DOAG Conference 2018

Hi Folks,

last year I have written a small review for the DOAG conference and I want to do the same for this years conference.

I was - again - a happy speaker at the DOAG conference 2018. My presentation was about "Single Tenant is only unnecessary complexity?" and I held it at the last conference day at noon. Despite the key note before my presentation and despite of the time where all people wanted to go to lunch, I think I had more than 100 people attending it. In 45 minutes (I had a slight overtime of some seconds only) I presented some features of Single Tenancy on Oracle databases - including a live demo to show how easy it is to do in reality. As a lot people after the presentation asked me how to do this or that (they started to think about the requirements they have at home), I think it was a valuable presentation at all.

It was good to do this, even a week before I have held the presentation, my VM crashed and was unreparable and I was thinking (for some minutes only) to skip the live demo part. But - luckily - I had a one week old backup of the system so I needed only two night shifts to get everything up running again. You could have smelled my fear minutes before I started the demo - I really hoped that nothing crashes at the presentation...

Beside my own presentation the 3 days were fully packed with know how provided by well prepared speakers. A trend I have seen last year also continued this year: In my opinion the number of live demos is dropping more and more. Unfortunately, in my opinion, because I like presentations where you can really see "things are running". So, if you plan to speak somewhere at a conference: Yes, it is a shitload of work preparing everything and testing and preparing more and testing again - but it's worth it guys (by the way, my live demo was a one week workload - including the crash)!

What else, hm... the community: Even if some guys don't think it, but Oracle is "still alive" and the community is also. More than 2'000 people found their way to Nuremberg and more than 400 speakers including really famous international speakers (and Oracle product managers) were there. And the best is they are approachable - all of them can be found at the coffee lounge or somewhere else. So you can discuss, you can ask, you can get solutions for free (what is especially worthful when the Oracle support does not seem to make the job very well like it was told us at a session regarding support satisfaction). Stefan Köhler, e.g., was just sitting two afternoons at the coffee lounge - ready to discuss about performance with everyone.

Another thing I have seen at the conference - the interest to know more about alternative databases is high, so open source database talks were fully booked out. Especially when PostgreSql was mentioned at the conference planner, the rooms were filled until the last place. In my opinion, open source databases will get a bigger piece of the cake (so robotron and therefore I also will do up to 24/7 support on PostgreSql), nevertheless, they are not soooo free at all if you make a TCO calculation.  While Oracle database is a big, feature-rich database monster out of one hand, you do have in open source one main project, but if you want to use additional features you need some additional software here, a plugin there, ...

At the end, you either throw some money into a consulting company, to get help for the community software, or you throw some money into a couple of internal guys who will find out what you need and how you get it from the communities - or you buy a "open source software" by one of the vendors around the communities. The problem then is the same as with Oracle. You will have some kind of vendor lock and knowbody knows if these companies do exist in 5 or 10 years or are bought by someone and the "product" maybe is not supported anymore. It is not so easy at the moment to make the right decisions (at least I think Oracle will still exist in 10 years also). And the big companies like Amazon or Salesforce only give a small part of the development, they do, back into the community versions. As I said, there will be a rising number of open source database installations, but I think also Microsofts SQLServer and Oracles database will be the two biggest fishes in the next couple of years.

In addition to technical details there are a lot things you can hear about makeing better projects, about AI or Machine Learning, about development or DSGVO, Cloud, ...

Some last words to the organisation: It is astonishing for me how this all works year for year - especially if you know that a big part of work is done in the spare time of the DOAG members. Organizing stuff for more than 2'000 people, including food, the key notes, the party, all community actions (like apex, PL/SQL, ...), incredible. And the location - with it's different rooms and restaurants at each floor it is really perfect.
My conclusion: if you didn't had time to join the conference (it would be good to speak german as most presentations are hold in german) - try to come to Nuremberg next year (19.-22. November 2019). You hopefully find me also there again...

For the guys looking for the scripts of my presentation: You can find them here.