Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

Pint with Oracle User Group – First International POUG (Polish) Conference October 14, 2016

Kamil kicks it all off: Apparently water has bacteria in it – so drink beer
(stolen from Pieter v.Puymbrooeck)

Last week I enjoyed being at the first international conference that the resurrected Polish Oracle user group has put on. I say enjoyed – I actually mean really enjoyed! Why did I like the conference so much? Three major components came together.

(Before anyone rushes to mention the Polish custom of entertaining you with alcohol, that was not one of the three parts. It was the fourth instalment of the trilogy…)

Let’s start with a little history. I first came across Kamil Stawiarski just a year or so back. I had blogged about Pragma UDF and how it improves the performance of PL/SQL functions called from SQL – and then came across his blog post on it. About the same time he came across mine and we got in touch. He’s an “Oracle DBA type” and his company is called ORA600! {if you had not noticed, so is mine}. The similarities do not stop there. He loves beer+presenting (for some reason I have this reputation…) and using an axe. I am a little more technical – as I use a chainsaw as well as an axe. In respect of Oracle Technical, I’ll give Kamil the prize in that. The biggest difference is I am old enough to be his dad. I might adopt him. Anyway, Kamil came to the UKOUG Tech15 conference, we met up and he asked me (as well as several others) if we as international speakers would support him running a conference in Poland? Of course! I had so much in common with Kamil, he and his travelling companion Adam were so friendly, positive and knowledgeable that it was an easy decision.

A date was chosen, Kamil let us all know and those of us who could went along. The conference took place in Warsaw on Friday 7th to Saturday 8th October, with a speaker’s meal on the Thursday. There were two streams during the conference, one mostly on database topics and the other mostly on development & BI. We had a lot of well-respected and talented speakers including Jim Czuprnski (who has Polish roots), Joze Senegacnik, Piet de Visser, Heli Helskyaho,Phillipe Fierens, Neil Chandler, Sabine Heimsath… Apologies to the others I have not mentioned. Why did we all turn up? Because we were asked to. Most of us presenters just enjoy presenting (as we crave attention and being asked to present appeals to our egos 🙂 ). Being serious, if you want to organise an Oracle conference or user group meeting, don’t be afraid to ask people to consider coming along. The worst we will do is say “no” (and please be cool if we do; we all have other calls on our time).

What a set of Mug Shots 🙂

With this cunning trick of simply asking people he thought could speak well to come speak at his conference, Kamil had got himself a bunch of good speakers, one of the three things you need for a good conference.

The speaker gifts were just so apt!

The next part that is key is the organising of the conference. So Kamil set too organising it. Well, I say Kamil orgainised it, he actually got Luiza Koziel to organise most of it, which he says was one his best moves! So he, Luiza and probably half a dozen people I should thank but have not (I really should get a list of the volunteers), spent a lot of time and effort planning the event. Update – Kamil let me know the names. In his words:

Rafal Rebecki- he found all sponsors.
Pawel Chyliński, Adam Jagielski and Radosław Kut – always ready to help with every issue we had challenging us
Kamil Kozieł – directly responsible for all marketing stuff like website and social media
Adam Boliński- help with organising speakers and preparing agenda he was also one of the sponsor
Of course Luiza Kozieł – she was responsible for everything 🙂 finding venue, organising hotel and gadgets. she did most of the work

I’ve helped out with many conferences & meetings, from the huge behemoth that is the UKOUG Tech conference to small SIGs and special interest groups. It takes a lot of work – much, much, much more work than you can appreciate until you do it yourself. They sorted out a suitable venue, they compiled the abstracts for the talks and speaker profiles (often not an easy task, some of us are such prima donnas), put together the web pages for it and advertised the event well. During the event they smoothed out the issues that invariably crop up and they looked after all the delegates and speakers. The food at the venue was excellent, both the speaker’s meal and the conference party were fantastic, signage at the venue was good, crowds were managed and encouraged back into sessions at the appropriate time. There are a dozen other things that go to making the mechanics of an event work and, from what I could see, it was all done well or quickly resolved such that I did not notice.

Heli Helskyaho’s crowd is a nice example of how busy the sessions were

The organisation was great, the speakers were fantastic, what is the third thing you need?

The final thing is sort-of beyond the control of the organisers. For a conference or meeting to work you need an engaged audience. The audience does not have to be huge (though full rooms really help) but they have to be there mentally as well as physically. POUG got an excellent, large crowd of delegates. As a presenter I like it when I feel looked after. A speaker’s meal is great, havng registration and any admin done for you by the “office” is a help. There are lots of “nice” things you can do for the speakers but, for me at least, there is only one absolute. What makes a conference great for a speaker is actually having delegates who want to be there and want to hear presenters speak – and who then are chatting between themselves, challenging the speaker “experts”, asking questions in sessions, continuing discussions outside the presentations and generally making that “buzz”. Lots of things can be done by both the organisers and, to some extent, the speakers to help this. But in the end it comes down to having an involved audience. And in Poland we had that in spades. It was very, very “buzzy”.

Don’t water the speakers after midnight!

Obviously the organisers can prime the pump by getting the speakers and organisation right and I think it helped that the people leading the conference were relaxed and yet determined that everyone had a good time. But in the end, I think the delegates take some of the credit for making the conference so good.

All in all it all came together wonderfully in Poland last week. It’s in my top three conference experiences. (I won’t confirm where or which the other three are – It changes depending on what aspects I am thinking about).

The end of the conference summed it up. Just as in Ireland earlier this year, the last session was an open, “panel” affair with some speakers at the front and an intention to get the audience involved. At POUG we had a discussion about why DBAs are so arrogant and Developers so useless. Of course, neither statement is true all the time and it led to a lively, good-natured and often very funny discussion. The organisers had ensured that this could roll on if there was the desire to do so and the audience demonstrated that there was. I am sure we went on for twice the allotted time! Finally POUG stepped in and closed the conference (in a very nice way).

The DBA-Dev “love” – thanks to Kiran Tailor

I’ve got lots of stories to tell about the POUG conference but that can be in another post – or simply when chatting at other conferences or in a a bar. Some of them involve the use of alcohol as an enabler in IT.

I hope there is another POUG next year. I hope it is even half as good. I especially hope they let me come back!