistic could have been better I think, especially when I compare it to OOW, ODTUG or the IOUG events.

In the afternoon I walked a bit around and finally sat down to prepare for my presentation.

I had to do the last presentation of the day, before the keynote. As I thought the people started to become tired I tried to make it as digestible as possible.

I talked about the integration of BI Publisher and APEX. The more I do this presentation the more I try to put in things of BI Publisher. For ex. Conditional formatting, multiple datasets, ppt output... next time I might talk about the Scheduler and passing parameters to BIP reports.




In the evening John Scott , Peter Scott, Borkur Steingrimsson, Mark Rittman and myself went to a pub. We had some excellent tapas and some beers. They are all really nice guys, we had good talks and laughs! Later that evening we went to another pub, it's the unofficial Oaktable pub I heard later, and it must be said that the more famous Oracle people (bloggers) were in that bar. For ex. I talked to Marco Gralike, Lisa Dobson, Kurt Van Meerbeeck, Doug Burns, Mark Bobak, ... The later the evening the more tired I got, so at 11.30pm I went back to the hotel to get some sleep.