I am writing this blog from a coffee shop in Nuremberg, having just attended DOAG 2014 at the Nuremberg Conference Center. This was my second time talking at the DOAG conference and it seemed even busier than last time. DOAG is the German Oracle User Group, and the crowd at its annual conference is a wide mix of software developers, product managers and sales from a wide range of companies using the whole spectrum of Oracle products.
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As last year, the sessions were mostly in German, and while my German is good enough to have a simple conversation with someone when we are both trying to keep things simple and easy to understand, it isn't up to the level required to follow a complex technical session (I did try, attending an interesting looking session on Identity Propagation in Oracle Fusion Middleware, but I only managed to follow about 10% of what was said). The number of english language sessions in the middleware track was limited (just 12) and many of these clashed with each other, which was a shame. However the sessions I did manage to attend were interesting.
There was a definite focus on Oracle SOA Suite, BPM and OSB talks this time around, with many of them being roadmap outlines presented by the Oracle product management teams (unfortunately heavily caveated with Oracle's safe harbour statement preventing me discussing the plans here). There were a few interesting how-to talks, one on how to use the user messaging service in SOA suite to notify users of items of interest, and another on integrating Oracle Event Processing and SOA suite. OEP is a product that I can see becoming more widely used as organisations seek to identify and act on patterns in the event streams generated by their SOA Suite applications.
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My presentation was on the Thursday (luckily in the afternoon, giving people time to recover from the community party the night before) and was well attended, with two thirds of the seats taken. The topic was using WLST to create WebLogic domains (see slides below), and the audience was a mix of people who have already started down this road and wanted advice on best practices, through to people who had no experience of WLST. I had some interesting conversations with people after the presentation, and it was good to see so many people who want to take devops to its logical conclusion and include domain builds in their continuous build and integration suites.
I hope to be back for DOAG 2015, and already have some ideas for presentations that people may find interesting. If DOAG can continue to expand the english language agenda (and schedule the english language sessions in a track so that they don't clash) it has the potential to draw people from all around Europe.
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As last year, the sessions were mostly in German, and while my German is good enough to have a simple conversation with someone when we are both trying to keep things simple and easy to understand, it isn't up to the level required to follow a complex technical session (I did try, attending an interesting looking session on Identity Propagation in Oracle Fusion Middleware, but I only managed to follow about 10% of what was said). The number of english language sessions in the middleware track was limited (just 12) and many of these clashed with each other, which was a shame. However the sessions I did manage to attend were interesting. There was a definite focus on Oracle SOA Suite, BPM and OSB talks this time around, with many of them being roadmap outlines presented by the Oracle product management teams (unfortunately heavily caveated with Oracle's safe harbour statement preventing me discussing the plans here). There were a few interesting how-to talks, one on how to use the user messaging service in SOA suite to notify users of items of interest, and another on integrating Oracle Event Processing and SOA suite. OEP is a product that I can see becoming more widely used as organisations seek to identify and act on patterns in the event streams generated by their SOA Suite applications.
My presentation was on the Thursday (luckily in the afternoon, giving people time to recover from the community party the night before) and was well attended, with two thirds of the seats taken. The topic was using WLST to create WebLogic domains (see slides below), and the audience was a mix of people who have already started down this road and wanted advice on best practices, through to people who had no experience of WLST. I had some interesting conversations with people after the presentation, and it was good to see so many people who want to take devops to its logical conclusion and include domain builds in their continuous build and integration suites. I hope to be back for DOAG 2015, and already have some ideas for presentations that people may find interesting. If DOAG can continue to expand the english language agenda (and schedule the english language sessions in a track so that they don't clash) it has the potential to draw people from all around Europe.
