#OTNEMEATour First Leg #Harmony17

After reaching to Helsinki, sleeping on 3 complete empty seats lied down by luck (I left my emergency seat for this reason), I made a small city tour and reached the meeting place (in front of Presidential residence – intentionally mentioned this because it is the real residential palace of Finland President with non-moving soldiers in front of the building) and met with Frits Hoogland and Patrick Barel. Speakers dinner is very well organised on a ancient trade wooden boat and sailing with the power of the wind (rarely with engine when we are behind the schedule) and we were all sailor-man (in real). In spite of sun, it was about 4-5C and some of us was downstairs in order not to get cold because of freezing wind. Please click pictures to enlarge.

Short city tour of Helsinki (with luggage & backpack)

Reaching to Hotel Rantapuisto.

Since roads in this area are not so proper (we’re in the edge of mountain and sea with rocky paths) to walk with luggages, I decided to stay at the conference venue to save tomorrow morning. Special thanks goes to Patrick that he shared his room with me (don’t worry, room had 2 separate beds) for a night.

Woke up, had a breakfast and went to the conference auditorium to prepare to my session. What could be wrong? Almost everything. Projector was not a real projector but was a wireless screen transferring device. First, I couldn’t connect with my Mac, app didn’t installed, second, no cable support, third, even if I copied my presentation to Pasi’s laptop, it didn’t show in presenter’s view (my notes, presentation timing, next slide or animation, all weren’t there), also my custom fonts are gone and I begin to panic!

But, eventually, it was a nice session as far as I get the good feedback and seeing smiling faces at the end of my session. Thanks to Pasi for giving me such an honor to be the keynote speaker (I have to confess, this as my first time) for OUGF’s Harmony17 conference.

Speakers dinner (well, actually speakers boat sailing)

My sessions in Harmony17.

Then here is the liste of sessions I attended and here is the online agenda and abstracts of speakers.

• Patrick Barel‘s session “Increase your programming confidence by using Unit Tests”
• Timur Akhmadeev‘s session “Typical Issues with Middleware”
• Bryn Llwellyn‘s consecutive sessions “What’s New in PL/SQL and EBR in Oracle Database 12c Release 2” and “Edition-based redefinition: the key to online application upgrade”
• Lauri Pietarinen’s session “Relations – What the #&%@?”
• Frits Hoogland‘s session “Deep dive into the memory usage Oracle database”
• Gianni Cereza‘s session “OBIEE DevOps with Containers: How and Why”

This was the first day, full of knowledge and learnt a lot (as usual in technical Oracle Users Group conference).

I increased my Finnish vocabulary with new words kiitos (thank you), ei lainkaan(not at all), tervetullut (welcome), kyllä (yes), ei (no) and täydellinen (perfect).

Since we are in Finland, it will be impossible to leave without visiting a sauna. I am very pleased to be invited by OUGF board (thanks Susa) a sauna party with beers, near the sea (I tried to swim but it was cold enough for me to leave after the first 10 centimeter), but the hot tub (40C) was great (it was outside with a great view of the sea) and also conversation with Mike Dietrich in the tub. Then went to bed!

Second day started early, as a usual conference day, had a breakfast with Timur as a company, entered below sessions;

• Rene Antunez, “RMAN 12.2 What is new and What is Old?”
• Frits Hoogland, “About Multiblock Reads Part1” and “Part2”
• Mikko Puonti, “Towards Agile Enterprise Data Warehousing”
• Gurcan Orhan, “How to Handle DEV&TEST&PROD in the Cloud for ODI” (hey, that’s my session).

After the session, I headed back to airport to meet with Heli to continue my #OTNEMEATour Baku, Azerbaijan leg to meet my brothers there, but this is another story needs another post.