This is a gues blog by Oracle ACE Director Alex Nuijten
The annual EMEA Community Tour takes place towards the end of the year and 2023 was no different. No fewer than eight different countries signed up to host an event during the tour.
For me it was not feasible to participate in all the events, and I don’t think anyone did. There is a lot of traveling involved and the whole tour takes about two full weeks. For the first time the NLOUG, the Dutch User Group in The Netherlands of which I am the secretary, was part of the EMEA tour – so of course I had to be there.
The event took place in the offices of Oracle Netherlands in Utrecht. With three parallel tracks and about 80-90 delegates there was a good buzz. The opening keynote was done by Jeff Smith on the future of data-centric Application Development which was very well received. Many other international speakers such as Hans Viehmann, Christian Gohmann, Nelson Calero, Ron Ekins, Ruben Rodriguez and Samuel Campos also attended the event.
Even though I have been to many conferences throughout the year, it is always exciting to “discover” a new one and to see how things are done there.
Some years ago, I met Rustam Khodjaev, founder and president of the CASOUG and ACE Pro, in Nurnberg, Germany at the DOAG (German Oracle User Group). While having a chat, he invited me to come and speak at their annual conference. The CASOUG, Central Asia Oracle User Group, organizes multiple smaller, local events per year and a bigger one with international speakers. Of course, I had to accept the invitation. Unfortunately, I had to wait a few years before I could go there, I met Rustam a few months before Covid hit.
This year, the EMEA Community tour would also visit some sites in Central Asia and I took the opportunity to submit some abstracts for them.
Getting to Tashkent in Uzbekistan was quite a long trip, as there are no direct flights from Amsterdam to go there. The “only” option was to go through Riga, Latvia. By the time we got there it was 10 p.m. local time, and after a day of travel I was quite tired.
The following morning the alarm clock sounded around 7 a.m. local time, but with a time difference of 3 hours with back home, it still felt like the middle of the night for me.
The conference started around 9 a.m., so there was plenty of time to wake up, have breakfast, got my things together and find out where we were going. The weather was still nice and having breakfast outside was a good way to start the day.
Other speakers at the event were: Patrick Barel, Rustam Khodjaev, and Kamran Agayev. With around 60 delegates it was a nice event in a fine location.
After the conference we did some sight-seeing and we visited the Amir Timur museum. The night was concluded with a traditional meal with Plov 😋. Man, that is one delicious dish. The place that we went to serves around 20,000 meals per day and uses 1,000 kilograms meat and 5,000 kilograms rice.
The next morning, we had an early flight to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, it departed at 8 a.m. so again getting up way to early. The following day the conference started, and the venue was simply amazing. It took place in the hotel where we were staying so that was easy. The screen was huge and very bright.
What was nice to see was the group of students attending the event. They were very engaged in the topics that were presented – from Exadata migrations, to SQL, PL/SQL and JSON (what I presented on). After the event we had a nice discussion during some (soft) drinks. Sorry for the bad selfie, that’s something I need to work on.
