oug_ire
OUG Ireland Meetup 11th May
The next OUG Ireland Meetup is happening on 11th May, in the Bank of Ireland Grand Canal Dock. This is a free event and is open to every one. You don’t have to be a member to attend.
Following on from a very successful 2 day OUG Ireland Conference with over 250 attendees, we have organised our next meetup. This was mentioned during the opening session of the conference.
We typically have 2 presentations at each Meetup and on 11th May we have:
1. Oracle Analytics Cloud Service.
Oralce Analytics Cloud Service was only released a few weeks ago and we some local people who have been working with the beta and early adopter releases. They will be giving us some insights on this new product and how it compares with other analytics products like Oracle Data Visualization and OBIEE.
Running Oracle DataGuard on RAC on Oracle 12c
The second presentation will be on using Oracle DataGuard on RAC on Oracle 12c. We have a very experienced DBA talking about his experiences of using these products how to workaround some key bugs and situations to be aware of for administration purposes. Lots of valuable information to be gained.
There will be some food and refreshments available for you to enjoy.
The Meetup will be in Bank of Ireland, Grand Canal Dock. This venue is a very popular locations for Meetups in Dublin.
Our first OUG Ireland Meet-up
Last Thursday evening (20th October) we had our first Meet-up event for OUG Ireland.
Up to recently we have had a one or two full day SIG events that covered both the Tech and BA/Big Data areas. But we have been finding it increasingly difficult to get speakers and attendees to take a full day out of work to attend the SIG events. This was particularly true for a SIG event we had scheduled to happen in early October. But by the end of August things were not coming together for us, so it was time to try something new.
Over the past couple of years Meet-ups have been growing in numbers and in popularity. We (the OUG Ireland SIG committee) have been keeping an eye on this in the UK and Ireland.
It was time to get this concept a try.
What did it entail and what venue did you use?
The first thing we needed to do was to arrange a venue. A very popular location for Meet-ups in Ireland is in one of Bank of Ireland branches. This is Bank of Ireland on Grand Canal Dock in Dublin. It is one of their enterprise centres and is open during the day for meetings, as a workspace and it also operates as a branch. In the evenings and on a Saturday morning it is available for groups to hold meetings for larger groups and Meet-ups. We have the venue from 6pm-8pm.
What presentations did you have?
After securing a venue the we then decided to have the theme of the Meet-up to be about ‘Updates from Oracle Open World’. Most of the SIG committee was at Oracle Open World, so that should be easy enough to put a few presentations together and we got the local Oracle office to joins us to.
What about catering?
The venue very kindly supplies some soft drinks, tea, coffee, a few beers, along with some sandwiches and pastries. All for free!
So far we have a free venue, free catering and the committee for presenters.
How did you advertise the event?
The only other thing we needed to do now was to advertise the event. For this we used a combination of EventBrite and Meet-up.com for this, along with our own contacts. Plus some of our friends helped to spread the word. This worked really well. We ended up getting roughly the same number of people registering for the event on each platform. We had 98 registrations on these websites.
Something we were warned about is that a lot of people will register, but if you get 40% of those turning up for the event then you are doing well. We got 48 attendees (=50%). We were delighted with this. For our full day SIG events we might have had 20-25 attendees.
How much this this event cost?
It cost us zero euro/dollars/sterling. As there was no admin, advertising costs, catering, room hire, nothing. Well that is not entirely true. There was a small cost and that was for our membership fee to be on Meet-up. That cost me about $30 for 6 months (unlimited plan). Yes I’ve paid that myself.
What was the feedback after the event?
The feedback was fantastic. People loved the new format, loved that it was in the evening after work, liked the short length presentations, liked that it was free, etc.
I also asked people if they might be interested in presenting at a future Meet-up. Personally I had 5 people talk to me about this. The over committee members also had people talk to them about it. It seems people are interested in trying the shorter format presentations, as it is not as daunting as presenting at a conference. A conference seems to be more formal and a step up in presenting levels.
What next?
Well we have the same venue booked for 12th January and 11th May. We have our 2 presenters for the 12th January already. We actually had those before our first meet-up. Plus for the 11th May we have some possible presenters and I just need to work with them to see who will get on the agenda.
The plan was to have 3-4 of these each year. Based on the feedback and the level of interest we might need to have a few more. But it is still early days and we need to see how things develop.
Our Meet-up was in Dublin. Ideally we want to bring this to over regions. For example we could do the same in Belfast and Cork, and possibly Limerick and Galway. This is something we are looking at and in 2017 we will definitely have a Meet-up in one (or two) of those locations. That would bring us up to 4-5 Meet-ups in 2017.
Thank you to everyone who attended and everyone how helped to make this happen.
OUG Ireland 2016: a roaring success
Last week we had out OUG Ireland annual conference. Traditionally it has been a 1 day conference and in the past few years we have had an extra day where we had the likes of Tom Kyte (we miss you), Maria Colgan, etc give a full day seminar.
But over the past few years a few of the committee have been constantly asked about when we would have a second day of presentations (just like we have for the one day event).
After lots of discussions and looking at budgets and relooking at budgets, then looking at possible alternative venues we worked out a way to have a 2 day conference.
So last week we had our new 2 day conference in the Gresham hotel in the centre of Dublin. Check out the agenda here.
The day before the conference (on the Wednesday) I had arranged for a speakers drinks meet-up. There was lots of people travelling in from all across Europe to present, so this was a good way to get everyone together over a few beers. We met in a micro brewery in Dublin. It was a fun evening with people coming and going throughout the evening and some people stayed for the entire evening. (Oh my poor credit card!)
On Thursday we all got together with all the 275+ attendees at in the Gresham Hotel.
We had 4 tracks that covered DBA, Developer, Business Analytics and Apps. The rooms were just the right size for these tracks, with most of the rooms being full for each of the presentations. With some presentations there was people standing around the sides and down the back. All of this helped to add to the atmosphere. The exhibitors were only there for the first day. This is something we need to look at for next year to get them to attend the 2 days.
On the Wednesday evening we had an Oracle ACE Dinner that was sponsored by OTN (THANK YOU) and they also provided the ACEs with conference ribbons. Also thank you to the OTN ACE programme for providing some travel support to the various ACE Directors.
On the second day (Friday) we kind of got of a slow start for the first sessions of the day, but this must have been due to the snow we had in Dublin that morning. But from the second sessions onwards we were back to packed rooms. Because of this great turn out on the second day, helps us justify having a 2 day conference next years.
I got a chance to talk to lots and lots of people over the course of the 2 days and every single person was talking about the conference being 2 days and Please doing this next year and the year after and the year after, etc.
One of the highlights from the end of the second day was the Q&A panel discussion on the Oracle Optimiser. On this panel we had Jonathan Lewis, Joze Senegacnik and Martin Widlake. I managed to rope in a friend Alan Kelly to be the quiz master for the session. The Q&A Panel session was scheduled for 45minutes. But despite the best efforts to encourage the attendees to finished up, they kept on asking questions and the panel kept on answering. This session ran for an additional 45 minutes. Yes that was a 90 minute session.
All in all the 2 day OUG Conference was a roaring success and I would like to thank all the speakers, the attendees and the various sponsors for making this event happen.
Check out Debra’s blog post about the conference.
Check out Martin Widlake’s blog post about the conference.
Oh and there was a Yeast and Sourdough Bread Making symposium during OUG Ireland where a number of the peoples got to talk about and share their experiences on making bread.
Oralytics 