Top and Tailing Bulgaria.

Tomorrow I head off to Bulgaria for the BGOUG Autumn Conference 2016. I’ve only been to the Bulgarian user group once before, having heard from so many people what a fantastic user group conference it was – and they were right. Milena Gerova and her team do an amazing job of organising it and make everyone feel really welcome. So I am really looking forward to my return.

Bryn always gets a good crowd but this was typical for Bulgaria (sorry it’s blurry)

In one of those strange quirks of fate, I’m “opening” the conference and also “closing” it. I.e. my first session is in the first slot on the first day and my last is, well, the last slot on the last day. In between I’ll be enjoying the other talks, doing a third session myself and trying to avoid repeating the “6am with the crazy Ukrainians” experience of last time!

Having the first slot on the first day is just perfect for the session I am doing “The heart of Oracle – How the Core RDBMS Works”. A while back I realised that there are a lot of experienced and highly capable Oracle practitioners who do not actually know some of the basics of how the database software works {if I look in the mirror I see one of them}. That is, why redo is so important, what goes into the redo stream, that all table and index data is accessed via blocks (until you get to that fancy engineered systems stuff) and it is blocks that go into the SGA buffer ache, what a consistent get is or how Oracle finds a block of data in memory. That last one I had no clue about until about 6 years ago, I had made some stupid assumptions.

When you discover these things or tell someone about them, a common response is “Oh! That makes so many things make more sense! I wish I had known that from the start…”. So this talk tells people about these things and, though it understandable by anyone who has only got as far as writing their first SELECT statement and was originally aimed at those new to Oracle, most experienced people take something new from it that helps make all those more detailed talks make sense. It really suits all levels. Thus having it at the start of the conference will hopefully help give them a better understanding of the core framework of the Oracle RDBMS into which knowledge of specific areas can slot into.

The location in Pravets is lovely

The final session is equally suitable for everyone. Which is good as it is the only session available at that time! It is a “Discussion Over Beers About Oracle Database” – beers are available to all. It’s a fun and relaxed way to round off the event, with questions coming from the audience. I loved the session last year and this time I’m up on the panel. Bryn Llewellyn was sniping from the audience last year (as only Bryn can) so they are doing what you should do with any troublemaker, which is to put them in charge :-). So Bryn is also on the panel, along with Joze Senegacnik and Tim Hall.

Sometime in between those two bookends I’ll do my talk on clustering data for better SQL and overall database performance but more importantly I’ll be listening to many of the other great talks. I’ve looked over the agenda and I know I will have the complaint common in any conference with good contents – more than one talk I want to see at most points in the day. Thankfully, having been a bit of a conference tart this last few months, I have seen some of them already which makes my decision making easier.

Traditional Dancing is a Traditional Entertainment (and my shot is traditionally blurry!)

Another thing I am looking forward to is enjoying the hospitality & entertainment that BGOUG is so famous for. The conference is in a hotel that is not that near many other things, which could be a problem. But the organisers make sure that we are entertained in the evening and the food last year was great. This made even better by spending time talking with the delegates and other speakers in the evening. Last year I was struck by how engaged the audience was during sessions and how enthusiastic they were to learn & share outside of them.

Just like The Polish user group conference I went to in October, BGOUG has the three things a great conference needs: Excellent presentations; good organisation; an engaged audience. For some people there, this will be their 10th or 20th time (or even more) at the BGOUG conference. Nothing says more than that.