This is a guest blog by Oracle ACE Pros Martin Berger and Stefan Oehrli
The DOAG 2023 Database with Exaday conference is a German event that brings together technology professionals to discuss the latest developments in database management systems. The conference features keynote speeches from experts in the field, as well as technical sessions covering topics such as data security, performance tuning, and cloud migration strategies. Attendees can network with peers and explore the latest database-related products and services from the industry vendors.
Whether you are a database administrator, developer, or architect, the DOAG Database with Exaday 2023 conference in Düsseldorf in the Van der Valk Hotel (near the airport) offered a valuable opportunity to stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices in database management in over 70 sessions in four parallel streams. And a lot of Oracle ACEs were there!
We arrived on Wednesday late in the afternoon – DOAG organized a speakers dinner, that was a great opening event to a great conference. It was nice to see a lot of ACEs in the Uerige breweri in the old town for some tradional German food like Haxen und Schnitzel. The Alt-Beer in the small glasses flew in at regular intervals. And for sure, no one left the occasion hungry or thirsty.
After a short break and some hours of sleep, the conference started at 9 am in the morning, with the welcome session. Almost 200 people listened in the full-packed room how Oracle’s Vice President of Oracle Database Product Management, Markus Michalewicz talked about the future direction of the Oracle database.
During the first conference day, a lot of interesting sessions were presented: Database Security, OCI Migrations or Optimizer are just a small selection. And often it was hard to decide which session you want to join.
The first conference day ended with the perfect organized live cooking buffet at the conference location. There was enough time in the evening to meet people, do networking and small talk with an Altbier in the hand. And after a short night, day two was coming.
On day two we had the same dilemma: to see some Data Pump tricks by Mike Dietrich, or to watch the difference between Oracle and PostgreSQL in backup and recovery?
We, and all the participants too, really appreciated that folks from the Oracle product management were here. And a lot of Oracle’s PMs had to heard words like: “We have the following issue/question…” . But as we know from the PMs, I am sure that everyone got a friendly and helpful answer. It’s important that people from the vendor are at such conferences. There is no better way than to hear from base how their products run. And the feedback is unmasked and 1:1.
My “wow-moment” (Martin) at the conference was in the session delivered by Oracle ACE Director Neil Chandler – even after more than 15 years working with Oracle database products, I never realized that the optimizer will transform ANSI joins internally. Trace event 10053, thank you Neil!
The in-person exchange with colleagues was the highlight of the event. The DOAG database has a perfect size. People meet each other and have enough time besides the technical sessions. There was also something like “I need to finish my presentation quickly….“, but that’s another story 😊.
Here is what other ACEs had to say about the conference:
- Martin Klier: “Loved to see everybody in Germany!”
- Fernando Simon: “DOAGDB is an opportunity to see friends, engage the community and learn new cool features. No buzzwords, Oracle technical information from PM and ACEs.”
Martin & Fernando, we fully agree with you! Thank you DOAG for this great event, with great people in this great location. See you in 2024!
Regards from Switzerland,
Martin Berger & Stefan Oehrli