This post was originally published on this site

It has become almost a tradition for me to write an annual review of my conferences and presentations. The good news: In 2022, most of the conferences were on-site again. Additionally, there was another important event for me in 2022: I changed my job and work now for Callista.

When I stood on our balcony on New Year’s Eve a year ago together with my wife and some of our friends and toasted the New Year, I already suspected that there could be some changes for my job situation in 2022. My employer Trivadis has been aquired by a large consulting company, and this will certainly have some impact on my job. I decided to decide in 2022 whether I should stay in the company for the last few years until retirement, or whether I should look around for a new job opportunity.

At the beginning of the year, everything was still going as usual. Then, in March, the integration into the new company began. It went much faster and worse than I could have ever imagined. It was a kind of culture shock for me. The cultures of the two companies are completely different, and the mindset of the new company isn’t mine. I started looking around for alternatives. In summer, it became increasingly clear to me that I would be leaving Trivadis. In Switzerland, there is a notice period of three months, so I left the company at the end of October.

Since November, I am working for Callista, a Swiss service provider for IT consulting and engineering. I’m still working in the consulting business, and my job is similar to what I did before. At the moment, I mainly work in a data warehouse project for an insurance company as a data warehouse architect and data modeler. Compared to my situation at the beginning of the year, I am now much more optimistic and relaxed again. I still have an interesting job with technical and conceptional challanges, but at Callista I have more flexibility and better conditions than in a large international company.

Swiss chocolate from a Swiss company: Christmas gift from Callista

My Presentations at Conferences in 2022

Something else has changed for better this year: Finally, there are on-site conferences again! In 2022, I had the opportunity to speak at several international conferences. My conference year started in May with APEX connect in Phantasialand theme park in Brühl (Germany). in June, I had the pleasure to speak at ODTUG Kscope22 in Grapevine, Texas (USA). September was quite busy with three conferences in a row: POUG2022 in Wroclaw (Poland), DOAG Conference + Exhibition in Nuremberg (Germany) and Trivadis Performance Days in Zurich (Switzerland). One week later, beginning of October, I was at ConTech2022 by RoOUG in Bucharest (Romania). Beginning of December was the last on-site conference this year, UKOUG Breakthrough’22in Birmingham (United Kingdom). In addition to all these on-site conferences, I still gave three presentations online at AIOUG Virtual Online Series (India) in May and at IT-Tage (Germany) in December. I once more realized that speaking on front of a camera and without live audience, it’s not the same as a presentation on a real conference.

Since my wife Andrea Kennel was nominated as an Oracle ACE Pro, she has also more opportunities to attend conferences as a speaker. So we were able to travel to most of the conferences this year together.

ODTUG Kscope in Grapevine, Texas (photo: Kim Berg Hansen)

Trivadis Performance Days in Zurich (photo: Christian Marquardt)

ConTech by RoOUG in Bucharest (photo: Mirela Ardelean)

UKOUG Breakthrough’22 in Birmingham (photo: Andrea Kennel)

On the conferences I attended this year, I presented different sessions, most of them more than once. Here a short overview of my presentations:

• Function Calls in SQL – Black Box for the Optimizer? – In this presentation, I show the performance impact of SQL and PL/SQL functions to the Oracle optimizer and what features help to solve these issues. I also wrote two blog posts (Function Calls in WHERE Conditions and PL/SQL Functions in SQL Queries) as well as a German article (Optimizer im Blindflug – Funktionsaufrufe in SQL) about this topic. The session I presented at APEX connect, AIOUG Virtual Online Series, ConTech by RoOUG, UKOUG Breakthrough’22 and IT-Tage.
• One Goal – Different Approaches: Performance Tuning in Practice – My (former) Trivadis colleague Martin Berger and I have bee analyzing and solving performance problems for a customer for several years. In several discussions we realized that we used different tools and approaches to solve the issues. In this presentation, we show our different ways to reach the same goal: good database performance. We presented this session at POUG2022, DOAG conference and Trivadis Performance Days.
• BrewTracker: Behind the Scenes of a Brewery App – In this presentation of Andrea Kennel and me, we present a bunch of technologies that a student team used to implement a smart phone app for our craft beer brewery. But we do not only talk about REST Data Services, Autonomous Databases and Flutter, but also about the process of brewing beer. Because we presented this session at ODTUG Kscope22 and ConTech by RoOUG, we were not able to bring some bottles or our own beer to the conferences.
• To Laugh or to Cry? Code Review of a PL/SQL Procedure – This is a presentation about a real-life example of an inefficient PL/SQL load procedure and how it can be improved to make it faster. I already presented this session last year. This year, I had the chance to show it at ODTUG Kscope22.
• Autonomous, Automatic, Adaptive: Are we running out of work? – I created this presentation last year for two online conferences. At UKOUG Breakthrough’22 and IT-Tage, I presented an updated version with some changes in content and with slides that use the design template of Callista.
• Technisch muss nicht trocken sein – Leitfaden für kurzweilige Präsentationen – Although the title of this session sounds technical, it is a non-technical session. At the DOAG conference, I showed with good and bad examples how you can improve technical presentations. The presentation contains some tips and tricks about slide design, storytelling in presentations, live demos and time management. Because I planned this presentation only for DOAG, the slides are in German. After the feedback of the session, I decided to submit the presentation for other conferences as well – then of course with English slides.

Presenting on conferences is one thing, but even more important is the possibility to meet friends and members of the Oracle community. On all the on-site conferences this year, it was a real pleasure to meet people again. This is one of the learnings of the last three years: Virtual conferences cannot replace the real ones. Thanks a lot to all the volonteers and user groups that organized these events.

Happy new year to everybody and hope to see many of you on conferences in 2023!

Oracle ACE Community at ODTUG Kscope22 (photo: Jen Nicholson)

Speakers at ConTech by RoOUG in Bucharest (photo: RoOUG)