I went to HEUG EMEA 2019 last week at the University of Amsterdam. I enjoyed it. It was good to meet some other people who work in education and use Oracle technologies. I haven’t been to HEUG before. The HEUG was smaller and I feel more friendly than the UKOUG. There were fewer exhibitors, and they seemed less desperate to sell, and happier to just have a chat about the conference and travel, which actually makes them more approachable, but I am not sure they sold any more!

There were similarities where Oracle have sessions to sell their technologies. It was interesting after these sessions to talk to people who understand their limitations, for example Oracle Student Cloud has no APIs, so can’t share data from Campus solutions.

I have never been abroad to a conference before, so was grateful to travel with my colleagues. It was easier than I imagined, because most things are in English, which is really convenient for me. The public transport in Amsterdam is very good, and my colleague managed to get us in a very convenient hotel close to the venue and the tourist parts of the city.

Another first for me was to present at the conference. This also went smoothly. I practised with my colleagues who were very helpful, and it gave me a great confidence boost that the presentation was interesting enough and pitched at the right level for technical people who wanted to understand what I was doing. It also explained enough that people could follow along who weren’t DBAs. Thanks to my colleagues for helping with this.

I will post my notes from some of the sessions I went to tagged with HEUG2019