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September was my second round of conferences this year. A presented my session “Avoid Horror Queries: Keep Your SQL Simple and Fast” on three different conferences, two of them organized by Trivadis.

POUG 2019 Conference, Wroclaw/Poland

For the second time, I joined the POUG conference in Poland. If you think, POUG means “Polish Oracle User Group”, you are wrong. POUG is the abbreviation for “Pint with Oracle User Group”, and this is not the only thing that is – let’s say – slightly different on this conference. This year, the conference was located in a cinema in the city center of Wroclaw. So it fitted pretty well that I called my session “The SQL Horror Show”. Every session starts with music, and for my session I have chosen “Time Warp” from the movie “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”.

Almost everybody from the Oracle community seem to be at this conference: International speakers from all over the world (including “the usual suspects”), attendees mainly from Poland, but also from other European countries, as well as a group of young DOAG NextGen members from Germany. Once more I realized that the POUG conference is a great place to meet a lot of interesting people. I even met some Trivadis colleagues who work for our company in Poland. When they told me after my presentation that they knew some of my “horror queries”, I first thought they were customers.

One more detail: Of course, a lot of tweets with hash tag #POUG2019 were published on Twitter during the conference. For some people that were not attending the POUG conference, the event seemed to be a kind of a beer festival. This once again clearly shows that the perception on social media does not always correspond to reality.

Trivadis TechEvent, Regensdorf/Switzerland

Twice a year, my employer Trivadis organizes the Trivadis TechEvent, originally an internal event for knowledge sharing within our company. The first TechEvent I joined in 1999 was a small event with two parallel tracks and a few sessions about different Oracle topics. Today, it is the biggest IT conference in Switzerland with more than 100 presentations in 11 parallel streams about different technologies. It is still an “internal” conference for Trivadis employees, but customers are also invited once a year in the autumn TechEvent.

For me, the TechEvent is always a good chance to meet colleagues from other locations that I don’t see very often (usually only twice a year at TechEvent). So, the social part of TechEvent in the evening is at least as important as the technical sessions during the day.

One more detail: This year, the TechEvent in March was not near Zurich as usual, but in Barcelona. It was an anniversary party for 25 years of Trivadis. It was a great event, but the “Tech” part was a bit missing. That’s why I enjoyed the September event even more.

Trivadis Performance Days 2019, Zurich/Switzerland

The Trivadis Performance Days are not as big as the TechEvent, but much better known in the Oracle community. They have been organised by Christian Antognini since 2006, initially under the name “CBO Days”. As a member of OakTable network, Chris knows many performance specialists, so he can invite top speakers every year.

For the Performance Days this year, the speakers list was again very impressive: Jonathan Lewis, Tanel Põder, Richard Foote, Franck Pachot, Stefan Köhler, Ivica Arsov, Mark Ashdown, Shasank Chavan and from Trivadis Emiliano Fusaglia and me – and of couse Christian Antognini.

One more detail: This is the only conference I know with 3 speakers dinners. Although the Performance Days take place near to my home place, I like to attend these dinners with interesting guests and feel almost like a tourist in Zurich during the whole week.