Tech 16 – We Want Your Abstracts on SE, Real-World & Practical Topics

The Call for Papers is open for the UK Oracle User Group annual TECH conference. It’s in Birmingham, in December, and is being co-located with the JDE & Apps conferences too (and the call for papers is open for them also).

If you are a Standard Edition (SE) expert, have a real-world story to tell about how you used Oracle (good or bad!) or want to teach others how to get going with some aspect of Oracle, I really want to see your abstracts.

You can register as a speaker and submit abstracts here at this link. You have until June 1st, so that’s just under a week. Plenty of time 🙂

I love this event, I’ve been going since 2002. Last year was the best for many years, almost everyone I spoke to felt it had regained the energy of prior years, attendance was up, lots of new faces were there and, a real sign of a good agenda, people complained that they were having to pick between excellent talks.

A couple of things have changed a little in the last two years, which I think have increased the overall appeal of the UKOUG conference.

First is that we now have “introductory streams”. These are talks that need no or little prior knowledge of the topic and give you all the information about it to get going. The conference had become a little too “expert-focused”, packed with great talks about esoteric aspects of tuning or internals that many of us love – but not everyone is ready for or interested in. We will still have lots of those, but we are giving more talks for those who are not experts (yet). This will be the third year we are doing this due to it’s success. If you are an expert, how about offering a paper that gets people started? Such talks tend to get much larger and enthusiastic audiences.

Second is the Standard Edition stream. This was really popular last year, the first ever dedicated stream of sessions for SE at any conference. Lots of you use SE but like the small kid in the schoolyard, it tends to get ignored. Last year we chose introductory talks, for obvious reasons, this year we are aiming for more depth – can you talk for 45 minutes about an aspect of SE, help people really make the most of it?

Third is more emphasis on real-world experience based talks. They are always the most popular, especially if they are about things not working out as the theory or Oracle Sales Guys would make out. The UKOUG is a User Group, we want to share good, bad and ugly. Personally I’d love for someone to step up to the mark and give some talks about real Cloud adoption or why Cloud is NOT the answer to all requirements.

Of course, we are always interested in the latest-greatest, just-released and did-you-know-about type talks too. But to be honest, we get lots of those 🙂