This was my first time at the UKOUG conference. It has been a nice week. I think there was almost 3.000 delegates, so it is a pretty big event compared to the 600 that were at the ODTUG conference. Every room has an usher and a technical person to setup the audio/visual equipment which made everything run smooth.

One of the great things about events like these is that you can meet up with people you have otherwise only ‘met’ online. I met my LogicaCMG colleagues Roel Hartman, Piet de Visser and Andrew Clarke. Roel was nice enough to Chair one of my sessions, thanks for that! I have uploaded my presentations if anybody would like to see them: Securing Web Services : From Encryption to a Web Service Security Infrastructure, How to Make Your Oracle APEX Application Secure

I also met John Scott from APEX Evangelists for the first time. He is a nice guy, and I really enjoyed his Debugging APEX Applications presentation. John is publishing an APEX book which sounds very promising. As I understood it, it will be out when APEX 3.1 is released. (Whenever that is)

People might think that going to a conference is a free vacation but it is hard work. There are presentations going from 9.00 to 18.00 or 19.00 and doing your own presentation is rather stressful, at least if you are not a seasoned presenter, which I am not. I missed Dimitri Gielis presentation on integrating Bi Publisher and APEX because I needed a break and had to prepare my own presentation. On this year’s ODTUG conference we were presenting at the same time, but hopefully I will get to see one of Dimitris presentations in the future.

Wednesday I was on the APEX Roundtable panel with Jeremy Duggan, Anthony Rayner and Dimitri Gielis. There were some interesting discussions. One point where I disagree a bit with some of the other participants is on how big projects you should use APEX for. I love APEX and will use it whenever possible. APEX scales with the database so there is no problem with performance, but I would never use APEX for a really big project. I would use a JEE platform like Oracle ADF, that follow Open Standards and Integrates to version control tools etc.

I did not see much of Birmingham but I went out to 2 Indian restaurants which was excellent. There are no Indian restaurant around where I live and I love Indian food.

All in all it was a very nice week and I can only recommend going to the conference for knowledge and networking.

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