OUGN Conference 2015 Trip Report

Saturday night I returned from my trip to Oslo where I attended the OUGN2015 conference. Myself, I presented some exciting WebLogic 12.1.3 features doing a rather technical hands-on demo with a few slides only. As usually, I tried to mention the existing show stoppers. Indeed I had no fixed agenda, instead I tried to make best use of the allotted 45 minutes showing as much as possible which worked out well.
Seems like the attendees were most impressed by my demo using the new RESTful API in a combination with URLs typed into the browser, curl, Python and a REST plugin to create and test a JDBC data source.

#OUGN2015 Conference / Frank Munz

(thx to Michel Schildmeijer for this pic!)

Overall it was a fabulous event – not only (but also) because it was hosted on a cruise ship. Since I recently explored the Hadoop eco system and big data myself, I highly enjoyed the keynote given by James Morle ( “map reduce is dead”, “the industry suffers from overly complex systems”). Also I largely agree on what calls the “idiot factor” in IT.

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I attended some strategy and middleware sessions, but I learned most about big data. Good to see that Oracle is not missing the boat here with technologies like Kafka, Spark and Storm but nicely integrates with them.

Also exploring Oslo was lovely! It was my first time there and I checked out some cafes, the harbour area and a few museums, including the Viking Ship museums and the Kon-Tiki museum where you can see the vessel that Heyerdahl used to cross the pacific with his men and a parrot.

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Apart from learning something new, what matters about a conference is who do you meet and who do you chat with. OUGN2015 was well worth the trip!