Oracle User Groups - Collaborate 2016

What is Collaborate 2016?  It is the yearly meeting of three of the largest Oracle product user groups in the world.  This conference brings together three unique sets of groups.  Oracle is a very large company and addresses the needs of many things in the technology world.  From the start Oracle has been a technology company, building one of the first relational database platforms, and from that time to today they continue to build  the main technology that drives modern businesses.

Somewhere in the late 1980's Oracle started building out specific application software.  Software that could be used to meet the functional needs of large companies and even governments.  The first version I used was only for financial transactions, but since then Oracle has expanded into many fields spanning all types of businesses, their flagship product: Oracle E-Business Suite.  In the 2000's Oracle has also procured other software products to extend their business application functions into Human Capital Management with Peoplesoft, Customer Relationship Management Siebel, and small to medium manufacturing businesses with JD Edwards.  Oracle's technology list goes on and on, including tools like WebCenter Portal and GoldenGate just to name a few.

Collaborate is the only conference where you can see a global collection of professionals covering all of these technologies in one place.  Bringing together the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG), and the QUEST user group.  Why is this unique or important?

Oracle technology is complex, sometimes it can be the most complex software in your data center.  This is not specifically by design, but with many years of design for reliability and thousands of features, this may be inevitable.  The hundreds of thousands of customers of Oracle is a testament to this.  Again at it's foundation 76% Oracle customers run the Oracle database, and all of them use Oracle Java.  Both of these require deep technical expertise, and all OAUG and most QUEST customers use these technologies to keep their businesses running 24x7.  Who keeps all this running?  Just a small group of people, whose business titles could be just about anything, but we generally call them developers, web administrators, application administrators, and database administrators (DBA).  Only the DBA seem to have been given the 3 letter acronym treatment for 30+ years, but very few go by this title any more.

Is a DBA built?  No one is born as DBA, nobody learns a software product from DNA.  Often DBA is much more of a state of mind, and of course a set of skills.  Skills learned and honed through practice, training, and making mistakes.  Often the main view of a technical expert is the lone wolf sitting in a room at a terminal.  Making genius decisions, taking big risks, and finding amazing answers at the last moment.  This Hollywood view is probably the farthest from the truth.

Everyone learns from someone.  That someone could be the technical author who wrote the manual for Oracle database install guide.  It could be the person who wrote a blog entry that you found and answers that critical question on how to setup a TNS names entry for a RAC database custom service.  Mostly we learn from our peers, fellow students in school, our coworkers, or even the person that left the system in the state you inherited it.  Now the question one has to ask is this.  Is this the best way to learn?

What if you could find the a person who has already done what you are trying to accomplish?  What if you could find someone who has done the one thing not equal to your project, but the one thing that fits into your project.  What if you could find three people that have done three differently unique things with Oracle database that you are trying to combine?

Those are the interactions that user groups make possible.  It's not the main presentation, it's the question after the presentation.  It's exchanging a business card at the end of the session.  It's meeting the person in the room waiting for the same speaker as you that just finished implementing what you are now trying to implement.  It might even be meeting the product director, or even the developer.  These are not things that happen to the lone wolf sitting in their room.  You could search google and the internet for hours or days and this would never happen.  But at Collaborate this happens a 100 times a day.

Why?  It's actually very simple.  Out of every 100 people doing Oracle work, maybe 1 does a blog.  Of 100 tasks a week that each blogger does, they may blog on one of them.  That's one article out of 10,000 possible.  Blogging takes time, DBA's don't have it.  Manuals are written in a one direction style, if you want to travel from Chicago to New York, you get on the freeway, and you drive straight, and you exit in New York.  Anything beyond that and you are on your own.

So why did I write all this?  What am I asking for?

Take time, go to a Collaborate.
Persuade the managers of tight budgets that attending Collaborate is worth weeks of google searches.
Those that go to Collaborate go to share, inform, and learn.

For me Collaborate is five 14 hour days of talking Oracle, meeting Oracle professionals, learning, and sharing.

The last 25+ years of how we got here is due to a small group of technical people that work hard, share their knowledge, and grow the profession as a whole.  The next 25 years will be no different.