Just back from a full week in San Antonio for KScope12. I really had a good time. ODTUG provides us with the best conference for developers in the world. Seen some great sessions, met up with some old friends, made a lot of new ones, met in real life with some people I knew only from the internet.

On Saturday I went to the River Walk with Chet Justice, Jeff Smith, Dan McGhan and Galo Balda. Here we went to see The Alamo, had dinner at Café Ole and met up with Tim Gorman and Kellyn Pot’Vin.

On Sunday the Sunday symposiums took place. I kinda mixed the Application Express symposium with the DB & Developers toolbox. Saw some nice new things on APEX 4.2 (early adopter available here), learnt some nice stuff about the Oracle Cloud got some insight on how Oracle handles your queries.

The night started with the speaker/ambassador/mentor reception where I got to meet up with some old and new friends. Then it was right into the welcoming reception where I had some good laughs watching the thirsty games. Also, I want to thank Jeff Smith for getting me the first t-shirt of the conference. The ORACLENERD shirt.

On Monday the KScope sessions started. I went to see Tim Gorman on RDBMS Forensics. Learn a bit about how you can troubleshoot errors in you production database. Then it was Jonathan Lewis who explained Single Table Access Paths. I have been working with Oracle for over 10 years but only now I think I understand what’s going on ‘under the hood’. Then it was off to the APEX track for Christian Rokitta on APEX and JQuery Mobile. There was no ambassador for this session, so I decided to do this. I gained the ambassador’s badge for this.

After lunch I decided not to go see any session and to prepare for my own session: Should Invoker Rights Be Used. I am not too pleased with how it went. In my opinion it was too short, I was too tired (which you could hear in my speech) but the good thing is I had Steven Feuerstein and Bryn Llewellyn in the audience, so we had a couple of nice discussions at the and of the session.

After this there was the ACE reception. My very first one. It is nice to be part of this. Had some chats with a couple of other ACE’s amongst who Peter Raganitsch.

Then it was time for the keynote by Cary Millsap. This was totally not technical, but man, how right he was. You can checkout the keynote here. If you have an hour or so to spare, I urge you to take a look.

APEX Open Mic Night concluded day 1 for me. It was nice to see what people are doing using APEX. How different all their applications are. Shows how you can really build what you want using APEX.

Tuesday started off with a nice session by Tom Kyte. Five things you probably didn’t know about PL/SQL.

More Code = More Bugs

Less Code = Less Bugs

The fastest way to do something is NOT doing it

I decided to skip the vendor track, so my next session was Optimizing a Two-table Join by Jonathan Lewis. This was actually a continuation of the session of the day before. Even more insight for me. Then it was off to the lunch and learn session with a panel of Jonathan Lewis, Cary Millsap, Steven Feuerstein and Maria Colgan. Some nice discussions on amongst others Table Functions.

Next stop was a presentation by Rick Greenwald on RESTful Web Services. Not only can APEX 4.2 consume Web Services, it can now also provide them. Then it was Kim Berg Hansen‘s first appearance on the KScope stage with a session on Analytic Functions.

Closing session for the day was Debugging PL/SQL with SQL Developer by Jeff Smith. It was nice to see how it works. I think SQL Developer is better in remote debugging than PL/SQL Developer. But in other aspects they are mostly equivalent to each other.

The evening was concluded for me by having a nice dinner with the people of Redgate. Dinner with Cary Millsap, Dominic Delmolino, Martin Giffy D’Souza and of course the people from Redgate. After this I went up to my room to run some final checks on my presentation on Wednesday.

Wednesday started of with a presentation by Cary Milsap on how instrumentation is useful in your code. After this I attended a session by Steven Feuerstein on Error Management in PL/SQL. Then it was time for my second presentation. Can collections speed up your PL/SQL? This one just went great, I am so happy with this one. I even had to skip through a couple of slides to finish in time. If you were there, I hope you enjoyed it.

In the afternoon I first attended a session about Binding by Tom Kyte and for the last session I was an ambassador for the session by Anthony Rayner on building Highly accessible products using APEX. This presentation was co-done by Paul Holliman who is blind. It was amazing to see and hear how he uses APEX to develop applications. It’s amazing how he finds his way around the builder using a screen reader.

The night was reserved for the Ranch and Rodeo Special Event which was a night filled with live music, armadillo races, a mechanical bull and a full-blown rodeo. The rodeo is something I would not go to myself, but it has been a great experience to have seen it at least once.

The final day of the conference started of with ‘An Oracle Geek’s Guide to Successful Dating’ which was, as you already expected, all about using dates and timestamps. Then there was the closing session, which is kind of strange when there are still two sessions to come.

I went to go see Kent Graziano with his talk on Reverse Engineering using SQL Developer Data Modeler. To bad his projector had some trouble, but he managed pretty good.

The final session of my KScope12 experience was APEX Developer Pro Secrets by Peter Raganitsch. Peter is maintaining the ApexLib Framework which was built by him and Patrick Wolf. There were other things in the presentation, some of which I knew, some of which were new.

The day was closed off by having dinner with Erik van Roon at a restaurant at the River Walk in San Antonio. After that I hung out in the bar at the hotel with Lori and her husband Ryan, amongst others.

On Friday I want home again, which was great too. It’s great to be back with my wife and kids after a great week in San Antonio. Thanks to ODTUG for organizing such a great conference. I hope to be back for KScope13 in New Orleans.