Collaborate 14 #C14LV

So to say this year has been hectic would be an understatement.  But here it is April already and time once again for the IOUG, Quest, and OAUG user group conference.  I mentioned in my opening blog post that in the old days there were no separate groups to send tickets to and there were not experts to run to.  Well that was not 100% true, the experts were not generally in the same company you were.

The experts were out in the field at other companies.  There was no internet to search for them, or social sites like linked in to find them.  As a
long time member of IOUG I have always been grateful for generosity of experts that have fought their way into learning, and then share their experiences.

I've been a member of IOUG for about 17 of their 21 years, and a volunteer for the last 8.  Being a member of IOUG has allowed me to work with and meet some of the most talented people in the Oracle community.  These are not opportunities you get by just posting to a blog, or talking to people only in your company.

So get out, be involved, and be a member.

With that in mind, sorry to the IOUG staff that I'm so late with this post, it has been a hard year. For those of you I'll see over this next week at Collaborate, please say hi, please pull me aside and grab some of my time.  It's a very busy week, but do reach out, and do connect.

I'm the lead of the development track this year, so for those of you that submitted proposals, thank you.  Even if you didn't get selected, thank you for sharing and keep trying.  We have a limited number of slots and we try our best to have a diverse and talented set of speakers for our audiences.  For the 17 of you that were selected and are presenting, if I don't get a chance to say hello or thank you in person, thank you for presenting and sharing your knowledge.

I'm also the associate editor for the IOUG magazine SELECT Journal.  So for all of you that are presenting, or submitted proposals, please consider authoring an article.  We are also looking for new authors and great article ideas.  This is your opportunity to be published in a industry leading magazine, that is peer reviewed.  Like a professor getting published in a scientific journal, we take this very seriously and we appreciate every submission.

I've also been asked to help with the new Solaris Special Interest Group (SIG) in IOUG.  For those of you in the SIG, I'll see you on Thursday and we discuss what is next for the SIG and I can decide if I can help out or not.

To Arup, Tariq, Kia, and Kirby; thanks for volunteering to help with our panel discussion on Thursday.  We should have a great two hours discussion infrastructure architecture and how it impacts the business.  From cloud, to engineered systems, virtualization and commodity hardware.  I'm expecting a heated but fun discussion on the larger impact of these items, not just the marketing hype.

And for everyone else going to the conference, have fun, learn a lot and got to at least one session out of your comfort zone.  if your a developer, go to a project management meeting.  If you are a DBA, go to a developer meeting, if you are a manager, go to a DBA tuning sessions.  Learn something that you never would have learned had you not come to Collaborate 14.
See you in Vegas.

COLLABORATE 14 has 1,250+ sessions, 5,000+ top Oracle users and lots of other cool events. Join me at #C14LV! http://bit.ly/19P4l0W @ioug